Re-Animator (dir. Stuart Gordon, 1985)
Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) has transferred to Miskatonic University to complete his medical degree after an incident in Switzerland left his mentor dead. He rents a room with fellow med student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), who is dating Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), daughter of the dean, and clashes frequently with their professor, Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale). After Dan’s cat Rufus turns up dead and in West’s refrigerator, they nearly part ways until the next night when a ruckus in the basement reveals that West can bring a dead cat back to life. It’s soon revealed that he can do the same to people, too, and everything goes off the rails from there.
I love this movie. There’s not a whole lot else I can do, but elaborate on that. It’s just a great deadpan horror comedy–pun one-hundred-percent intended. It’s not even that it’s a great comedy, it’s that it’s a great comedy with a minimum of jokes. The humor in the film relies almost entirely upon outrageous setpieces and Herbert West being one of the great assholes in genre cinema.
I really cannot praise Combs enough for his performance as West. He embodies hubris and arrogance and is among the all-time worst housemate in cinema. Abbott and Crampton have less to do as they are required to play it straighter than even Combs, but it’s necessary for the comedy to work. Crampton, in particular, has an almost thankless role, but she has such charisma you can almost ignore that she exists solely as “the girlfriend character.” David Gale plays a great creep in Dr. Hill, who emerges as the true villain in the piece simply by virtue that I don’t think Herbert West is capable of sexual thought.
Yes, the scene that everyone knows about the film is problematic as hell and is a scene of sexual assault played as much for comedic effect as it horror. I cannot really defend it in any other way than the film recognizes that Hill is a monster, and not just because he’s a zombie with a detached head. We know that he’s a lech long before then when he’s at dinner with Megan and her father. Our empathy is with Megan in the scene, or at least it should be. If it isn’t, what’s wrong with you? Still, I can completely understand anyone that nopes out of watching it because of it.
I think sometimes about this issue in general in art and popular culture. It’s something that has to come up when you enjoy the horror genre. How far is too far and what crosses the line? Generally I generally opt out if I think the filmmakers lack empathy for characters who are victimized by bad people, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s a matter of tone. Something like Re-Animator skirts a razor’s edge in the infamous scene, but because it happens late into the film after we’ve had a resurrected cat slammed against a wall and brought back to life, it feels less terrible. I don’t know. It’s a case-by-case basis. You just need to have good taste in bad taste.
October 31, 2018
oliveresque 