When people think of Horror films, the first impulse is to rate it by how scary it is. I believe Horror is a close cousin to Fantasy and there are more ways for a Horror film to be delightful than to give you nightmares. If I was only writing about films that are traumatizing this would be a very short list of depressing films that are tasteless and morally empty. Instead, I can praise a film like Re-Animator, which is joyfully tasteless and morally empty.
Re-Animator is practically scare-free, but Stuart Gordon makes up for that with a heavy amount of comic gore and outrageous scenes. The Evil Dead has an uncomfortable and questionable scene where a woman is attacked and violated by the forest itself. Here, there’s a similar moment, but it involves a body holding its own decapitated head (that’s very much alive) and the film gets away with it by not taking it seriously or going very far. It’s the rare case where there’s a dead cat and I’m never bothered by it. That’s just the kind of movie this is.
In our 3rd case of a director having the right on-screen partner who gets the tone (see Carrie and The Fly), Re-Animator benefits greatly from the theatrical performance by Jeffrey Combs as mad scientist Herbert West. Channeling the classic doctors of the 30s and 40s, Combs goes big. In a movie involving reanimated corpse heads, big is what you want.
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