Re-Animator: Why more films like this should be made

It's a bit embarrassing to admit that I just saw Re-Animator (1985) for the first time last Saturday. 


One of the most popular and must-see cult classics of all time. It's up there with The Evil Dead, The Return Of The Living Dead, and Braindead (Dead Alive) in the honors section of this type of genre. That small group of films that exploit all fear of cadavers and turning that fear and trepidation into a potent mixture of schlock, gore, and black humor not commonly seen in more mainstream Hollywood drivel these days.

Prior to seeing it I have already seen and are familiar with most of director Stuart Gordon's movies. Mostly adaptations of HP Lovecraft's shorts, that were given unique film treatments. Gordon has a knack for transforming Lovecraft's stories---difficult reads I must admit; given to long, drawling narratives that rely all-too heavily on the reader's own imagination---into compelling films that have so much visual impact that it lingers with you even after a while when you first watched it. 


The first film I saw was his 1987 adaptation of From Beyond, Lovecraft's take on stimulating the pineal gland via a machine called a resonator, which enables people to see otherworldy creatures existing in another plane of existence or dimension not readily visible to man's average senses. That was also the first film I saw frequent Gordon collaborator Jeffrey Combs, who played the tragic protagonist Dr. Crawford Tillinghast who eventually had his pineal gland pop out of his head like a gross, bloody insect antennae with a mind of its own due to the constant stimulation and exposure to the machine.


For an 80s horror film, it stood out from the rest that jumped in on the whole slasher craze that swept the horror genre. It's Lovecraft, for one. The late author's fascination with interdimensional existence, beings, as well as the Elder Gods and the notorious Old Ones gave rise to the Chtlulhu Mythos that no more than a few members of the society actually believe to be true. Add in Gordon's natural talent in conjuring celluloid shock material that include morbid sexual fetishes, gore, and humorous/shocking ways of watching people get killed. That was put into good use again with the lesser-known but equally disturbing Dagon (2001), this one an adaptation of the author's Shadow Over Innsmouth---about a race of hybrid human/aquatic creatures that worship one of the notorious deities allied with Chtlulhu that resides in the black abyss of the sea.


But among all of Gordon's outputs, Re-Animator has got to be the most widely known and, to some of the squeamish members of the society, reviled. It's the kind of R-18 film where even adults are driven to nail-biting discomfort, specially when that famous cadaver with the severed head decided to molest a woman in some of the sickest ways a celluloid zombie could ever think of.


It starts off with the introduction of Herbert West (Combs), a medical student kicked out of a European school for his radical theories on brain death and re-animating dead tissue via his special re-agent formula he discovered with a deceased mentor. he transfers to the fictional Miskatonic University Medical School where he met and befriended the other half of the film's two protagonists, student Dan Cain (Dark Justice's Bruce Abbot).

Jeffrey Combs as the notorious Herbert West, re-animator

What follows is the standard partnership between the brilliant, but weird partner and the other grounded, mediocre, and more socially popular one. It was only a matter of time when both people's experiments on re-animating cadavers goes out of hand (like what happens to all horror movies that involve 'experiments') and the fun really goes into overdrive. 


For one thing this is not the typical zombies the George Romero school of zombie-making has taught us. And that's how I view and expect to see how reanimated corpses would behave. Gordon's corpses are different in a way that they are also deadly homicidal monsters but not with the same motivations as standard zombies (sorry, living dead) usually do. The Walking Dead, this isn't.


But for all its gore and ample shocking footage of violence, the most surprising aspect of the film is its ability to make you laugh and cringe at the same time. Mostly in the space of one frame. One second a character does something totally hilarious like bumping over things while holding his own severed head, and the next moment become an evil diabolical mastermind that rivals all other film villains in existence. Not to mention adding a lecherous side to the heavily-cliched portrayals of the living dead.


It's over the top entertainment, for sure. But it won't reach cult status if it wasn't any good.

A nightmare, alright

I held off watching the remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street for a variety of reasons. One of which is Michael Bay being attached to the project. And the other, most important point: Why bother?


It's always Hollywood and its endless fascination with remakes. There's always an enterprising studio exec in there somewhere, with a bright idea that probably goes somewhere along these lines: "Hey! Why not reboot an 80s era blockbuster to fit today's braindead audience who has no chance of seeing the original despite the presence of Google and man's innate nature to go looking for things? Let's save them from that 'looking' and make truckloads of money while we're at it." 


If the studios are doing it to explore artistic reinterpretation, then Michael Bay is a modern day Fellini. 


The thing about remakes is that 9 times out of 10, most are simply sub-par, and dreadfully inferior versions of the original work (see: Psycho, The Ring). Unfortunately 'Nightmare...2010' is no exception. 


Remakes do unimaginable harm than good to almost everything, especially on movies that require suspense and rely heavily on the viewer's apprehension and uncertainty about what character will die on the next sequence.


And on a horror-thriller at that. What's the point of watching a 'thriller' if you already know what happened to every major character? For the new generation to be familiar with a 20+ year old celluloid boogeyman? Has spoonfeeding really degenerated to this?


There's the hype of it being the more 'serious and less comical interpretation' that is guaranteed to give you more scares than the original. That Jackie Earle Haley's Freddy Krueger is a lot more brutal and scary than the original Robert Englund version.

Freddy, 2010 incarnation

That would have been very promising except that Freddy is not Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. Dour, silent killers with no sense of humor.

Freddy's appeal on the other hand, is in the various creative ways he toys with his victims. Always in that nasty sadistic toying and humiliation before going in for the kill.In a lot of ways "Nightmare..." is not exactly a 'horror/slasher' film than a curious fascination on how Freddy will come up with new ways to dispose of his prey.


One memorable sequence in an early installment had him transfer a teenager as a playable character in a video game he was playing. Or a woman bring eaten face-first by a television set. Or Johnny Depp being swallowed by the bed and regurgitated as a bloody mass of pulp back to the ceiling. Horrifying at first, but then you realize it's a movie not meant to be taken seriously.

 

Englund nailed the character's brilliance, nastiness, and most of all, amusing sense of humor and the acerbic kiss-offs that's noticeably missing in Haley's version. Not his fault---a good actor---but what can you do with a character that is so familiar and embedded so deeply in the pop culture landscape people practically know him as how Englund played him? 


They already started with Freddy vs Jason, a fun and satisfying fanboy celebrity deathmatch fantasy came true. Whatever these studio heads are smoking for them to see things like this and resort to the abominable stance of doing a remake, ought to be very expensive.


I wonder how that Fright Night remake is gonna pull it off.

Those Carrie Whites

I was ambushed by a sudden rainshower halfway from the office to the nearest train station on my way home from work. I headed to Megamall to kill time and to wait for the rain to subside. I usually loiter around bookstores. Nobody gives a damn whether you’re gonna buy something or not anyway. Unlike clothing shops where they have annoying personnel trailing you as if you’re a parolee up to no good. I was contemplating on opening the SWAMP THING graphic novel I’ve seen during my last visit, when I came upon the Stephen King section of the shop and found an opened copy (the plastic wrapper of the paperback was shoved unceremoniously between The Stand and Insomnia) of his first bestseller Carrie. I haven’t read the book but I saw Brian De Palma’s movie adaptation in Betamax back when I was in third grade.

I rented the video, of all places, in a squalid billiard hall that also moonlighted as a video rental store (carrying mostly x-rated flicks that starred 80s porn stars like Ginger Lynn, Traci Lords, and Seka) found in the center of the local flea market in our town. I just got a hair cut from my barber a few doors down when I passed by the place and saw the hall screening what looked to be a zombie movie (The Return Of The Living Dead, actually.) and found, to an 8-year old’s amusement and delight, the shelves by the TV stacked with hardcore, original copies of Beta and VHS tapes with titles like “Behind The Green Door”, “Oiled For Orgasms”, “The Ballbusters”, “Taboo”, and probably 20 other titles that are way too obvious even to a third grader. 


The clerk, an elderly woman eating a banana-cue regarded me with a menacing stare that is, again, another synopsis in belaboring the obvious. I knew even if I had a million bucks the clerk would even STOP TO THINK about letting me rent those. And I was far from being being a millionaire. I was a snotty-looking kid with only 20 bucks spare for a single video. I liked horror movies---and I still do---so I looked for anything that could fill in for the skin flick that I should’ve rented. It’s a good thing it’s all original copies; bless the seaman who owned the joint, at least you’d get a rudimentary idea on what the movie’s all about by reading the synopsis in the jacket. I saw Carrie. I Saw Sissy Spacek’s blood-soaked image at the back of the tape. I saw the name Stephen King. I forked the twenty and jumped the nearest tricycle back home.

The movie was, for the most part when I was watching it, just okay. But not scary in the “zombie-psycho slasher-aliens from outer space” type of scary. John Travolta was in it, and I hated him then because of his Saturday Night Fever dance number and the film looked outdated and so big a relic of the 70s---a decade that I really loathed---that I was a bit nauseus on some parts. But most of all I hated it because it reminded me so much of a classmate named Rio.

She transferred to our school during first grade (our class was together since kindergarten); and everybody was more than willing to alienate the new girl with a dumb look on her face. Stephen King described it as “bovine-like” and it’s true. Class freaks do have the expression of total submissiveness and apathy akin to that of cows about to be lead to the slaughterhouse. She was not pretty to start with, and kids at this age are brutally frank and cruel in expressing their dislike to a person who’s not likable at all. She was the butt of all jokes, even earned the moniker “Rio Kalbo” courtesy of the meanest duo ever to walk the grounds of WVSU Elementary School SEAFDEC Campus: Peter and Paul---the twin masters of disasters from 1st to 6th grade. The class bullies. Every student has had a taste of the two’s nastiness but Rio got the heaviest blows most of the time. 

And every time everybody’s ganging up on her I participated and razed her with extreme prejudice as well. There was something about her not being pleasant to look at and not acting like a normal girl does that just makes it feel extremely good to hate her---even if she did not do anything to you, much less look at your direction at all. After the heckling stops she’d just go back to her seat and take out a textbook and pretend to read while others resumed their everyday elementary business. That was the only reprieve she had. Once or twice I caught her wiping her eyes like there was some irritant stuck in them and knew she was crying. The entire class and I enjoyed seeing her suffer. This went on for six years. I can only imagine how ecstatic she probably was when we graduated. I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I was too busy with myself to even notice she was there.

I didn’t think about her again until I read the foreword to the book just a few hours ago. It’s about Stephen King’s personal experience with the “Carrie Whites” in his school and I realized how very close they were to my own.

Feeling bad about it won’t change a thing.

I wonder how those twins are holding up?