Aside from John Carpenter’s The Thing, there is probably no other film that’s ever received as much consistent praise on these lists as Re-Animator. A then-modern adaptation of a classic story by H.P. Lovecraft, which itself was a spin on the even more classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Re-Animator centered around Dr. Herbert West, played by Jeffrey Combs (who you might remember from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A gifted but rebellious medical student, West isn’t interested in curing simple diseases or mending broken bones, but instead solving the one problem that has plagued doctors since the dawn of time: Death. To that end, West develops a reagent which, upon injection into the spinal cord of a corpse, actually returns the subject to life. Well, a semblance of life. Well, it turns them into savage flesh-starved monsters, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few abominable eggs, right?
Re-Animator was basically what 80’s horror B-movies were all about, or at least what they should have aspired to be. The premise was simple, which made the story itself uncomplicated and easy to get into. The special effects were excellent, which in turn made the gore and the violence particularly gruesome, of which there was plenty to enjoy. Jeffrey Comb’s performance as Herbert West, not so much a simple ‘mad scientist’ as a unapologetically immoral yet devilishly charismatic manipulator of the human form, putting him far above your typical Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger-style horror villains of the time. There’s no cardboard acting, no hackjob editing, no obnoxious soundtrack blaring during important scenes, it’s does everything right and looks good doing it. If you’ve read any of the previous lists, if you’ve read the entries on this list right now, you know how common it is to see me write ‘the special effects were good, but the story was crap’, or ‘you might enjoy this, if you overlook these characters’. Those kinds of statements never really seem to come up for me when it comes to Re-Animator, which as far I’m concerned is the only way to quantify whether a movie is ‘good’ or not in any meaningful sense. Subjectively speaking of course, objectivity is for fancy computers and Steve Ditko.
Then came Bride of Re-Animator a few years later, which was actually featured on the Marathon a while back. Horror franchises can generally get a least two good films out of a property before things get shitty (See: Frankenstein & Bride of Frankenstein, Halloween 1 & 2, Alien & Aliens), and Bride is no exception. There’s no attempts to reinvent the wheel here, but it does try to maintain the standards of the original while using the safety of the Re-Animator name to explore some directions, which is what everyone expects of proper sequels. In that way, while I probably enjoyed the original more, I have to admit that Bride of Re-Animator is far more bizarre film than its predecessor. Creatures made out of human limbs, disembodied heads with bat wings flying around, things get really weird there for a while. An entertaining movie and worthy sequel, and a good way to end the series. Barring any tie-in comics down the road, that is.
Then around a decade or so later Beyond Re-Animator comes to our doorstep, proving that the Two Movie Rule was more like a Two Movie Law.
Ugh.
So the premise itself is fine. Herbert West, who somehow survived the end of the last movie, has been in prison for the past thirteen years after his last experiment ended up a little deadly. Eventually a new rube (Dr. Howard Phillips, a Lovecraft reference and what passes for our protagonist) arrives at the prison, eager to work with West and his reagent and completely willing to experiment on prisoners without their consent and knowledge. After a decade of research however, Herbert West has moved beyond merely raising the dead. By transferring something called Neuroplasmic Energy from a living thing into a previously living thing, one can finally restore cognitive thinking and rationality to the reanimated, bypassing the one roadblock that had hampered the success of the reagent in the past. Messing around with the ‘souls’ of living things is a risky gamble though, especially when you’re in a horror movie, and things start going to shit almost immediately. If you thought prison was bad before, just wait until the abominations of science start showing up.
It sucks though. As good a setup as that premise is, touching upon the abuse of power in the American prison system, providing an inherently violent and isolated setting that only becomes more so when you add the reanimated, it’s a bad movie. Cardboard acting (Pinocchio is less wooden than Howard Phillips), Friday the 13th style editing which pushes the violence offscreen, rather unfortunate portrayals of women (there are three women in this film. The first is murdered, the second is forced to expose her breasts, and the third is raped and murdered. Not the best track record), and ‘comedy’ scenes that occasionally try to match the morbid absurdity of the previous films but just come off as painfully stupid. About the only thing it doesn’t manage to screw up is the occasionally decent bit of gore and the soundtrack, which while forgettable at least features the theme from the original movie. Oh, and Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, the rock which weathers the shit storm of a movie raging around him. Love ya buddy.
So is Beyond Re-Animator supposed to be the Army of Darkness of the Re-Animator series? There does come a point in every horror franchise’s life where it devolves into self-parody after all, H2O for Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, it’s basically inevitable. You’ve reached the limit to how you far can push the formula, so you push the fact that you have no new ideas as the new idea and hope that debasing yourself will squeeze a few more drops of blood from the stone. Freddy Krueger goes from a demon of your nightmares to Bart Simpson, dropping sarcastic one-liners and making hip pop culture references in a bid to connect with ‘the kids’. Jason Vorhees becomes a space zombie. Michael Myers gets his ass kicked by Xzibit. Monster movies sure are dumb, right guys? Look at this hot chick with big boobs, look at all these horror tropes we’re messing around with! Buy our movie and we’ll let you spit in our mouth.
The thing is, the Re-Animator series wasn’t tired. There were two movies in the 80s, and then the franchise was basically dead for 10 years. So what was the point of even bringing it back if you were going to pull this half-assed shit with it? In one fell swoop you turned the Re-Animator series from an underrated cult classic with plenty of potential material into a fucking Syfy Original Movie in one fell swoop, sinking it even lower into obscurity than it was before your attempts at revitalizing it. Why not comics? Why not pen & paper RPGs? Instead we got a movie where a rat puppet fights a detached human penis, and although that probably sounds funny out of context, the reality is that you’ll have stopped giving a shit long before that scene ever shows up. I know I did.
Do I think that you should watch Beyond Re-Animator? No, not really. Do I think fans of the Re-Animator films will find something to enjoy with Beyond Re-Animator? Probably not, aside from a few choice special effects and the presence of Jeffrey Combs. Do I think my love for Re-Animator is keeping me from viewing Beyond Re-Animator more critically? Possibly. For any pros this film might have had though, it’s the flaws that shine through the brightest, and it’s the flaws which stick in my mind. If the only things you remember about a movie are the bad things, doesn’t that make it a bad movie? Write five pages on that and get it in to me by Monday.
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