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I have gone on record multiple times with friends in real life and on the internet that Re-animator is a fantastic and under appreciated movie in the horror genre, one that is specifically labeled as ‘awesome’ in my internal movie database. Released in 1985, the film Re-animator was an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft : “Herbert West-Reanimator”, focusing on a morally-deficient and slightly unstable medical student who creates a serum designed prevent death and bring anything that was dead back to life, which it does...mostly. Featuring some juicy gore, great make-up and special effects and an undercurrent of black comedy enhancing the overall insanity, it’s a film that works incredibly well with what’s trying to accomplish and indulges in all the right places. It’s an excessive but not extravagant movie, and were this under different circumstances I might have wrote about this one instead. I still recommend it though, and if you are going to watch this movie you’re probably better off watching Re-animator first, because it sets up a lot of the things for the sequel. So there are SPOILERS about the original film in this upcoming paragraph, be aware.
8 months after the events of Re-animator, and Herbert West (played by Jeffrey Combs, who is fucking great in this role) and his friend/accomplice Dan Cain are in hiding in South America after being connected to the mass killing that happened in the last film. Dan is in dire straits psychologically, a combination of the hideous nature of his work and the fact that said work lead to the death of his girlfriend wreaking havoc on his psyche. West, being the good friend/mad scientist that he is, proposes a seemingly perfect solution: Dan’s girlfriend may be gone, so why not build a new one, a perfect girlfriend with all the best parts a man could find. So begins a new cycle of murder, subterfuge and suspense for Herbert West and Dan Cain, one with even more gruesome experiments, dirty deeds and talking heads (not David Byrne, even though that would’ve been awesome) than ever before.
It’s no coincidence that Bride of Re-animator holds a similar name to Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the 1931 Universal classic. Both films involve resurrecting a woman of course, but more than that both films are markedly more bizarre than the films they succeed, and in both cases I think it affects the overall narrative negatively. In Bride of Frankenstein I believe it’s not too much of a detriment (maybe James Whale directing both had something to do with that, but I can’t say for sure), but in Bride of Re-animator there’s so much insane crap going on that the focus is on the insane crap rather than telling a coherent story. It’s awesome to look at all the crazy special effects they pull off with West’s creations, but most everything else takes a step down in my opinion. Sort of like the progression from Evil Dead to Evil Dead II, but Evil Dead II was the superior film in that case, so maybe I’m a hypocrite in this case. I don’t know.
So, not as good as Re-animator, but as far as sequels go I’d say Bride does a pretty good job of establishing a end to the storyline, even if the third film that came out years later kind of mucked that up. As a standalone film it’s a delightfully gory, incredibly surreal and slightly messy (plot-wise) experience. After you check out Re-animator, why not putting this on your Halloween film queue?
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