The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Society (1989), directed by Brian Yuzna

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Sex and Dying in High Society", by X

       Of all the people that I name drop on this blog, Brian Yunza is not one one of them. From the longest article I’ve written to the shortest, the appearance of his name could probably be counted on one hand, and yet this blog probably exist without him. After all, he was the producer on Stuart Gordon’s 80s cult classic Re-Animator, one of the films I covered in the very first Halloween-based thing I ever did for the blog, which has become my trademark, for better or worse. He also directed its sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, which I covered in the first proper Marathon, which was one of my favorite movies of that year. He also directed Beyond Re-Animator, one of my least favorite films of the year that it was featured, but then not every ball you hit can be home run after all. So in recognition of his contributions to Marathon history, I figured there could be no greater honor than covering yet another one of his films. Not only that, but a complete Yuzna original this time around; No Stuart Gordon or H.P. Lovecraft to steal the spotlight. From 1989, it’s Society.

       Bill Whitney (as played by Billy Warlock, who Obscurus Lupa fans might recognize as Baywatch’s Eddie Krama) lives a pretty charmed life. He’s Beverly Hills Academy’s star jock, he’s on his way to becoming class president, he’s got a cheerleader girlfriend, oh and his parents are filthy stinking rich. Yet all is not well in this modern day Xanadu. Aside from the fact that his parents are always fawning over his sister Jenny, there’s just something...off. Something not quite right, and it’s left him in a state of paranoia, at least according to his psychiatrist. Billy’s fears are completely legitimate however, at least according to Billy, and they are completely justified when David Blanchard, Jenny’s ex-boyfriend, provides him with a secret recording that paints the Whitney family in a damnable light. The smoking gun? More like a key to hell, as this tape will lead Billy to discover that what he thought the Whitney family was, and what he thinks Whitney family is now, pales in comparison to the truth.

       Society is the kind of movie that, like many horror movies of the time tries to spin a lot of different plates at once. At first it seems like it’s aiming for a psychological thriller, in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby or The Believers. Then it takes a straight turn right into body horror territory courtesy of Screaming Mad George (who you might recall from The Guyver), concurrently with some social commentary that comes out of the blue. Very ambitious, bringing to mind not only Yuzna’s previous work on Bride of Re-Animator, but films like The Stuff and Night of the Creeps as well. Although this is right on the edge of the decade, this feels like prime 80s splatterhouse territory, and at this stage of the game we’re all well aware of my feelings for that sort of cinema.

       Society is a film that implies a complex narrative and a subtle build to suspense however, and having seen two other Brian Yuzna movies at this point, complex and subtle are not in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing wrong with going over the top, especially when it comes to cult horror movies, but for that to be effective you have to establish where the top is, the reality from which surreality springs. While those Screaming Mad George special effects are certainly a treat,its effect in the story is equivalent to downing a shot of espresso after inhaling a line of cocaine. It’s too much, and in hindsight not only is nothing ever properly explained, there’s no real justification for why the plot of the movie even happens at all. Even Yuzna seems to recognize that at some point, as it feels like he originally forgot to write an ending to his movie and what we see on screen is what he hastily wrote in the margins when the crew called him out on it. Again, if it were just about the horror it wouldn’t be a problem, but because it seems like there’s an attempt at saying something bigger here, there needs to be a few moments of respite.

       What we also see in Society is an internal struggle on tone. Yuzna seems conflicted on what he wants his film to be like, The Thing or The Ruling Class, so he decided to compromise by shoving comedy haphazardly into the most intense moments. Now horror and comedy aren’t strangers, from Get Out to Fright Night we’ve seen it done, but in Society it seems out of place and flat out stupid at worst. Not stupid in the good way either, as in the slapstick of Evil Dead II. Bad stupid, the kind of stupid that makes you wonder if the director really thought it was a good idea. So it was with Beyond Re-Animator, so it was with Screaming Mad George’s The Guyver, so at this point you can’t deny it’s not a conscious choice, I just dunno. I can see the argument of the last act being some kind of Bosch-like vision of hell, with our protagonist being tortured with bizarre and horrible sights, but I end up rolling my eyes and wondering if the director is actively insulting my intelligence. I don’t like that feeling, and I don’t think that’s Yuzna’s intention, but when I see someone literally pretending to be an asshole and farting on people it raises some red flags. Makes me wonder if I really did like Bride of Re-Animator all those years ago, or if I’m being blinded by less than a decade old nostalgia.

       I’m probably being a bit too harsh on Mr. Yuzna though, as well as Society. I know there’s people out there that are going to be super into the 80s gore, and there’s a Dark City defense there of being not entirely unlike its peers that gives it a certain feeling of originality and mystery, so despite it not quite hitting the right switch for me I’ll give it the recommendation in case it does it for you. Fair warning though, you might want to avoid any pasta for at least 24 hours. Trust me, you’ll be better off.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Bride of Re-animator (1990), directed by Brian Yuzna

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Found Love In a Graveyard", by Veronica Falls

     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?

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- Beyond Re-Animator (2003), directed by Brian Yuzna

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "The Drifter", by H. P. Lovecraft

     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.