Voodoo Zombies revisited Jeffrey Combs, better known as Special Agent Dammers (The Frighteners (Director's Cut) plays Herbert West in this delightful interpretation of HP Lovecraft's series of short stories. Herbert West is a medical student with an interest in death, but more importantly in reanimating the dead. With a nod to voodoo zombies, he uses a serum to reanimate the recently deceased, but lacks control over them, turning them into rampaging monsters similar to those later found in 28 Days/Weeks Later. Add a corrupt Professor/Doctor, a naive Med Student, his bimbo-esque fiance and her Dean father, Re-Animator is an almost Zombie movie that doesn't take itself too seriously with funny one-liners, plenty of gore, and a great score, reminiscent of Psycho. This film is recommended for fans of zombie movies (Dead Alive & Shaun of the Dead especially), cult films, and people who are just a little bit weird/strange/unusual.
80's horror hit. Stuart Gordon's first is a must see. Definitely If your big on horror, If yout not well don't. Great film that's totally over the top but in the way that it should be. It has it's oh s@*t moments. The effects in this movie are great to this day, ofcourse they are. They were never bad effects to begin with. The story is obviously great and is based on H.P Lovecraft's series of stories , Herbert West The Re-Animator. The acting, direction, and cinematography is to die for. I'd say it's a hell of a film premiere. I'd be proud to hail this as my film If I'd directed it. I'm sure Stuart Gordon is. If your into movies like Scanners, The Thing , Return Of The Living Dead, or any of Romero's zombie films check this out. Definitely If your someone who likes vintage horror movies.
A poor horrorfilm that misuses Lovecraft's name far beyond acceptable limits I had actually never seen "Re-animator", strangely enough, seeing that I've been an avid reader of HPL's tales since far back into my youth. I don't know why really, but it had always given me a bad feeling when I heard people talk about what a great "splatter" it was. Granted, "Braindead" is a funny movie in many respects, but then again, that doesn't say "H. P. Lovecraft's" on the cover. Two friends came over and we started the movie, I quickly realized though, that this has as much to do with HPL as the semitically correct film version of "The Lord of the Rings" have to do with Tolkien's wonderful world.
The film portrays Herbert West, medical student and obsessed with research on re-animation, that being the idea that you can bring someone back from the dead through science and chemistry. He convinces a fellow student to join him in his research, ever pushing the boundaries of the law in their quest for the perfect dead body to revive, but never finding one that's "quite fresh enough". When they involve two of the professors at their university, including the daughter of one of them, she being the fiancé of the helper, everything goes to hell. Being a horror-film, you can imagine what goes wrong, from West's point of view. This is also a so-called "horror-comedy", something that I could hardly loathe more, so I might not be the right person to judge this movie, but I'll give it a go, since I spent an hour and a half watching it.
There's really very little in the film that has anything with HPL to do at all, so I'm quite certain that if Lovecraft had any kind of "estate", the way other famous deceased authors often had, this film would never have been made out to be based on his amusing and above average horror tale. It contains excessive and meaningless nudity and erotic scenes that add nothing to the tale, apart from making it even more meaningless. The only reason I'm not giving it 1 star, is because it DOES have a FEW amusing lines and also the face of one of the legion of bodies that eventually starts to roam the film is quite hilarious, you'll know it when you see it. The bonus-material was to me only minor, and I almost wish I had gotten the censored version, something you'll understand a little while into the movie.
All in all, a poor "horror film" that isn't scary at all, and is generally a waste of time, in addition to being an insult to the intelligence of our great radically conservative American-English author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, may he rest in peace.
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