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DVD Tuesday: Re-Animator Reanimated!
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!
I can't believe Re-Animator, one of my great horror-movie viewing experiences of the 1980s, is more than 20 years old. But the release of a new, two-disc special-edition DVD from Anchor Bay is an excellent excuse to revisit it in DVD Tuesday.
The 1980 success of Friday the 13th launched a string of stalk-and-slash movies, and while the cream of the slasher crop includes some top-notch fright flicks, overall it's not my favorite kind of horror film. Which only makes Re-Animator that much more delightfully surprising. A throwback to the golden age of manmade-monster movies based on H.P. Lovecraft's then little-known Herbert West: Re-Animator, master of horror Stuart Gordon's debut film manages the tricky feat of being genuinely shocking and genuinely funny.
Let me be clear: I hate horror comedies in general and horror spoofs in particular. But Re-Animator doesn't make fun of the genre. It finds the dark humor in any obsessive dedication to some warped but worthy-sounding goal that is carried to its deranged extreme — which is a staple of fight flicks in general and mad-doctor movies in particular. Medical student Herbert West's (Jeffrey Combs) "obscene doodling with human body parts" is so grotesque you have to laugh, especially since he himself has absolutely, positively no sense of humor. West couldn't see the humor in reducing his rival, lecherous Dr. Hill (character actor David Gale, one of the film's secret weapons) to a decapitated head in a pan if you diagrammed it for him. But Hill's single-minded pursuit of lovely student Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), even after his head and body have been separated, produces the movie's notorious visual one-liner, which I won't spoil for those who haven't seen it.
I can't recommended Re-Animator highly enough, even to those who aren't die-hard horror freaks, though I must warn the squeamish that it's very, very gory. I recently had the great good fortune to chat about the film with director Gordon, and I've used some of his thoughts in the discussion items below. Click through for the complete interview.
Things to consider:
MM: Why has Re-Animator held up so vividly when many horror films of the 1980s now look dated?
SG: I think it's partly because it can still take people by surprise.
MM: Genre filmmakers often talk about the relationship between scares and laughter — discuss horror spoofs vs horror films with humorous elements.
SG: The humor in Re-Animator comes out of the characters, rather than from the impulse to show that we — the filmmakers, the audience — are better than this kind of thing. [Audiences] need to laugh, not because the movie is silly, but because they have to get rid of some of that tension that builds up when you're doing everything right.
MM: Do remakes help introduce a new audience to the classic horror movies of the 1970s and '80s, or do they just drag down the genre by running its icons into the ground?
SG: I really don't like the remake trend. We need new monsters, not rehashes of tired old monsters.
MM: Serious horror buffs and theorists of the genre (guilty as charged!) are quick to see sexual metaphors in horror films. Valid interpretations, or just so much academic nonsense?
SG: All horror movies [are] about nothing less than life and death. Sex is all about creating new life, and death is about extinguishing life. So of course horror movies are all wrapped up in sex!
Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Mar 20, 2007 5:48 PM
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Reanimator is great because it is somehow simultaneously over the top and realistic at the same time. It sets up it's own mythology and plays by those rules. Add in Combs' performance and some grotesque zombies--especially the cat--and it's a recipe for enduring quality.
I think the the visual one-liner you mention when his body goes in the wrong direction says it all. It's the real reaction anyone would have and it's horribly fantastic at the same time. Kind of like Lovecraft.
As I said in the interview post, bring on the From Beyond!
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Mar 20, 2007 6:50 PM
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BTW, the horrorchannel.com web site showed Reanimator online last year during a live chat and Stuart Gordon was the guest. He gave out a lot of interesting facts about the movie. So sad I didn't save a transrcipt. But if it was any indication of the commentary on the new DVD, it will be great!
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Mar 20, 2007 6:52 PM
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Just FYI, the satellite network Monsters HD showed a restored version of From Beyond last year (here's Video Watchdog Tim Lucas' assessment), which I hope presages a deluxe DVD reissue of the film.
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Mar 20, 2007 11:07 PM
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I think it would be more accurate to say that _Halloween_ (1978) launched the slasher craze, not _Friday the 13th_.
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Mar 21, 2007 10:55 AM
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tdean, what Maitland says is "The 1980 success of Friday the 13th launched a string of stalk-and-slash movies"... which is 100% accurate. She didn't say Ft13th was the first. (and besides, there are stalker/slashers that pre-date Halloween).
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Mar 21, 2007 12:17 PM
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Achyfakey,
Well, there's no "proof" one way or another, but I maintain my point. I still say there' wouldn't really have been a _Friday the 13th_ without _Halloween_ a year or two before, and there were several "slasher" films between _Halloween_ and _Friday the 13th_. And obviously, yes, there were slasher films before 1978, but _Halloween_ set the pattern--and the popularity--with the murderer after teenagers. So, I still say it's more accurate to say that "the 1978 success of Halloween launched a string of stalk-and-slash movies."
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Mar 22, 2007 10:40 AM
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tdean, I don't want to seem a jerk about this... but there is proof that Ft13th set off a wave of imitators. You can check it out yourself. I even just watched a documentary (I think it was "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film") that makes the same claims. Add in the fact that I was around back then and remember it for myself.
Yes, Halloween did beget Ft13th (as did many films before it). They are even cashing in on the "holiday" or special date theme. But after its release in 1980, it set off its own glut of hack n' slashers. This really is true.
Halloween was very much a real film. Ft13th is an amatuer production in comparison. The post-Ft13th craze was fueled by formula and attempts to out-gore one another. Anyone some cash and a creative choice of remaining holidays could make a slasher. Thank god for this... I love these films!
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Mar 22, 2007 12:25 PM
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This really is getting silly--but I'll continue it. I was around in the late 70s and early 80s myself, and I vividly remember the craze around _Halloween_ and the rash of slasher films that followed it even before _Friday the 13th_ came out. Sure, _Friday_ was big, but it kept the genre/formula going more than starting it. There are zillions of analyses of the slasher genre that credit _Halloween_ in the way I do. A quick Google will get you all kinds of info, scholarly/critical/amateur and otherwise. Here's a quotation, for example, from a scholarly article you can find at http://comm2.fsu.edu/faculty/comm/Sapolsky/
research/bookch/slasher.html
"Hollywood immediately tried to tap into the success of Halloween. Films such as Friday the 13th, Don’t Go In the House, Prom Night, Terror Train, He Knows You’re Alone, and Don’t Answer the Phone were all released in 1980. All hoped to imitate the profits of Halloween. These movies, which are some of the first slasher films, were extremely successful. However, with their increasing popularity came strong criticism. Slasher films were condemned for frequently portraying vicious attacks against mostly females and for mixing sex scenes with violent acts."
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Mar 22, 2007 1:46 PM
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Yes, Halloween set off a chain of horror movies. But Ft13th set off it's own chain. That is how I read Maitland's comments and that is what I remember from my youth.
Let's be clear so we don't just argue (politely disagree!) in circles: do you deny that Ft13th had that effect? Because that is how I read you...
P.S.
So glad there is someone to talk to at the DVD clubhouse this week.
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Mar 22, 2007 1:53 PM
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Well, I think it's all semantics, and I'm not sure how you would even measure whether F13 set off its own chain. F13 came so close on the heels of H--and its basic structure and approach is so similar to H--that its existence is clearly indebted to H. There were many slasher films between H and F13 and many after F13. But it is undeniable that H created a formula (and established box office success) that set off the wave of what we now call "slasher" films. I suppose you could do an analysis of the number of films and the box office receipts to see if there was a bigger or different surge after F13, but even then, you could argue forever over the semantics of whether F13 set off its "own" chain or whether it helped continue the chain started by H. I still opt for the latter. When F13 comes so closely after H in time, it's kind of hard for me to see how it is creating its own "chain." Anyway, that's what I remember from my experience in that time period, too (which was when I was in college, and actually doing some film study at the time).
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Mar 22, 2007 2:35 PM
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I think we need more slashers and fewer torture and zombie flicks right now. They kind of tried after Scream, but no one did as well as that film (please, no Valentine sequels).
It's such a simple formula: childhood trauma creates stalker, a couple of boobs, a bucket of blood, some creative deaths, an unexpected reveal at the end and voila! Perfection! We should be getting one of these every two months.
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Mar 22, 2007 2:41 PM
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I guess it's time for me to step in. There's no question but that Halloween was a hugely imfluential film -- I vividly remember seeing it in an East 86th Street theater and then going home to my apartment -- apartment, mind you, not suburban house -- with the hell spooked out of me.
But it was Friday the 13th, itself closely modeled on Italian giallo pioneer Mario Bava's Antefatto/Twitch of the Death Nerve (1972)that kicked off the stalk-and-slash era in the US -- trust me, I was there.
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Mar 22, 2007 11:05 PM
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