“Plagiarist!”

Hooptober 5.0 #4 (fulfills Barbara Crampton requirement)

I really, really, really wanted to like this more. And for the most part, most of the way through, I did like it a lot. Combs, whom I'd previously only seen in The Frighteners and in his wonderful work as one of the very best Star Trek villains, gives us one of the greatest mad scientists of all time in Herbert West. Abbott's Dan Cain, a combination of an easy mark from a '30s horror movie and a typical bland, hunky tool of the '80s, can't help being much less interesting, but I find it really hard to actually dislike a guy who has a Stop Making Sense poster on his bedroom wall, so he's all right. And Gordon generally has the horror comedy tone perfectly pitched: it's over the top in all the best ways, both totally hilarious and genuinely scary when it needs to be. I mean, this is a picture that managed to make me laugh at a dead cat, which is generally almost impossible to do, and after all the splatter has been spilled, it ends on a genuinely horrifying and tragic (but witty!) image.

Unfortunately, a couple of problems come up. First, Richard Band's score straight-up lifts Bernard Hermann's opening them from Psycho, dresses it up with a few '80s touches, and drops it intact right into this very different movie. To be fair, Band knew exactly what he was doing and expected audiences to know it as well—he admits in interviews and in the soundtrack album itself that he borrowed heavily from Hermann—but that doesn't really justify his wholesale recycling of music that had already been perfectly composed and put to its best possible use in another movie.

But that, in the end, is just an annoyance, a bit of a distraction that I didn't love but was willing to deal with. I had a much greater issue with the movie's most extreme scene. You see, Dr. Hill, the villain, is perving on Meg, Dan's love interest, throughout the movie, and he eventually sexually assaults her. I saw this coming, I really hoped I was wrong, and I was disappointed to be proved right. Gordon kind of plays it for horrified laughs, too, like it's just another disgusting thing that's happening among all the decapitations and eye-poppings and strangling large intestines. It is beyond offensive and unnecessary, a perfect example of horror's worst tendencies in its depictions of sexual assault and exploitation.

So, between those two drawbacks, my rating for Re-Animator had to be reduced by at least one full star. It's too bad, because this is generally a terrific ride and could have been something really special if Gordon had just eliminated the toxic shit and demanded something more (or something different) from his composer.