"Did you ever see that movie where the body is walking around carrying its own head, and then the head goes down on that babe?" -- Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham in American Beauty
With that line from 1999's Oscar winner for Best Picture, Re-Animator went from beloved cult film to dorm-room sensation overnight. (And as a result, "I want to borrow your copy of Re-Animator" became code for "I want to buy some pot.") It even surpassed The Big Lebowski on EW.com's The Cult 25 list.
Released in October 1985, Re-Animator bridged the gap between the Frankenstein/mad scientist genre and zombie movies. It also solidified the cult-horror transition from the bleak nihilism of the post-Watergate years (The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and so forth) to the self-referential sardonicism of the Reagan years and beyond, from Evil Dead 2 to Feast.
The plot is simple: an unbalanced genius has discovered a "reagent" (which looks suspiciously like the stuff inside a Glow Stick) that brings dead tissue back to life. Unfortunately, everyone that gets reanimated appears stuck on a sliding scale between primal anger and diabolical evil, and West's continuing experiments gradually unleash a cavalcade of very pissed-off zombies in various states of articulacy (and decay). It all starts when he brings back his roommate Dan's cat, Rufus, in what may be the film's best sequence. Dan, who is ostensibly the film's "hero," had already discovered his former pet stiff as a board in West's mini-fridge, whereupon West made up an oh-so-plausible story about "the poor thing" getting its head stuck in a jar. Cut to the following night, as Dan finds West in the basement doing battle with an extremely agitated, formerly deceased kitty. They finally manage to re-kill old Rufus by throwing the poor little bastard against a cinderblock wall, but our boy Herbert is just getting started: he then re-reanimates the cat, by way of demonstration ("Don't expect it to tango, it has a broken back"). The entire sequence (which comes, mind you, about 15 minutes into the movie) is a fitting preamble for what's to come: a perfect mix of gore, scares, and pitch-black gallows humor. It also tells you all you need to know about Herbert West: the good doctor is batshit insane.
When West's nemesis, Dr. Hill, attempts to steal the secrets of reanimation, West has no choice but to dispatch him by first clobbering and then decapitating him with the blade of a shovel. Face it, you would do the same in his position. Naturally, West gives the head a shot of Glow Stick filling, but he fails to anticipate Dr. Hill's ability to command his own headless body. Dr. Hill then proceeds, head in hand, to unleash an army of crazed zombies—and to kidnap and, yes, orally molest Dan's hapless girlfriend Megan (whose father, the dean of the medical school, has already been turned into a lobotomized zombie). In terms of "innocent bystander" abuse, the film is essentially a toss-up between Megan and Rufus the cat.
Needless to say, Re-Animator is roughly ninety minutes of unadulterated fun, replete with 24 gallons of blood, naked zombie fights, cat murder, dead cat murder, dead cat re-murder, zombie lobotomies (I know, seems redundant), beheading by shovel, and, of course, decapitated cunnilingus. In other words, it's good, clean family fun for Halloween.
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