Re-Animator

(1985) **** 1/2 

Watch that head, it's got nasty intentions!

A good year indeed for some gruesome-funny science fiction horror (coming from H.P. Lovecraft, no less) set in a university hospital with lots of dead muscular naked men (more on that later). This was my follow-up film to Martyrs, and its camp and ridiculous storyline restored my spirits as best as they could be.

Herbert West is on a mission – to reanimate the dead! After a failed attempt in Switzerland to bring his dead professor back to life, he re-locates back to America and moves in with Dan Cain, where sets up shop in the basement. West is a strange character and possibly the worst house-mate to have: he doesn't have any social graces and he's home all the time experimenting so you'd feel bad bringing anyone home, or writing your name on all the groceries in the fridge that YOU bought with YOUR money. C'mon, the poor man lives on the paper he writes his notes on and drinks his own nerdy sweat! (Well not really, but this guy only has one thing on his brain, and that's this green glowing goop.)

"We take our work very seriously. It involves wrestling with nekkid dead men."

Once West perfects his Ooze formula (which isn't totally unlike the one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were exposed to), he gets Cain in on his plan – mostly because Cain works in a university hospital carting around dead people to be dissected by students. This is where the fun begins.

Wouldn't we ALL love to thrust a drill through a random torso?

There's one scene where they need to test out their experiment on a freshly dead person, so Cain leads West to a room of dead (aaaaaaaaaaand nekkid!) bodies. West injects a dead, but ripped, dude with negative results (he's overaggressive). So what does West do? What should any logical scientist do? SHOOT 'EM UP WITH MORE OOZE!

While watching this I felt bad (but regret nothing!) for making JSP back-track not once, not twice, but three times to confirm that, yes, that is the dead man's dong on-screen.

Quite entertaining, to say the least. Watch with a big bowl of popcorn and at least 3 beers.

He's in mid-song on the set of "Re-Animator: The Musical"