Re-Animator (The Last Drive-In)

Film Year:  1985
Genre:  Horror, Science Fiction
Director:  Stuart Gordon
Starring:  Jeffery Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson

The Movie

This cult classic stars Jeffery Combs as a medical student who is working on a formula that can reanimate the dead back to life, but he can't get them to return to their original state instead of mindless, grunting zombies.  Renting a room from a fellow student, he confides in his roommate in his discovery, but they find themselves spiraling in a domino effect of reanimated corpses and a growing obsession with perfecting the formula.

I had not seen Re-Animator before this showing.  I had heard of it, most definitely knew it by reputation, but I had never had the opportunity to sit down and watch it, though it has been on the to-do list for a while.  Frankly, as crazy as I've heard this film was, I profess a tiny bit of disappointment.  I've seen many films much nuttier than this, many of which were seen in this very marathon (the previous film, Basket Case, makes Re-Animator look like Downton Abby), so very little in Re-Animator made me flinch.

But it's a devilishly stylish movie that's rooted in a rather colorful, comic book tone from beginning to end.  If there's anything Re-Animator has going for it, it's that it's fairly quick paced and always doing something flashy to keep audience interest up.  I found myself constantly intrigued as to what route the film would take and what its destination would be.  By the time it landed at its open-ended conclusion, there was a satisfying completeness to the entire experience that I'd say not a lot of movies can achieve with such an ending.

I don't think Re-Animator will become a favorite of mine, despite its best moments, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy watching it.  I enjoyed the performances, I enjoyed the creativity, and I thought the world of its spirit.  Even it's score, which obviously borrows many notes from the score to Psycho, is colorful enough to compliment the film itself.  I might find Re-Animator a tad overrated, but I can certainly see why people love it.

The Drive-In

Joe Bob knows he has a nutty little Frankenstein tale this week, and takes a good portion of his opening segment to lecture on the human brain, which is probably one of my favorite moments of The Last Drive-In so far.  Joe Bob gets all college professor on us, with his little chart and pointer stick, as he points out various portions of the brain and explains, in his own words, what they do.  This lecture is very important to him, because, as he points out, a lot of his fans (myself included) do not have the luxury of having this organ.

When it comes to discussing Re-Animator, Joe Bob takes the time to acknowledge what he feels is the greatest performance in horror history:  David Gale.  Gale plays a conniving professor who plans to steal the reanimation formula, gets his head ripped off, is reanimated, and then spends the rest of the film as a headless corpse lugging his own head around, which Joe Bob feels is the performance of a lifetime.  He's not wrong.  He spends most of his time praising Gale, though he has praise for the rest of the cast, including Jeffery Combs and the nakedness of Barbara Crampton.  He has some positive things to say about Bruce Abbott as well, who he feels isn't mentioned enough in reviews despite putting forth a good performance.

He shares some neat tidbits about the production, which he claims was put together by people from the theater, rehearsed for two weeks, then filmed in less than three.  He mentions the original cut to this fucker ran two-and-a-half hours long, which was cut down to 86 minutes (wisely, in my opinion).  But he laments the cutting of a subplot involving Gale's character which established that he was a hypnotist, explaining how he had control of all the corpses in the end.  Apparently the film's composer shot this subplot down, claiming one supernatural element in the film was enough.  Joe Bob thinks this is absurd, and considers the lesson to be "Never take storytelling advice from your composer."

But despite some editing choices Joe Bob doesn't agree with, Joe Bob is really enthusiastic about this movie and is really enjoying talking about it.  Plus Darcy has some amazing cosplay at the end of this episode, making it one to watch for your average Joe Bob fan.

Joe Bob's Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐