I was asked by a few users on my Favorite Horror Comedies list why I had included Bride of Re-Animator but not Re-Animator and their questioning me made me question myself, even though I was pretty sure I always found the sequel to be more funny.

Interestingly enough, I shouldn't have doubted myself. I still love Re-Animator and I like it more than the sequels, and while I think it is a fun, fast-paced movie, I don't find it funny. I don't laugh while watching it, I may smile simply because I love everything about it, but it's not something I find overly hilarious.

The only word I can think of to describe Jeffrey Combs is unique. There is no…

I’ll never get used to hearing my name in a movie and whenever I revisit Re-Animator I’m constantly taken off guard every time someone says ‘Mr. West’ 

Equal parts grotesque splatter and darkly humorous, Re-Animator (especially the unrated cut) is superbly paced and expertly crafted by Stuart Gordon, who wastes no time onslaughting us with gallons of blood, reanimated corpses running amuck, glowing green reagent, shovel decapitations, tentacle-like intestines flying out of bodies, the lecherous Dr. Hill and his soon to be blood dripping talking head, and cast that knocks it out of the park—with Barbara Cramptin and Bruce Abbott perfectly relating fear and vulnerability, and Jeffery Combs sealing his fate as an actor who notoriously goes full throttle into a performance…

Great effects and gore. Some tense 'action' scenes and some great slow reveals. I also liked the similarities in the soundtrack to Hitchcock's Psycho, with the stabbing string section. I got kind of a weird misogynist vibe from it though? Like the scenes with female nudity are really not needed at all, you could easily not have shown any nudity and it would have still been the same movie. There's really only one major female character and she always has the least importance in a scene or in controlling where the story is going. The nearly-sex scene near the end was extremely off-putting and is one of the few things that has made me feel truly sick. Some of the…

Director/co-writer Stuart Gordon claims Re-Animator was “a charmed film,” and in retrospect that really seems to be the case. Gordon’s desire to parlay the success of his and his wife’s Chicago theatre collective into a big screen incarnation led him to pursue horror (after being told by a friend that that genre was one of the two easiest to break into movies with) and, interested in telling a Frankenstein story among what Gordon perceived as a glut of vampire films (putting the genesis of the movie somewhere around the Dracula/Nosferatu period of ‘79), the filmmaker found his way to a first edition copy of H.P. Lovecraft’s titular serialized short story. Thinking at first the stories might be better suited to television,…