Tagline
“Herbert West has a very good head on his shoulders. And another one on his desk.”
The Review
Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator is the greatest Lovecraft adaptation of the 1980s and one of the most gloriously excessive horror comedies ever made. Jeffrey Combs' Herbert West — an intense, obsessive medical student who invents a glowing green serum that reanimates the dead — is one of horror's most magnetic performances. Combs plays West with zero irony and total conviction, which makes the escalating insanity around him exponentially funnier and more horrifying. The severed head scene is perhaps the single most outrageous sequence in 1980s horror. Gordon understood that Lovecraft's cosmic horror worked best when filtered through Grand Guignol excess.
Fun Fact
Jeffrey Combs was paid so little for his iconic performance that he continued working as a waiter during production. The green reanimation serum was actually made from a commercial injection liquid used to highlight veins. The film was initially given an X rating for its gore and had to be released unrated.
Score Breakdown
Total Score
20/30
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