Re-Animator

All right, it's Halloween, and I will never forgive myself if I go the whole month of October without a single post about horror movies. Though this will not be anything like the last couple years, where I actually put some work into it - and dealt with true masterpieces of the genre... I am eye deep in Ezra Pound (not to mention a hurricane, though that didn't do us much harm in Boston), and haven't spent much time on anything else - but still....

Instead - here is an old favorite - one of the high points of the comic-horror sex and gore mashups of the 80s, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator. Which provided many a drunken evening of pleasure back in the day... There's not a huge amount that needs to be said about it - it's a mix of a Frankenstein remake and a zombie film (mashing up horror sub-genres as well as everything else) - and a success on almost every score. It is genuinely funny, full of oh so quotable lines ("trysting with a bubble headed co-ed - you're not even a second rate scientist!"), and very dark comedy... I wouldn't call it exactly frightening, but it is certainly creepy often enough... and if it isn't quite the meditation on the limits of man and science and knowledge and the boundary between life and death that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was, or even the fairly moving bildungsroman the Universal Frankensteins are - it is a not unintelligent examination of hubris and sexual passion and love and loss, in among the grue and the jokes.... A very fine film to celebrate the season with.