Stuart Gordon’s debut feature, Re-Animator, isn’t just one of the best horror movies of the 1980s, but also one of the few rare perfect horror comedies ever made. Alongside Evil Dead 2, the original Re-Animator essentially helped invent the splatstick subgenre and announced Gordon as one of the most exciting voices in horror, plus, it turned genre royalty Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton into stars overnight. There’s almost no way it could be outdone in its sequel, 1990’s Bride of Re-Animator, though it’s not for lack of trying.
Brian Yuzna, producer of the first film, stepped into the director’s chair for the follow-up, which finds med student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) and Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) escaping to Peru months after the bloody and tragic events of Re-Animator. They continue to conduct their reanimation experiments on soldiers injured and killed in the midst of a bloody civil war, but they are chased out by the enemy. Returning home to their original house and hospital, the pair resume their work and West discovers he can re-animate individual body parts. Inspired to create an entirely new person from revived tissue of the dead, West promises Dan that he will reanimate the heart of his lost love in turn for his help. When a new romantic interest (Fabiana Udenio) and a nosy detective (Claude Earl Jones) make their work more difficult, things really get interesting—and that’s not to mention the reanimated severed head of Dr. Hill (David Gale) coming back to exact revenge.
As much as I love the idea of continuing the adventures of Dr. Herbert West in theory, the sequel devised by Yuzna and fellow screenwriters Rick Fry and Woody Keith somewhat misses the mark. Given the events of the previous movie, the friendship between Dan and Herbert doesn’t make much sense, nor does Dan’s arc throughout the sequel—at times he seems slightly mad with grief, at others he’s casually back in the dating pool. The title and the basic hook, borrowing from Mary Shelley and James Whale, are genuinely inspired; unfortunately, it takes until the final act of the movie for that inspiration to pay off. Bride of Re-Animator spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, coasting on our familiarity with certain characters while failing to make any of the new characters register. Believe it or not, it’s the relationships between the people that make Re-Animator work, whether it’s the romance between Dan and Meg (Crampton), the father/daughter connection between Meg and Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson), the creepy lust Hill has for Meg or his professional rivalry with Herbert West. Bride doesn’t have any of that emotional spine, and even the central and most familiar relationship—between Dan and West—is more or less ignored as each goes on his own separate adventure.
But then all the threads come together in the climax and Bride of Re-Animator redeems nearly all of its previous missteps. Like he had previously done in his directorial debut, Society, Brian Yuzna pulls out all the stops in the final act with a set piece that continues to top itself with gory special effects and general insanity. Bodies fall apart, tissue is rejected, the undead attack, and heads literally fly around the room on wings. The makeup effects by a team of all-stars including Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman of KNB EFX Group, Screaming Mad George, and John Carl Buechler, are nothing short of incredible—the effects are stomach-churning and messy, imaginative and surreal, especially in the unrated version. Few horror films nowadays are this willing to completely go for broke, often for budgetary reasons (there just isn’t the money to stage the kinds of effects Bride pulls off), but also because some corners of horror have become homogenized. Whatever criticisms can be leveled against Bride of Re-Animator, it can’t be accused of playing it safe.
Arrow Video brings Bride of Re-Animator to Blu-ray for the first time in the US in a limited edition three-disc edition with a limited run of 5,000 units. Both the R-rated and unrated cuts are included, presented in 1080p HD in their original 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratios, and it’s clear that Arrow has put their usual care into restoring the movie to look better than it ever has. It also comes packed with bonus content: the first disc, containing the unrated cut, has three separate audio commentaries. The first is from Yuzna, moderated by David Gregory, while the second includes Yuzna, Combs and members of the effects team, including Berger, Kurtzman, Screaming Mad George, and others. The final commentary features the film’s main stars: Combs and Abbott.
Also on the first disc are new interviews with Yuzna and the effects team, as well as about 25 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage and two deleted scenes, neither of which are in finished form. Disc two contains the R-rated cut of the movie, which runs the same length but is significantly different, as well as 15 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. The third disc is a standard definition DVD of the film. Arrow’s set also comes packaged with a booklet of reprinted Re-Animator comics from the ’90s and an excellent BFI essay from Michael Blyth.
Bride of Re-Animator is a mixed bag of a sequel, but the high points are so high and Arrow’s presentation so good that the disc deserves a spot in any horror fan’s library. It’s a weirder, sloppier movie than Re-Animator, but it deserves high marks for ambition. Yes, the reach may exceed the grasp, but who’s keeping score when the hand is severed, anyway?
Movie score: 3/5, Disc score: 4/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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