150 Words About . . . RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

By James Newman

Re-Animator is a gruesome horror-comedy that could only have come from the ‘80s (it makes a killer double-feature alongside Return of the Living Dead, FYI).  It’s also a classic mad-scientist movie.  The world needs more of those, don’t you think?  You can almost hear Frankenstein’s Colin Clive exclaim “It’s aliiive!” during every pivotal moment.  Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, in the role that made him a genre legend) is a promising student at a prestigious medical university who has discovered the secret of reanimating dead tissue (spoiler alert:  it’s a weird, green, glow-in-the-dark goo).  When he sets his sights on the local morgue as the perfect place for his clandestine experiments, you know this won’t end well.

Cool aside:  I dressed up as Herbert West for a Halloween party last year.  Only two or three people knew who I was supposed to be.  One of them was my wife.  Go figure.