Quantcast
Channel: Montreal Gazette » Horror Film
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

Re-Animator: Mad scientists! Zombies! Zombie cats! Talking heads! Glowing green gloop! Tonight!

0
0

I have never seen Stuart Gordon’s film Re-Animator, but I can tell from reading about it that it’s quite a special thing. Even “serious” reviewers, like Pauline Kael, Janet Maslin and Roger Ebert, have good things to say about it.

The Film Society will show it Sunday, March 9, 2014, at 7 p.m. in all its 35 mm, 95-minute glory. (I saw a favourable review that had just one complaint – the film should have been longer.)

So let’s get to those reviews.

Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wrote:  “Adapted from a series of six stories that H.P. Lovecraft published in 1922, this horror film about a medical student with a fluorescent greenish-yellow serum that restores the dead to hideous, unpredictable activity is close to being a silly ghoulie classic-the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is. It’s like pop Buñuel; the jokes hit you in a subterranean comic zone that the surrealists’ pranks sometimes reached, but without the surrealists’ self-consciousness (and art-consciousness). This is indigenous American junkiness, like the Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder Young Frankenstein, but looser and more low-down.”

” . . .it’s not out to scare you, it’s out to make you laugh at what other movies have scared you with, and at what they’d have scared you with if they hadn’t pulled back. . . The mockery here is the kind that needs a crowd to complete it; ideally you ought to see it with a gang of friends.”

(From the New Yorker, Nov. 18, 1985. Snippets of this review can be found on the Internet, but far as I can tell you can’t read the whole thing unless you buy the digital  issue or you are a New Yorker subscriber. As a subscriber, I can tell you that the review is quite long and enthusiastic throughout.)

Janet Maslin, New York Times:  “Re-Animator has as much originality as it has gore, and that’s really saying something. Stay away if you haven’t a special fondness for severed body parts, or an unflinching curiosity about autopsy scenes; this one takes place mostly at the morgue, and it doesn’t leave a thing to the imagination. But . . .Re-Animator” has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality. It even has a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 per cent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd. . . All of this, ingenious as it may be. . . is absolutely to be avoided by anyone not in the mood for a major bloodbath.”

.
Reader comment to Maslin’s review: Re-Animator is so over the top that by the climax when (there was a SPOILER here!), you are more going along for the ride as opposed to being grossed out. In fact that is the least of the gore. I am not a gore fan and though I closed my eyes for a lot of it, it is fun and isn’t a downer. The crude special effects (wait until you see the cat, it’s a howl) and low budget adds to its charm.”

.

Roger Ebert:  “One of the pleasures of the movies . . .is to find a movie that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird. . . I was reminded of Pauline Kael’s sane observation: “The movies are so rarely great art, that if we can’t appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go.”

“Gordon . . .borrows from the traditions of comic-book art and B-grade thrillers, using his special effects not as set pieces for us to study, but as dazzling throwaways as the action hurtles ahead. By the end of the film, we are keenly aware that nothing of consequence has happened, but so what? We have been assaulted by a lurid imagination, amazed by unspeakable sights, blind-sided by the movie’s curiously dry sense of humor. I guess that’s our money’s worth.”

(To my amazement, Ebert says that he saw Re-Animator at the Cannes film festival and that he had hoped that it would be better than “the festival’s run-of-the-mill exploitation films.” I didn’t know that Cannes washowed exploitation films, run-of the mill, or not. Thought it was more high-brow than that.)

.
Excerpt from an interview with director  Stuart Gordon in Cineaste:

Cineaste: It seems that almost all of your films deal with ambition, power, and greed. . . Are these statements about ambition’s negative effects intentional?

Gordon: I think these films are about dreams, and how incredible dreams can be. And the horror about dreams is that you have to be careful, because sometimes they can wind up becoming nightmares. Basically, at their root, they follow that old adage you’ve got to be careful what you wish for.

Re-Animator (1985, 35mm, original English version, 18+ )

Directed by Stuart Gordon, with Jeffrey Combs, David Gale, Robert Sampson, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott.
Sunday, March 9, 2014, 7 p.m.
Cinéma VA-114, Concordia University, 1395 René-Lévesque Blvd.
(métro Guy, métro Lucien l’Allier)
Admission: $8, general, $6, students and 65+

For more information about Re-Animator, visit the Film Society’s Facebook page.



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images