As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Most under rated horror comedy of the '80s if not of all time. It's violent and bloody but also very comical. Jt knows what it is and doesn't hide it. Based very loosely on the works of H.P .Lovecraft. Stuart Gordon cemented himself as a talented director with this little nugget.

I feel I missed a lot of great movie experiences by not watching this when I was a kid. It has everything that I would have loved, and lots of it. Now, a bit older, I can still appreciate it for what it is, but the novelty of it all is gone.I'm not sure if I have read the specific Lovecraft story this is based on, but as far as I can understand, it moves away from Lovecraft's storyline. Because I don't know how the original story goes, I can't say this for sure, but: It feels like they stuck to the story a while, but then got too caught up in having fun with ideas for scenes. It's like the filmmakers were let loose on a set with SFX-people, trying to think how they could do as much sick/fun things as possible. Which leads to some interesting situation, but it all feels very engineered. The plot built up in the first act(s) of the movie is still there in the background, but they miss the chance they had at making a compelling story. All the characters get caught up in the gore and he violence (and the slapstick), leading to a blood filled finale.What would I have preferred? Well, the SFX is fun, so I'm not really complaining about it. But I wish they had followed more up on the conflicts between the young idealistic scientist and the older, cheating one. It's there throughout the movie, but at one point you realize that it's just there to justify hostility. It also appears that some parts of the plot were removed, because the ending kind of does not make sense. How is one character able to control some of the re-animated? (according to wikipedia, it's explained in some cut scenes) Anyway, if you're a younger kid, you're gonna love this.

I first saw this in 1985 on opening day because I am an H. P. Lovecraft and Gothic horror fan. Read "The Rats in the Walls," and if you like that, read on!The title music and graphics of "The Re-Animator" scream "I am not just a horror movie, but also a Hitchcock-like thriller." Well, not quite. But it is a funky mix of thrill, slapstick, Freudian psychodrama, gore - and of course dark comedy, as in any good horror film, and in many Hitchcock films.Re-animator is really top-notch in the genre of over-the-top gore films. Even as a zombie film (we are re-animating the dead here) it is vastly superior to most zombie films (such as the sorry "World War Z," for example). The film is almost perfect horror in so many ways, and has been beaten in the over- the-top horror category only by Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive," which came out 7 years later. Jackson must have seen this and thought: 'I can top that both on the Freudian psychodrama and the gore.' And so he did, but you've got to have a 'Vorbild.' (Sorry, Sigmund)So what's on offer? We have a great 4-note string theme from the opening that recurs throughout to announce that something yucky is about to happen. Shirley Walker's theme for "Final Destination" would be a more recent example of getting it just right.We have all-out gore as we plod to the inescapable conclusion at the end, but always with as much suspense as gore. Who can ever forget the "black zombie cat" set piece? Or a decapitated corpse giving tongue? (By the way, if the latter makes you nervous, do not watch this movie. It is R rated for the gore, and the director figured, what the hell, why not some sex and nudity while we're at it?)We have perfectly cast actors for each role, such as David Gale in a Christopher Lee-like role as a creepy brain surgeon with a lot of funding, or Jeffery Combs (who played blue Andorians on Star Trek) as a creepy medical student who think's he's surpassed his teachers in skill.Most importantly, we have loving detail in every scene, far beyond the usual horror film. Our hero (played by Bruce Abbott) has a sweat stain on his surgical gown when he wheels a dead patient to the morgue, after exercising hard to pump her chest to re-animate her the convention way. At a dinner, the Dean of Miskatonic Medical School fêtes David Gale for bringing in the biggest NSF grant the school has ever gotten. What-in-hell movie director or writer knows what an NSF grant is? When a skull gets sawed open during an anatomy lesson, tiny drops of blood dribble off the saw onto the surgical cart in a close-up. There are two peep holes in a doctor's bag carried by a headless zombie so its head hidden in the bag can direct it. And so much more. What this attention to detail does, is to maintain a sense of realism, and that in turn maintains a sense of suspense, despite the comically absurd plot. The plot is where this film is unable to transcend B territory, and must remain a B movie. The biggest fallacy of horror films is that people who should know better stay at the mercy of an improbable situation. Like a family staying in the haunted house after scary things happen, when any normal person would move out. Rarely, this fallacy is transcended, such as in "Alien," where the characters really have no choice but to stay in the spaceship, weeks from any planetfall. "Re-animator" fails to transcend in that regard: it is completely preposterous that a highly regarded medical student with the Dean's daughter as girlfriend takes a really creepy roommate when she says "no." Or that said student will go along with the creep, when he finds his beloved cat dead in the refrigerator, to have the poor animal reanimated as a zombie flying around the basement and screeching like no cat ever has or will. Or that zombies will stumble around one minute then be agile enough to do laser-scalpel brain surgery the next. The characters far too easily accept the situations into which they are thrust, when they could easily escape. This is a necessary device to move B movie plots along quickly to the yucky action. And that's where "Re-animator" falls far short of Hitchcock's "Psycho" for example, where Bates' staying at the motel is amply explained by an Oedipal relationship with his dead mother, whereas other visitors suffer a rapid demise before they even know what's going on.But there is plenty of yucky action, suspense and dark humor in "Re-animator." I realized just how good this film is recently: I had seen it once in 1985 on opening day, and thought it was a blast. Yesterday I decided to see it again. Second impressions are often less flattering, but the moment I heard and saw the music, Dr. Gruber, the cat, Dr. Hill's head on a receipt spindle, it all came back crystal clear because my mind had refused to forget. It is a weird feeling when you think you have forgotten something, and then suddenly remember every detail just before it comes up. Thank you, Stuart Gordon (the director), even though your story does not have that 19th century macabre atmosphere of Poe and his disciple Lovecraft, upon whose ideas the film is loosely based.

Re-Animator is one of those movies I always heard about but never got around to watching. Having finally seen it (and its sequels), the only thing I can say is that I wish I would have seen the series a lot earlier!Promising medical student Daniel Cain is assigned partners with Herbert West, a peculiar young man obsessed with the idea that death is a reversible process. West has developed a re-agent that he believes will lead to resuscitation of tissue after death, although when he is given the opportunity to try it out on a perfect specimen, things do not go as planned. What follows is a descent into gory chaos that also happens to be a whole lot of fun to watch.I certainly understand why this is considered a cult classic, because while it's not for everyone, fans of over the top gore (a la The Evil Dead and Dead-Alive) will find plenty to love here. Jeffrey Combs was flawless in his performance as West, who has become a horror movie icon in his own right... It is worth mentioning that I found nothing at all wrong with the sequels, which is rare in any film genre, but especially so in horror - but that's a review for another time.