Seeing that my personal film history is
a goddamned nightmare, and that I only watched Back to the Future for
the first time this year, what do can one expect of me when it
comes to Re-Animator? I’d never watched a single horror film until
this year and the amount of science fiction films I’ve seen can fit
comfortably on two hands. I had never heard of Jeffrey Combs until
this morning, and even after performing a Google image search, I sit
and stare at a screen full of a face I’ve never seen before. In my
life. So this… this is a take on a well-loved film that I might
have seen if I’d grown up in any other life. Or at least I feel that
way. From the imbecile broad: my
take on Re-animator.

Re-Animator (1985) – Buy it from CHUD

Because
I can read the back of the box, I can see that the film was released
in 1985. I started off thinking I’d approach this film as just
another slice of the 1980’s pop culture pie, but it impressed me more
with some of its conventions, like the use of music and the “so
obvious it’s almost insulting” makeup effects. The opening theme
music felt like a
theme. And once I got further into the film, I realized how heavily
the plot relied on the orchestration–the sour sliding notes, the
dum-dum-dum of the
piano notes to punctuate the suspense, and moments like the building
crescendo of bows and strings until someone casually flips on a light
switch. It plays a major role again in the last scene and rolling
credits as a bookend of sorts to help us ascend back out of the
world. That’s when I “got it” in fact — it couldn’t have
ever meant to be more than a fantasy world. It wasn’t trying to play
the simulacrum game.

I’ve
been told that Combs is a genre staple, and is known for playing
“weird” very well. Of course, I had to see for myself. It
makes sense when he so adamantly exclaims that “We can defeat
death!” to his roommate (also a medical student), and later
picks up the fake cat and drops him straight down on the table with a
most likely never-meant-to-be-believable thud,
“Do you agree that he’s dead now?” I fully understand that
he is a smart mind, but a small mind with one mission. He is not
like this because he is a bad person… it is an affectation, and my
take on him shifts from nearly believing that he is unlikable
character to wondering where his quirks will lead him next in the
story.

I was
also told the film was, even with the blood and guts horror, supposed
to be funny. Well, humor it delivers. The obviously fake cat attached
to Combs’ back that we were to believe was attacking him got my very
first laughs. I couldn’t help it. My enjoyment naturally rose from
that same scene when the cat is thrown into the wall, and continues
through the first nude re-animated corpse in obvious body makeup
tossing the professor around the morgue after the first human
experiment.

One
thing I was not ever expecting was to see the main actress naked
which is nothing more or less than added value. The big bang there,
though, was the disembodied head sucking on her nipple. Never saw
that coming. High fives extended to you, Stuart Gordon. And I don’t
call it out because of the tits. Lots of movies have tits. But it’s
the crossroads of humor, self-aware gore, and muted sexuality, that
come to a hectic climax in the nudity and crap effects-filled scene
when all the bodies have come to life in the morgue that made me feel
like, oh, this is what Re-Animator is.
This is its essence.

Although
the makeup is probably an example of what not to ever do, and the
dismembered and burned body gore isn’t believable (and doubtful meant
to be a perfect replica of guts of all sorts) it makes for an
excellent story–one where belief is suspended just enough
to invest in what is happening, and takes you just enough
outside it to acknowledge the absurdity with either a smirk or a full
out laugh.

Most
of the film is enjoyable as heck, and I consider the entire piece to
be good old fun storytelling. The ending had me nodding inside,
inducing a hurrah! feeling as the character Dan Cain prepares to
squirt the life-giving formula into his dead girlfriend’s brain. It
fades to blackout, revealing only the glowing liquid and we are left
to complete the story for ourselves. I’m not sure I’d re-watch the
film, but I am glad I know that it exists now, and from now on, the
title will no doubt bring to mind the image of David Gale’s head in a
blood-filled tray.

The image of Rotwang’s machine-man – hooked to countless wires, rings of electricity pulsating all around it – is one that I remember seeing long before I ever knew to what it belonged.  It’s as iconic as any image in popular culture and in just that one frame, that one little disembodied moment, completely free of context, it still manages to be evocative enough to sear itself into your memory.

But there comes a point when you realize that evocative little disembodied moments without any context are all well and fine but they‘re not worth a whole lot on their own.  So…

Metropolis (1927) – Buy it from CHUD

There are a lot of different ways to look at Fritz Lang’s masterpiece of a film.  Made in 1927, it feels very much “of its time” and like a movie that’s in between two eras.  Which isn’t to say that cinema can be broken down into “pre and post Metropolis,” but when you watch it you get the distinct impression that you’re watching a language slowly being developed.  Maybe not necessarily invented, but certainly matured.  Coming in at the tail-end of German expressionist cinema, Fritz Lang was able to blend the artistic merits and sensibilities of the movement with a relatively astronomical budget (the largest of its time) and make a movie that not only has meaning and resonance thematically, but that also looked phenomenal.

I mentioned earlier that this is a lot like watching a language being developed and there’s a lot here that showcases that.  When the Expressionist movement migrated to America after the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, it had its own tangential influences (see Hitchcock’s work on The Blackguard), the ripples from Metropolis veered off into another direction.  The amazing thing about it is that you really don’t need a ton of context to know, at least to some degree, just how seminal this movie was.  But, it’s not necessarily in terms of cinema itself.  I don’t need to tell you that cinema was in its infancy and go into digressions about frame rates and lighting and silent films in general.  The image of the machine-man I mentioned earlier?  That image virtually single-handedly visualized, created and jumpstarted what we now know as the “mad scientist” aesthetic.  Were it not for Dr. Rotwang, there’s every possibility that we wouldn’t have had a Dr. Frankenstein.  At least, not as we commonly know him.  And that’s just one example – the things Lang created for can be found in practically everything we see today.  All you have to do is watch it once and you can immediately draw parallels from it straight through cinema‘s history and into today.

But again, it’s not just the whiz-bang effects – it’s the way that Lang used his big-budget bells and whistles to serve the expressionist sensibilities that made it so special.  It’s the combination of those two elements to serve an idea and making that idea the primary focus.  It’s taking an abstract view of something that doesn’t exist and making it real, building a world, giving it a palpable mood and making it and its inhabitants components in a much deeper commentary.  It’s science fiction.  It’s what Sci-fi as a genre still does (to varying degrees of quality) to this day.  And everything that we see, everything that’s being made, can be traced back to Metropolis.  When you get right down to it, Metropolis (or, more specifically Fritz Lang) is the godfather of the modern sci-fi movie.  Sure, others have expounded on what was started here and advanced the genre and the language (while others have failed miserably in their attempts), but every sci-fi movie you know and love started here.  Metropolis is The Beatles, so to speak.

And on top of all of that?  Fritz Lang wasn’t just the Godfather of the modern sci-fi movie, he’s also one of the most important socio-political directors of all time.  The overall themes in Metropolis are timeless and eerily relevant in today’s social climate.  I got the same feeling watching this that I did with M.  There’s a combination of slack-jawed incredulity that comes with seeing something so old be so on the nose in today’s culture and a little bit of sadness that after all this time we’re still fighting these same battles. The man has a knack for exploring the fragility and inherent fallibility of society itself and seems to have a preoccupation for not only watching it crumble, but be reborn.  There’s certainly a lot of bleak in Lang’s films, but there’s always a trace of hope.  He’s a lot like Kurosawa in that way (at least in the ways that I’ve always interpreted Kurosawa).

I’ve gotten a little bit of flack for watching the current version on Netflix Instant and not waiting for the special, newly restored Blu-ray that has the extra footage and the new transfer.  And while I do want to get my hands on that (very badly), in the end those are trivial things that only serve the, for lack of a better word, superficial elements of the film.  Not to downplay the importance of narrative and picture quality, but the power…the heart, if you will…of Metropolis can be seen in any format and on any platform.  I don’t need a 1080p Blu-ray transfer to be able to see the importance of this film.  I just needed to watch it.

You do too, if you haven’t already.