Bonus! The Special Features Feature Featuring Re-Animator
Today’s Feature: Re-Animator – The Integral Cut (2017) – Re-Animator (1985)
Though I was always interested in horror movies growing up, it wasn’t until I finally obtained a DVD player (in the form of a Playstation 2) that it grew beyond stumbling upon them on television. Furthermore, it wasn’t until I saw Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator on Elite Entertainment’s Millenium Edition DVD that my continuing obsession with home releases truly began. Re-Animator is a big reason that this site exists today. The film is also one of the few that I remember almost all of the circumstances around my first viewing. I was at my friends house for a friendly and nigh endless game of Risk. After we all got sick of playing the game, we retreated to his family’s den, where he pulled out the neon green box. He explained that he had first heard of the film on a Death Metal message board, where a group of Australian Metal Heads were obsessing over it. He also recounted how the Australians dropped C-Bombs with no restraint, a shock to American teens in the days before video streaming. Intrigued, he headed to Suncoast to find the DVD, and was able to find it there. Ahhh, when retail had inventory, what a time. Having grown up watching the TV edits of AMC’s Fright Fest and the like, Re-Animator seemed like the craziest movie ever made. Boobs, blood and guts. Now, I realize that there are far gorier films out there, but that doesn’t take away from the real strengths of the cult classic.
Okay, that almost oral sex scene is still pretty nuts.
Re-Animator stands as one of the greatest horror-comedies of all time, perhaps second only to Return of the Living Dead. Nearly every scene has a fully functioning gag, and sports one of the best casts in B-Horror history. Jeffrey Combs through his performance as Herbert West and is a wonderful counter-point to both Bruce Abbot and David Gale. Even A-List casts struggle to find the timing that this one does. Sure, there is the gore and sex of other films, but Re-Animator knows its strengths and exploits them at every opportunity. The Integral Cut isn’t the most revolutionary alternate cut, but is certainly a cool one. Combining the footage from both the unrated and R-Rated versions, it doesn’t really change the narrative, but does provide the most fleshed out version to date. Because of it’s successful integration of the two most common cuts, it kind of becomes the definitive one by default. Oh, and don’t worry, even this cut only runs about an hour and forty five minutes. Modern Horror could learn a thing or two.
Domestically, Re-Animator: The Integral Cut is only available in Arrow Video’s Re-Animator Limited Edition Blu-Ray set, which is out of print. If you are a devotee of the film, you should try to check it out anyway. It even has a few Special Features of its own.