Double Feature #10: 'Return of the Living Dead'/'Re-Animator'

 

An evening of gooey, gorey, laugh-out-loud mayhem. Released almost exactly two months apart, Return of the Living Dead and Re-Animator both manage to achieve a nearly impossible balance of gut-busting humor and gut-churning horror. They each also have a few things to say about entrenched bureaucracies, institutional decision-making, and scientific arrogance. But mostly they're just a whole lot of fun.

 

Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon - 1985) begins with the premise that the events portrayed in 1969's Night of the Living Dead actually happened, the dead rising as the result of a botched military experiment. Metal drums containing the bodies of the zombies were then mistakenly sent to Uneeda Medical Supply in Louisville, Kentucky, where they've been stashed in the basement ever since. While training new employee Freddy (Thom Matthews), Frank (James Karen) accidentally breaches one of the drums, releasing the corpse-resurrecting gas. The gas returns the dead inside the warehouse to life (a glass case of butterflies, split dogs) - most notably the human corpse in the freezer. Frank calls their boss Burt (Clu Gulager), and the three manage to subdue the corpse with the help of a pickaxe and saw. Meanwhile Freddy's teenaged friends have grown tired of waiting for him to get off work, and decide to break into the cemetery across the street, where they begin to party. Since the reanimated corpse remains alive even after being dismembered, Burt and his now sick employees take the body to the cemetery morgue, where with the help of mortician Ernie (Don Calfa) they burn the remains in the crematorium. What they don't realize is the smoke from the body rises into the atmosphere, seeding the clouds and causing the chemical to rain down upon the graveyard - prompting the dead to rise from their tombs and attack Freddy's friends, hungry for brains. And then things get really weird!

 

Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985) is a very loose adaptation of five H.P. Lovecraft stories serialized under the title Herbert West - Reanimator in the 1920's. After some... unpleasantness... while studying in Zurich, medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) transfers to Miskatonic University in New England. There he meets fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), renting a room in his house. Dan is having a secret affair with Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), the daughter of Miskatonic's dean, who finds Herbert to be a creepy, unwanted presence in Dan's home. While in class, Herbert repeatedly clashes with Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), an arrogant and corrupt professor - who happens to be a grant machine for the college. And who also happens to have an inappropriate attraction to young Megan. Dan discovers Herbert is working on a serum that will reanimate the dead - who, truthfully, don't seem all that happy with the idea. Soon Dan is assisting Herbert with his experiments, the dead are returning to life, decapitated corpses are taking orders from their own severed heads, and Megan finds herself on the receiving end of the weirdest case of teacher/student sexual harassment ever.

 

The plots of these films really don't matter all that much - executed differently they could be any run-of-the-mill low-budget horror flicks. What sets them apart is their tone, and the vision of their writer/directors. Dan O'Bannon was already a horror/sci-fi legend, having penned genre classics Dark Star and Alien. Return of the Living Dead is his only feature as director and he doesn't waste the chance, packing the film with clever dialog, great jokes, memorable gore and one plot detail so brilliant it would become a mainstay of zombie lore - the dead are hungry for brains. 

 

Re-Animator would also be Stuart Gordon's first film as director, having cut his teeth in the Chicago theatre scene, founding the famed Organic Theater Company with his wife in 1969. Originally conceived as a TV series, Gordon was soon convinced the tales of Herbert West would work better as a feature film - a format more friendly to horror. Like O'Bannon, Gordon was determined to take full advantage of his big opportunity and hold nothing back. Undeterred by his small budget, Gordon used many of the visual tricks he'd learned as a theatrical director to bring the film's gory special effects to the screen. Much like the wild self-referential humor in Return, this gives the film a winking bond with the audience that serves to make the over-the-top horror not only more palatable, but increasingly funny.

 

In amongst all the insanity, these films share a jaundiced view of institutions run wild, the abuses of power by those in charge of large bureaucracies, and scientists more interested in whether they can do something than whether they should. In Return, the initial zombie outbreak in '69 is blamed on a scientific experiment gone wrong, while all the trouble in Re-Animator comes as a result of Herbert West's blindly arrogant focus on achieving his goals while ignoring the destruction left in his wake. The institutions in charge of stopping these scientific blunders only exacerbate the problems - the military sends the drums of zombies to the wrong storage facility, while the administration at Miskatonic focus more on personal grudges and selfish desires than attempting to actually stop the gruesome experiments. That the military in Return considers nuking the area the only way to cover up their blunders is the final cynical comment on institutional thinking. That the nuclear fallout only serves to spread the contagion over a wider area is the final black joke.

 

Both films boast excellent casts, the actors gauging their performances to compliment the shifting tone of humor and horror the material requires. As the