Beyond Re-Animator

It has been 13 years since the last Re-Animator film, but Dr Herbert West is still as nutty as ever.

Jeffrey Coombs is back as the unemotional, deadpan scientist who is obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. Except for a few crow's feet, Coombs is right back into the character he created in 1985. The writer even made the time-lapse make sense, because the story takes place 13 years after the last chapter, during which time Dr. West has been in prison, and the little boy who witnessed the end of the last film has grown up to be a doctor himself, deliberately asking for the assignment as prison medic in West's jail.

In the intervening years, the Mad Doctor has been devising a scheme to add some new features to his formula for reviving the dead, the most important innovation being that the dead should now come back as reasonable people, and not as frenetic flesh-chewing zombies, because West has found a way to re-capture the human soul after it leaves the body.

Well, of course, that would be no fun, so Dr West has to screw it up somehow, which he does by constantly robbing from Peter to pay Paul in his budget-priced experiments, a process which eventually forces him to use a rat's soul on a human, and ...

... and I think you can probably figure out the rest.

It just keeps getting sillier and sillier.

NUDITY REPORT

Raquel Gribler shows her breasts when a maniac rips off her nurse uniform.

Elsa Pataky shows her breasts and offers a long distance look at her buns, in a sex scene.

DVD info from Amazon

widescreen anamorphic, 1.85
director commentary (not good, just a recitation of what we can see for ourselves
"Making of" featurette with several cast interviews
music video.

This series has always been over-the-top camp, and this one is out there in the same territory. The prison and its warden are in the mode of Dickens-meets-Dr Strangelove, the resuscitated zombies chew more scenery than flesh, limbs are ripped off casually, blood gushes everywhere and the final prison break has the same chaotic energy as the one in Natural Born Killers, except that also it tosses in a few zombies with missing limbs.

I can't say that splatter comedy is really my thing, but I have to admit I laughed quite a few times in this film, especially at the mock gravitas Coombs imparted to all of his lines. If you want to see a horror movie, take a pass, because this one makes no real attempt to go for any real scares or a dark horror tone. It's strictly for gross laughs, and it does deliver some imaginative nonsense.

The Critics Vote ...

No major reviews online

The People Vote ...

IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it 6.5/10. That will drop. It probably should be about 5.5.

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by genre fans, while C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-.

Based on this description, this is a C. Not a genre masterpiece, like the first one, but a pretty good sequel. The ending promises another one as well.