Bride of Re-Animator (Yuzna 1990)

If there is one set of themes that tends to recur in horror films above all others, its sex and sexual orientation. In classic horror films, it often appeared as subtext; in more recent horror, it has often become rather blatant. Just this month, I reviewed Dracula’s Daughter (Hillyer 1936), in which the vampirism of the title character has more than a hint of homoerotic overtones, and I am sure before this month is over I will come upon a few more films in which sex and sexuality will be addressed, be it through metaphor, allegory, and/or direct discussion.

Of course, when it comes to the presence of sexual orientation issues in horror films, more often than not the films tend to be regressive and conservative in their presentations and explorations. Yes, there are plenty of films that are more progressive in discussing (an exploiting) sexuality, and the complex processes of viewer reception and identification provide a multitude of readings of even the most regressive of these films. I still believe however that it is more than fair to say that many horror films tend to try and reinforce the simplistic and wrongheaded notion of “homosexuality bad, heterosexuality good…and normal!” So thank God for the flawed-but-compelling Bride of Re-Animator (1990), Brian Yuzna’s straight to video sequel to Stuart Gordon’s 1985 classic Re-Animator. As the title indicates, Bride of Re-Animator riffs on the themes and concepts of the playful and complex Bride of Frankenstein (Whale 1935), a film which itself expanded and subverted the themes and concepts presented in its famed predecessor. In Bride of Re-Animator, Yuzna has crafted a film in which presents almost all forms of sexuality as confused, dangerous, and destructive, with the “salvation“ from these destructive relationships and impulsive coming from an unlikely source. Oh, and the film is a darkly funny and fun blast as well.

Bride of Re-Animator picks up months after the events of the original film, with Dr. Herbert West (Jeffery Combs) and Dr. Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) making the most out of the dead bodies piling up in a Peruvian civil war. Forced back the city of Arkham in the United States as the war becomes too dangerous for them, they resume acting as Doctors at the Miskatonic University. West’s obsession with reanimating dead tissue takes on a new dimension when he decides that he can make a new life out of separate body parts, and to ensure Cain’s assistance in this new endeavour, West proposes a particular project for them to work on: creating a woman out of the heart of Dean’s lost love Meg. Things become tricky for West and Cain however as a police Lieutenant (Claude Earl Jones) intrudes in on their lives, a friend from Peru, Francesca (Fabiana Udenio, of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery [1997] fame) shows up to romance Cain, and Dr. Graves (Mel Stewart) discovers a jar of the regenerate fluid, as well as the head of Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale).

The key to the film’s exploration of sexuality is the character of Dan Cain, whose romantic desires are, to say the least, confused. Dan in this film is defined by three key relationships, first and foremost among them his lost love Meg, who died in the previous film. For Dan, his love of Meg is an obsession with death itself, and when the notion of creating a woman out of the parts of others arises, his obsession takes on a further dimension of necrophilia. Heterosexual relationships thus become tied with death, and it is no coincidence that it is Dan’s desires that lead to most of the death and destruction in the film. This destructive side of heterosexuality is further supported in the “relationship” between Lt. Chapham and his re-animated wife, who spend most of the film attempting to kill one another (Chapham had already killed his wife in events preceding the film). This rebuilding of Meg thus becomes the crux of the relationship between Cain and West, and the attempt to create new life in the absence of women gives this relationship shades of a homosexuality (I say shades, because West has a distinctly asexual streak to him as well, though I shall get into that further on). When Dan early on tries to break off his work with West and leave their home, the scene is shot and performed in a manner evocative of quarrelling lovers, raging at each other one moment and speaking tenderly another about creating a new life. Granted, its new life being built out of dead body parts, but the point stands. Even their living arraignment, a home for the two of them out in the cemetery away from the rest of civilization, carries a hint of romantic domesticity about it.

Chief among these overtones of a coded homosexual relationship between the duo is West’s reactions to Dan’s third key relationship, that with Francesca, the most clearly romantic and explicitly sexual. From the start of the film till its conclusion, West is alternatively dismissive of Francesca and threatened by the risk she posses towards his relationship with Dan, a feeling that is mutual on Francesca’s part. The rivalry between the two is some of the film’s strongest material, allowing West to get in more than a few excellent deadpan one-liners (“Think with the big head Dan, not the little one.”), as well as underscoring the homoerotic subtext of West and Cain‘s relationship. While the narrative structure of the film is typical of the genre and somewhat predictable, the film plays with the audience’s expectations as to what the cause of the horror, and our salvation from said horror, lies. In turn, the film’s examination of sexuality becomes increasingly surprising and sophisticated. While the film is structured around Dan’s need to resolve his conflicting desires, this confusion becomes the instigator of the film’s horror. In turn, Dr. West becomes the source of security and stability in the face of this horror. Yes, West is obsessive, his work dangerous, and he engages in more than a little manipulation to achieve his ends, but that does not change the fact that he is the most rational and proactive character in the film. Consider: Dan is an emotional mess in the film, and it is his confusion and selfish obsession with reversing Meg’s death which places Francesca in danger. Similarly, when a cancer patient similar physically to Meg dies, Dan is too busy explaining how he see’s Meg in this woman to notice she is dieing, and makes the situation worse when he botches cutting into her chest in order to try and save her life. Chapham furthers this point as we at first meant to feel some sympathy for him given his wife’s state as a re-animated corpse, until West points out that Chapham himself killed his wife through physical abuse (leading to perhaps my favourite line of the entire film: “Dan, he’s a wife beater! Use the gun!”). As such, Dan’s claims that West is more interested in seeking out fresh meat for his experiments rather than helping patients ring hollow, particularly when we are shown evidence that directly contradicts Dan’s beliefs. When a soldier dies at the film’s beginning, West actually shows frustration at the man’s death when Dan is clearly not looking, before he decides to test his regeneration fluid on the man. Not too long after, West risks his own wellbeing to save Dan’s life, and later on still, West continues to work on saving a patient’s life after Dan’s crippled emotional state leads to her death. The worst thing that can be said of West is that he is a cold pragmatist after the fact. Given this, West and his clinical views about life and death are less horrific than the alternatives presented in the film, and from here, the film can be read as a subversive attack upon supposedly normative heterosexual relationships by revealing, in a coded manner, the destructive side of heterosexuality. However, I’m not certain that this is entirely the case, as the idea of West as being a coded homosexual does not entirely hold up. To begin with, while Dan supposedly is working with West to further the work, we are most often presented with West working alone while Dan is off doing just about everything and anything else. When the Bride of the title comes to life, and looks at Dan as its creator, West repeatedly rejects the notion of anyone else save himself as the creator, a point that is hard to argue given what we witness onscreen. If West can be read as anything, it is as asexual, with asexuality as being upheld as an ideal and infinitely less destructive form of reproduction, free of the emotional trappings of any other form of sexuality. Of course, you have probably just read everything and are asking one question, and one question alone: is the film any good? To that, I give a resounding yes, though the film does suffer from some flaws. The film is an energetic piece that occasionally oversteps its available resources as a low budget sequel, but shows great confidence in its quest to entertain. Brian Yuzna provides a solid hand as director this time out, perfectly balancing the tone of the film as a whole and giving his actors room to take center stage. Stylistically, Yuzna too often attempts to imitate his predecessor Gordon rather than attempting to imprint his own stamp on the proceedings, though this attempt at consistency with the first film is appreciated.

Given that it is a Re-Animator film, questions inevitably turn to the effects, and I am pleased to say that they work for the most part, offering some inventive stop motion work and all the gore expected of the film. Occasionally, the low budget roots do show through, from the awful flying head effect for Dr. Hill at the film’s conclusion, to the inability to even show an onscreen shooting, with a sound effect substituting for the absent practical effect. Given the low budget of the film and how much is achieved onscreen for such little money though, it is hard to fault the filmmakers for such minor flaws. The film’s greatest strength though, as it was in the first film, is Jeffery Combs as Herbert West, as he walks the fine line between deadpan seriousness and melodrama. Given the meatiest material to work with, Combs gives this role nothing less than his all, and continues to make West not only one of the most beloved horror cinema icons, but the best mad scientist character of the past thirty years. Even as other components of the film occasional failing to work as they should, Combs is always on hand to deliver another magnificently over-the-top speech or contemptuous smack down on those around him. The rest of casts’ work ranges in quality. Bruce Abbott is fine as Dan Cain, though his shifts between Dan’s different mental states are occasionally clunky and reveal his limitations as an actor, while the returning David Gale is wasted in the film, as Carl Hill really has little to do overall until the final third of the film. Fabiana Udenio is honestly given nothing to do except be shocked at what happens around her and provide gratuitous nudity, and Mel Stewart does the best he can as a plot device. Still, Bride of Re-Animator is a more than worthy sequel to the classic original, offering more than enough fun, horror and intellectual meat for film lovers despite its flaws. Will the third film, Beyond Re-Animator (Yuzna 2003) carry on this level of quality? We shall soon see.

The Graveyard Shift (Singleton 1990)

Before I embarked on this review of the film The Graveyard Shift (Singleton 1990), I decided to go back and reread the Stephen King short story upon which the film is based. The story of the same name is featured in King’s compilation of short stories titled Night Shift, and was originally published by itself in 1970, long before King hit the big time and became not just a famous writer, but a brand of horror.

The short story is not one of King’s better works, though considered in the context of the early years of his career, it does offer insight into how he has developed as a writer. The story is focused on the tension between a drifter named Hall and the foreman at a textile mill where Hall is currently employed. Over the course of a few days working the graveyard shift as part of a clean up crew, the tensions build into a murderous rage which explodes in a mysterious subbasement where rats have not only been breeding, but have mutated into hideous, man-eating monsters.

The story is slight in plot, character, and thematic complexity, but King’s distinctive voice is in full force in the story, as he blends Edgar Allen Poe style horror with the pulpier fare of the classic EC comics. As such, “The Graveyard Shift” might have worked as a short film, and would have been right at home as part of a Creepshow sequel. As the basis for a feature film however, it is hard to see what could be done to stretch the material beyond the twenty minute mark. That Ralph S. Singleton’s film works at all is a miracle, but is doesn’t change the fact that the finished film is a failure overall, never finding an strong enough approach to adapt the material for feature length.

As in the short story the film is based on, the film focuses on a drifter named Hall (David Andrews, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003]), who arrives in a town where the only work to be found is at the local textile mill owned by Warwick (Stephen Macht, whose credits mostly seem to be from television), a greedy and corrupt man who has no problems with extorting labour and other favours out of his employees. While Hall strikes up a romance with his co-worker Jane (Kelly Wolf, Less Than Zero [1987]) and makes enemies with other locals, Warwick is faced with the threat of his mill being shut down due to various building and health code violations. Bribing his way into getting extra time to clean the place up, Warwick drafts Hall and Jane into the graveyard shift clean up crew. As tensions heighten amongst the crew, people start to disappear and a mysterious subbasement is discovered. Does the subbasement have anything to do with the mill’s massive rat population? Only a trip down holds the answers.

While the film takes the general premise of the short story, it abandons the short story’s focus upon the mental state of Hill and his murderous rage against Warwick. The relationship between the two this time out is more clean cut: Hill is decent average-Joe here, while Warwick has been transformed from an inept boss who likes to lord his limited power over people into a cartoon-ish villain, openly and knowingly playing God with people’s lives through running the town's only source of employment. In place of this missing psychological thrust, the film instead chooses to reflect on the recession era America it was produced in (which does allow the film to feel oddly timely with the current recession), with the presence of the rats scourging for scraps mirroring the desperation of the town folk in need of work, and their willingness to do whatever it takes to even just get a scrap.

It is this sense of working class desperation and impoverishment that the film captures perfectly, at least in the production design and photography. The town in this film is a decaying rural hell, mixing dilapidated industrial structures with just enough gothic elements without going overboard. The film is successful enough in creating its impoverished world that by the time the monster bats and rats come out to play, their existence seems almost natural.

Unfortunately, the production design and photography is about all that works in the film. With our characters reduced to stock types of hero/villain/hero’s girlfriend/etc., it is natural to assume the filmmakers would be to amp up the man vs. monster rat action. The film though is structured like a slow burn horror film, focused on character and punctuated with moments of jump scares. The problem is that there is nothing to burn here: we know the direction the film is heading from the moment it begins, and in the absence of well rounded characters, the film feels padded as it delays the inevitable (or, more precisely, the predictable), with repetitive scenes and odd tangents that go nowhere.

Take the character of Tucker Cleveland, the exterminator who we see working on the rat problem in the mill. As played by sci-fi and horror genre veteran actor Brad Dourif (Dune [1984]; Heaven’s Gate [1980]), the character is bizarre creation with no basis in King’s story, rambling on about Vietnam and the pleasures of his job. The character is one of the most entertaining elements in the film, but at the same time, one that is indicative of the film’s problems: he does not really have much of a place in the film. He adds nothing to the narrative, and if his scenes were deleted, they would have no impact upon the finished film. I love a good tangent, and as it stands, I am happy that these scenes are in the film,as Dourif is always a joy to watch, but the character is a clear indicator for the amount of padding included in the finished film.

The film’s best weapon in combating boredom however is Stephen Macht, who in his villainous role decides to chew as much scenery as possible. As noted, the character isn’t even remotely close to being anything more than a caricature of an evil boss, but Macht clearly enjoys every sleazy moment he is given to play, especially when his character (SPOILERS) is allowed to go completely crazy at the film’s conclusion. (END SPOILERS) Part of this enjoyment comes simply from the fact that Hall by contrast is such a blank slate of a lead character, which is in no way the fault of actor David Andrews, who gives a fine performance. The material Andrews is given is simply limited, and it is hard to imagine any actor being able to make anything out of the character. Fairing even worse is Kelly Wolf, who has absolutely nothing to do throughout the whole film.

Most disappointing however is the film’s climax in the subbasement, as the characters start to behave irrationally, and the final confrontation with our monstrous bat/rat thing is given the short end of the stick after an entire film’s builds up. The direction is haphazard and the sequence is poorly edited, undermining any possible tension and ending the film on a somewhat sour note. I understand trying to keep a monster in the shadows, but when your film is about a giant mutant bat/rat, then the expectation is that the audience will see it head on at least once. As it stands, the limited presence of the monster seems to be motivated by a lack of adequate special effects rather than any artistic reason.

While Graveyard Shift is a disappointment and should not be at the top of anyone’s Halloween viewing list, the film does hold a small amount of charm and some treats for horror film fans, including an early performance from Andrew Divoff of Wishmaster (1997) fame. Furthermore, it can at least be said that it is not the worst film ever produced based on a Stephen King work, and for those who make it to the end of the film, the closing credit’s music is cool and catchy. If you are holding a marathon of films based on the works of Stephen King, you could do worse than slapping Graveyard Shift in the middle of the pack. Just don't kick off or end the marathon with the film.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (Harrison 1990)

Ok, at this point, I am going to stop announcing films before I review them. The last film, and this latest one, are not works which I felt there was much to say about. Thankfully, I will be back later this week with a film I have plenty of things to say.

Now, onto the review:




One of the fascinating aspects about shared culture is how elements of it that seem to date and supposedly lose prominence ultimately work their ways into the culture in new forms. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, a spin off from the cult television anthology series of the same name, is very much about cultural history and how it weaves its way into the supposedly new elements of our culture, utilizing a metafiction framing story for the three tales contained in the film, each story either adapting well known literature, making use of intertextual reference, or drawing upon cultural folklore. In each case, the past works of culture burst into the (then) present, both haunting and, in some ways, saving us through our retelling of these tales.

The film is comprised of three sections: “Lot 249,” based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, in which a wronged university student (Steve Buscemi) seeks revenge on those who wronged him with a mummy; “Cat From Hell,” based on a short story by Stephen King, follows an assassin (David Johansen) who is hired by an old man to kill the cat in his home; and an original tale (though the best online research available to me suggests that it might be an update or an old folk tale from Japan) titled “Lover’s Vow” in which an artist is witness to a horrific event, and makes an important promise. These tales are framed by the story of a young boy (Mathew Lawrence) who is reading the stories to a woman named Betty (Deborah Harry) who has locked him in a cage, with the intention of eating him (It occurs to me now that I have seen two films in the past month dealing with the subject of cannibalising the young, with explicit references to the story of Hansel and Gretle. Just what is going on here?).

Central to each tale is the act of reading and telling stories, with the mastery of these narratives being either a key to salvation, or total damnation. This is explored most interestingly in the “Lover’s Vow” in which artist Preston (James Remar) is confronted with a major problem for an artist, when he promises a demon who murders his friend that he will tell nobody about the event at all, in any medium, in exchange for his own life. While the central concept, the temptation to break one’s promise as opposed to keeping it, is hardly new, the filmmakers provide a fresh take on the old theme by utilizing the basic need of expression as the crux of the dilemma. The tale that follows is one that is cruel, and featuring an ending that is strangely touching. Compared to Tales from the Darkside’s predecessors, Creepshow and Creepshow 2, the film manages to save the best tale for last, and it serves the film well.

This is not to say that the first two stories are bad. They simply lack the tense drama of the final segment, prompting ironic detachment as opposed to emotional investment on the part of the viewer. Nothing in these tales is particularly scary as a result of this approach, which is fine of course given that the segements are indeed entertaining. However, given the vast superiority of the final segment, I cannot help but feel it would have served the film better to take a more serious approach to the material in some ways.

On a level of sheer filmmaking, the film is well crafted, if not overly distinctive. John Harrison is a capable director, and manages to pull in some good performances across the board, including an early performance from Julianne Moore, as well as fun work from rockers Deborah Harry and David Johansen (who is about as far removed from Buster Poindexter as he can get in this role). The standout of the cast however is James Remar, who redeems himself for his work in The Quest (to be fair, Jean Claude Van Damme is to blame for that crap) and shows that he has greater range than he usually is allowed to show in his work.

Overall, Tales from the Darkside is not going to be anyone’s favourite film, but is a fun October movie to celebrate the coming of Halloween. If you can find it, check it out.