1 - 10/20 Sammy

March 12, 2002

Re-Animator is not a great horror movie. It is, however, a spectacular excercise in deviant dreck. True terror isn't what it delivers, but shock-value, camp-apeal and delicious eye candy it certainly does. The movie stars, scream-queen and b-movie icon, Barbra Crompton whom plays the daughter of a domineering, closed-minded doctor. When Barbra's father opposes the proposed re-animation of corpses via an experimental drug, he himself becomes one of the guinea pigs in this blasphemous experiment after he's murdered. Resurrected and reduced to an animalistic zombie, the once strong-headed doctor is quarantined and kept in confinement. Watching him in this tragic state, Barbra is mortified by her father's transformation. Ultimately, the re-animated doctor under the influence of the film's perverted mad-scientist escapes and pays his lovely daughter a visit at her home. Not expecting a late night visit from her zombified dad, Barbara is grabbed by the burly old man, knocked unconscious and carried away, wearing only a skimpy night gown. All of this builds to the undeniable highlight of the movie, which combines gore, nudity and dark humor in what is perhaps the kinkiest of damsel in distress scenarios to grace the silver screen. Kidnapped by her own father, now under the control of the lecherous mad scientist, Barabra is carried into a lab and stripped of her night-gown. Leaving her stark naked, Barbara's dad straps her to an examination table and stands by while the decapitated scientist, himself re-animated, has his way with the doctor's nubile daughter in a most bizarre way... In short, what this film lacks in genuine horror, it compensates for with cheap amoral entertainment. Scary it isn't, but for geek-show enthusiasts, watchable it certainly is!

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