Loosely based on the story "Herbert West, Re-Animator" by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft,
Re-Animator tells the tale of a brilliant (but somewhat mad) young scientist, who's invented this glowing green serum, that can bring the dead back to life.
Having just moved his studies to the Miskatonic college hospital in Massachusetts, he proceeds to constantly antagonise the resident lecturer Dr Hill (David Gale), by constantly arguing with him. But following an incident in the morgue, where Dr West and his college chum Dan Cain (Bruce Abbot) had been conducting some extremely unethical experiments on the corpses with his re-animation agent , Dr Hill finds out about West's research and attempts to steal it for himself.
Not-with-standing, West decapitates him with a shovel and proceeds to use his headless body for some re-animation experiments. Of course, the now undead Dr Hill isn't too happy about all this and so, in an extremely funny sequence, his re-animated body knocks out Dr West, steals his re-animation fluid and goes on the rampage. Kidnapping Dan's girlfriend Megan (Barbara Crampton) in the process, who he ties up in the morgue and procedes to do some rather unsavoury things to!
But Dan and Herbert come to the rescue, leading to an extremely gory final fight in the hospital morgue, as they attempt to free Megan and defeat the re-animated Dr Hill, whilst fending off the hordes of corpses he's reactivated. As body parts go flying everywhere and blood spills by the bucketful during the ensuing battle (lovely stuff).
A very VERY cool film, exceptionally gory and very darkly humoured, which still holds up well today. Indeed, it was so gory, that it was heavily censored in the UK up until 2007. So if you love gore and mayhem you'll love this!
