Product Details

• Actors: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson
• Directors: Stuart Gordon
• Writers: Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, H.P. Lovecraft, William Norris
• Producers: Bob Greenberg, Brian Yuzna, Bruce William Curtis
• Format: NTSC
• Language: English, German
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Lions Gate
• VHS Release Date: September 18, 1991
• Run Time: 86 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (180 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302035260
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #427,085 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Stuart Gordon's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West: Re-Animator puts a Night of the Living Dead spin on the classic Frankenstein story. Jeffrey Combs furrows his brow and bugs his eyes as the preternaturally intense Herbert West, a maverick medical student whose gory, gooey experiments cause bloody corpses and body parts to jerk to life. Bruce Abbot is the studious roommate drawn into his extracurricular experiments, which soon involve the dean's daughter (the frequently naked Barbara Crampton) and the college's cadaverous, calculating star professor (David Gale), who literally loses his head over a battle for West's discovery. In this world, that's only a minor setback. Charged with sick gallows humor and a ghoulish gallery of undead beasties, Re-Animator, like Evil Dead II, is one of the most inspired and inventive--and funniest--horror films of the 1980s. Combs, Abbot, and Gale reunite for the almost-as-entertaining sequel Bride of Re-Animator. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You wanna see a REAL horror movie?, October 31, 2000

By 

Kitten With a Whip "kittenwithawhip" (The Hellmouth) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reanimator [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The best horror movie ever made, period. For me anyway, this has to be my personal favorite. Forget all that Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer junk. You wanna see a REAL horror movie? Rent this one. Skip it if you're squeamish, though--trust me on this.

The plot is taken (loosely) from an HP Lovecraft tale, "Herbert West, Re-animator". The taglines kinda say it all. Dan Cain is a young medical student dating the Dean's daughter, who takes in a roomer and meets up with West, brilliantly played by Jeffrey Combs. West has discovered a "reagent" that will bring the dead back to life, except the serum still needs lots of work. When the dead people wake up, they do not seem happy at all to be brought back, and in fact have the tempermant of a grizzly bear on PCP. Added to the mix is the creepy Dr. Hill (who looks like an uglier, way creepier version of James Woods), who clashes with West and also has an icky obsession with Dean Halsey's daughter. (the attraction results in the movie's most outrageous scene that I'm sure you've heard about, which gives new meaning to a slang term for oral sex that..well, you'll figure it out).

This movie is scary, gory, original, and above all, lots of fun. Just when you think it can't get any more over-the-top, it does. Combs steals the show as West, who looks like a cartoon version of a brainy young scientist with huge hornrimmed glasses. I appreciate his performance more each time I view the movie. He gets most of the best lines, such as when Dan yells at him when a hysterical Meg has found her pet cat, Rufus, in West's fridge with a broken neck, that if he found the cat that way as he claimed, West could have left a note. "A note saying what? 'Dan: cat dead. Details later'?" he dryly replies.

Stuart Gordon made other great movies later on such as From Beyond and The Pit and the Pendulum (also with Combs) but he never topped this underrated, underseen gem.

A word of caution-make sure you are renting the unrated version, as the R version has most of the gore cut out and the last 20 great minutes reduced to 5 or so. The R rated version has some scenes not in the unrated one that you might find interesting if you are a big fan (I rented it by accident) but really, the unrated version is the way to go.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Man what a great flick, August 16, 2006

By 

Fred Derf "Horror Lover" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Re-Animator (Millennium Edition) (DVD)

A reviewer below said that this film will only seem good to those who saw it in the 80s and that people who have never seen it shouldn't. Well I really have to disagree. I'm only 15 so I obviously never saw this film in the 80s, but a few months ago I bought this DVD for 15 bucks and it was one of the best 15 bucks I ever spent. This film is great. If you actually like real horror films then you should like this film. Also the same reviewer said that the special efx were only good when the film came out, but I thought the efx were great and better than the CGI of today. So if you're a fan of horror and haven't seen this film yet you should go out and buy it right now. The DVD is amazing by the way and pretty cheap.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent movie, but this release may not be necessary, March 14, 2007

By 

S. Marzioli (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Re-Animator (2 Disc Set + Highlighter) (DVD)

I compared the special features in this release with the one released by Elite (millennium edition). Most of them are the same. The only real notable difference is that this one has a new 70 minute documentary. I'm sure that's worth the effort of rebuying another 2-disc set. If you have the Elite version, you may want to pass on this.