A lot of people will talk about Re-Animator and what a great film it is. And it is! It is a true masterclass.™ A stone-cold classic. But you won’t see anywhere as many people talking about the second film in the series, Bride Of Re-Animator.
Bride Of Re-Animator picks up 8 months after the original. West and Cain have fled to South America to be doctors in the Peruvian civil war. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, natch. The fresh bodies give West a constant supply to experiment on. After the base they work at gets overrun, the boys head back to Miskatonic University to pick up where they left off.
Things get a lot weirder from here. West starts playing around with animating body parts instead of whole bodies and robbing the morgue and the local graveyard. He gets the idea to reanimate a person from different body parts sewn together. It’s pretty clear at this point that West is a few rounds short of a full magazine. Even more so than the first film.
West finds Megan Halsy’s heart in the university morgue and convinces Dan that they can piece together a new Meg and use her heart to bring her back in the most horror-movie-logic way possible. Despite this absurdity and crime against God, Dan agrees since he is still in mourning for his dead girlfriend and pines for Barbara Crampton’s lush tatas.
Things start to get pretty wacky from there on out. No matter how many times I try to type out what happens, it sounds like the most retarded film ever made and I’m afraid my summary will put you off from watching it. It’s not retarded, it’s just I don’t have the communicative ability to explain it in a way where it doesn’t sound stupid. You have to see it for yourself.
Is it as good as the first film? No, few things are but it is still pretty damn fun. The weird levels go way up. The gore goes way up and Jeff Combs’ zany level goes up an order of magnitude. It suffers a little in the script department. The lack of Stuart Gordon’s steady hand is missed but Brian Yuzna does a solid job imitating his style for the sequel.
If you want to see it, Arrow has you covered in the Blu-ray department. I have this edition and it looks great with plenty of extras.
