First and Last 2.0 Stuart Gordon: The Re-Animator (1986) and Stuck (2008)
The late filmmaker Stuart Gordon was a true frightmaster, a beloved genre specialist best known for adapting the stories of masters like Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen, most famously with his cult classic 1985 debut The Re-Animator, an exceedingly loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1923 short story “Herbert West–Reanimator.”
Like many filmmakers, Gordon peaked early with his first film but his career was far more eclectic and impressive than his reputation as a horror filmmaker might suggest. Gordon started in theater in Madison, Wisconsin and later Chicago, Illinois, directing campy, self-consciously transgressive plays filled with ghoulish dark comedy as well as less gory, kitschy fare like David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. In 2011, Gordon combined his auspicious theater and film careers when he helped adapt The Re-Animator for the stage as a musical by co-writing the book and producing.
Though Gordon gravitated towards independent horror, his resume includes the screenplay for Abel Ferrara’s terrific, underrated 1993 Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake Body Snatchers, a story credit for the smash-hit live-action Disney science fiction comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the 1998 fantasy family comedy The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, which was co-written by Ray Bradbury from his own short story, and the brutally funny, evisceratingly dark 2005 David Mamet adaptation Edmond, which makes for a terrific double feature with the equally bleak, brutal and funny film that immediately followed it, 2007’s Stuck.
Gordon brought that love of dark comedy and blood-splattered outrageousness to The Re-Animator, a hilarious and exquisitely gory contemporary take on the Frankenstein legend that catapulted star Jeffrey Combs to instant cult fame for his career-defining portrayal as Dr. Herbert West, a brilliant and quite insane medical student intent on bringing the dead back to life by any means necessary.
Combs plays West as someone with God’s own ego and the devil’s malevolent instincts, a wild-eyed lunatic whose incontrovertible genius and equally undeniable insanity puts the “mad” and “science” in “mad scientist.” He’s a tiny little man with a great big Napoleon Complex who won’t stop until he has undone what the good Lord has wrought.
There’s a spark of divine madness at the heart of West’s bravura turn, a sense that the rules that govern other men do not apply to him because he is smarter, and more ruthless, and consequently better than the rest of humanity.
West’s madness and ruthless, unGodly ambition can’t help but infect the people around him, like Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) is a strapping, hunky, All-American medical student dating the dean’s gorgeous daughter Megan (scream queen Barbara Crampton). The handsome young man is initially skeptical of West and his unnerving, disconcerting intensity but he quickly falls under the demented doctor’s spell once it becomes apparent that West has pulled off the ultimate medical miracle in defying and reversing death.
Animals and people alike begin dying awful deaths but they don’t stay dead for long. A wild rumpus ensues as West, Dan and a series of equally deranged, equally ruthless older men square off for two distinct yet overlapping forms of immortality: the kind that comes with being the first doctors to achieve the historic feat of re-animating a dead body and the even more impressive feat of beating death by dying and then roaring back to life.
The monstrous men of The Re-Animator come back from brain death but they do not come back the same. Some manage to hold onto their faculties and sinister ambition but most rage incoherently as feral, zombie-like creatures, all mindless rage and rampaging violence.
There are no good guys, really, in The Re-Animator. Megan is the only truly sympathetic figure and she is more a damsel in distress than a proper heroine. It’s less a matter of good versus evil than evil versus moderately less evil, or differently evil. West is at once anti-hero and crazily charismatic villain. From his very first moment on-screen it is achingly apparent that he is out of his goddamn mind, but there’s something oddly irresistible about his single-minded obsessiveness all the same.
In The Re-Animator, death is most assuredly not the end. In Gordon and Lovecraft’s weird world, it’s more a speed bump than a brick wall.
Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), a crazed narcissist even by the exceedingly lenient standards of the medical profession, is violently separated from his head relatively early in the film, for example, and just keeps going all the same.
The lanky character actor has a distinct Fred Gwynne quality. That makes sense, since he is at once a lumbering, massive Herman Munster-like figure and someone who can vouch, from personal experience, that sometimes dead is better, to paraphrase Pet Sematary, another ghoulish exploration of the folly of playing God and bringing the dead back to life in violent defiance of the natural order.
In a characteristically warped gag, the presence of a poster for the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense foreshadows Dr. Hill spending much of his time onscreen an actual talking head disconcertingly operating just fine without being connected to a body that he eventually forms a kooky sort of double act with.
Dr. Hill’s headless body functions as a ghoulish, literally mindless henchman who does his master’s bidding while his disembodied yet still functioning head tries to outwit and out-maneuver his medical peers AND defile Megan despite the considerable disadvantage of lacking a body.
Not even death can keep the men of The Re-Animator from being toxic and terrible, or from trying to sexually assault women. Dead or alive, men are scum. They’re ugly on the inside and the outside.
Despite a low budget and tight shooting schedule, The Re-Animator is a work of stomach-churning artistry, a Fangoria subscriber’s delight with practical effects that are as funny and wildly creative as they are disgusting. The mutilated, destroyed and deceased yet somehow still sentient human body is a source of laugh-out-loud comedy as well as horror in Gordon’s capable, bloody hands.
The Re-Animator combined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Night of the Living Dead, H. P. Lovecraft and the demented gore slapstick of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead to create an instant classic deeply rooted in horror history yet unmistakably fresh and new, the anarchic, undeniable work of a b-movie auteur at the very height of his extraordinary powers.
A little over two decades later Gordon ended his big-screen career with a dark comedy based on a too-strange-for-fiction true story that similarly found pitch-black dark comedy and no small amount of horror in the human body in a state of distress and peril, but this time the human body at the center of the narrative just barely holds onto life after being struck by a car rather than coming back from the dead to wreak havoc.
Where The Re-Animator is about awful men doing terrible things in search of glory and immortality Stuck is fundamentally concerned with two basically decent human beings trying to navigate their way out of an impossible situation.
It’s a testament to what a complex, multi-dimensional and convincing lead performance Mena Suvari delivers as Brandi Boski, a cornrowed caregiver at an old folks’ home who cleans the filthy posteriors of dementia-stricken senior citizens by day and parties on Ecstasy with her drug dealer boyfriend at night, that her character remains sympathetic, even likable, despite not just committing an unsympathetic act but a whole string of egregious wrongs both moral and criminal in nature.
Brandi doesn’t just hit homeless man Thomas "Tom" Bardo (Stephen Rea) with her car while high and drunk; she then leaves him to bleed slowly to death after his head and upper torso get stuck in the windshield of her car, takes more Ecstasy and has sex with her boyfriend and goes back to work before eventually deciding that the only way to solve a problem that size is by putting a singularly unlucky man out of his misery.
Before the epic cruelty of being hit with a car, then left to bleed to death slowly, Rea’s soulful homeless man first endures a series of smaller cruelties. He’s kicked out of the shabby rooming house he’s been living in for non-payment of rent. A public aid worker treats him like an inconvenience rather than a human being and, despite his job specifically involving helping desperate men with nowhere else to go, someone else’s problem. A cop tells him he can’t sleep in a park, and will have to take his exhausted body and sad little shopping cart elsewhere.
People whose job it is to help struggling souls like Tom instead treat him with poisonous condescension. He Is utterly and completely alone even before he ends up in Brandi’s garage in a state of near-death, with a cell phone that could prove his salvation just barely out of his reach.
It’s telling that the only two people who show Tom any kindness or mercy are people of color similarly at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; a kind black homeless man who takes a shine to the lost man and gives him his cart, a swig of liquor and some good advice, and a Hispanic boy who stumbles upon Tom on the brink of death in Brandi’s garage and tries to save him, only to be told by his father to mind his business unless he wants to attract the kind of attention from the authorities that might lead to his entire family getting deported.
Stuck is keenly attuned to the complexities of class, gender and race. It’s about outsiders on the the fringes of society whose lives are not valued because they are old, or immigrants, or black, or do the kinds of jobs that other people don’t want, and consequently their deaths aren’t seen as important or significant either.
Fallen men like Tom eventually become society’s problem but when Brandi crashes into him, nearly killing him in the process, he becomes first Brandi’s problem and then the shared problem of Brandi and her boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby). Rashid talks a big game about his extensive history with dead bodies but he understandably freaks out when confronted with Tom’s bloody, battered, bleeding but still alive body, which lingers uncomfortably in a terrible state of limbo between life and death.
Stuck is a horror film of sorts, complete with an impressive and extensive amount of gore rooted in poor Tom’s unfortunate predicament, which grows worse by the moment without getting bad enough to actually kill him. But the horrors at its core are fundamentally those of apathy, selfishness and capitalism, not zombies or the undead. Stuck is about the monstrousness of human nature rather than literal monsters.
Rea’s deeply empathetic, achingly sad, undeniably human performance allows us to feel his hard luck character’s unbearable, all-consuming pain on a visceral and emotional level. Even before his unfortunate run-in with Brandi he’s unmistakably a tragic figure. Suvari, an actress best known for her roles as teenagers in American Beauty and American Pie, delivers a career-best performance in this brutal exploration of American cruelty and homicidal indifference to the suffering of others.
With his terrific final film Gordon once again delivered the b-movie goods — sex, violence, gore, shock, nudity, a lurid story ripped straight from the headlines — in service of a story with something incisive, real and ultimately profound to say about how the savage iniquities of our society bring out the worst in everyone.
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