Review of Bride of Re-Animator (1990) by Jeremy S — 30 May 2010

The original Re-animator is one of those cult horror "classics" that I didn't see until years after the fact, and I wasn't entirely sure what all the fuss had been about. Sure, it had some nice moments of invention and a few good laughs but it was hardly worthy of being held aloft alongside other classics of it's time. This sorry mess makes it look like an absolute masterpiece though.

Right from the get-go things are a bit of a shambles, with a pointless prologue being the first of many half-baked plot arcs that dribble across the screen half-formed with incompetence by writers who couldn't quite decide how to structure the movie so just decided to throw enough crap around in the hope something would stick. It's not very sticky. There's one sequence where the effects are genuinely impressive, but as it's a sequence stolen wholesale from Evil Dead 2 it's not really worth shouting about. Elsewhere, as with the first movie, it's painfully obvious how every effect has been pulled off and as such it looks massively ropey. The acting is awful (aside from Combs' title turn which is enjoyably hammy), and it's shot so poorly that it looks way older than it actually is, meaning that even when I found myself thinking aloud "Well, I guess that does look pretty good for the early eighties" I was giving it less credit than I thought seeing as it was made in NINETEEN CHUNTING NINETY.

There are generally two characteristics that can raise a substandard horror movie into the realms of enjoyment, and that's by being very gory and/or very funny, and Bride drops the ball on both counts. So if a horror movie is neither scary, fun or particularly gory, what are you left with? A waste of 90 minutes that's less Bride of Frankenstein and more Turd of Frankenhooker. Dodge it.