



We have a new Numero Uno. We have the best zombie-mutant medical- experiment flick since Basket Case. We have blood, we have breasts, we have beasts. We have instant drive-in classic.

I'm talkin', of course, about Re-Animator, the only movie ever made where an actor gets his head cut off halfway through the movie but finishes the movie. David Gale, the actor that accomplished this for the first time in motion picture history, is a Drive-In Method Actor.

What this means is, he actually lives out his parts before he does 'em for the camera. So Gale had to master the difficult trick of playing half the movie with his head on and half with his head off. You can imagine what a wise guy he was around the set! You never knew whether he'd have his old noodle on straight or be haulin' it around like carry-on luggage.

What we got here is a story about Herbert West, this nerd-face space-cadet med student who starts messing around with secret-formula juice the color of urine -- and finds out he has the power to bring somebody's brain back to life after it gets smashed under an 18-wheeler.

So he goes up to Massachusetts, where they have an oversupply of dead brains, and moves in with a med student who's sleepin' with the dean's daughter, and the first thing he does is pump so much juice into a dead cat that he almost gets his face clawed off.

So then Herbert cons the roommate into going down to the med-school dean and trying to get some more help on cat-brain research. "I've conquered brain death," he says. "We can defeat death!" And the dean basically says to get his hiney out of the office and also they're both kicked out of school and stop sleepin' with his daughter.

Next thing, these two guys sneak into the morgue and start juicing up stiffs, until one guy gets out of hand and they have to ram a bone-saw through his back to make him stop breakin' down doors and -- whoops! -- killing the dean.

They look at the dead dean, look at each other, and then no problem. They juice him up and pretty soon he's standin' up, waving his arms and slobbering all over everbody. They do have to put him in a rubber room and watch Dr. Carl Hill do a laser lobotomy on him, but other than that he's fine.

But now the evil Dr. Carl Hill knows he's got these guys, and so he goes over to the secret brain-juice laboratory and tells Herbert West that he wants all the records so he can win the Nobel Prize. Herbert West's answer is a shovel through the neck.

Then he thinks, "What the hey, nobody's ever juiced separate body parts before," and from there on out Dr. Carl Hill tries to get himself back together, carryin his head around in a slime tray, doin laser lobotomies on all the other corpses. There's this one scene where he straps the dean's daughter down to the autopsy table, holds his head in his hands and. . . . That's about as far as I can go here, without getting the plug pulled by the high sheriffs.

A classic. Twenty-five gallons blood, the modern-day champion. Eight breasts. Twenty-seven dead bodies. Ten dead born-again bodies. One dead attack cat (three lives). Twenty-two zombies. Head smashing. Cat smashing. Flesh- ripping. Brain fondling. Heads roll. Arms roll. Bone-saw fu. Lobotomy fu. Intestine fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Jeffrey Combes as Herbert West, for wielding the green needle and saying "Come on, why not, this is the freshest body we have"; David Gale, as Dr. Carl Hill, for performing without his head and saying "I WILL be famous!"; Bruce Abbott, the med student, for saying, "I'm sorry, honey, but your dead father's been lobotomized"; and Stuart Gordon, the director, for painting the room red.

Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

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