Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 1989)

Re-Animator is one of my favorite 1980s horror movies, holding up over several re-watches (the most recent being a few months ago), and was a real mind-blower when I first saw it at age 11 (it's important to see this stuff young so you get warped in the right ways). For whatever reason, though, I'd never seen Bride of Re-Animator until last night. Maybe it was harder to find than its predecessor, maybe I was avoiding the diminished-return problem plaguing most sequels, but I missed it. Too bad, because Bride of Re-Animator is big, weird fun that maintains the look and tone of the original. Yeah, it's not as good as the first movie, but it gets pretty close, and the ending is even wilder.

Bride benefits from the return of several people involved in Re-Animator. Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, and David Gale reprise their roles as, respectively, Dr. Herbert West, Dr. Dan Cain, and the severed head of Dr. Carl Hill (only Barbara Crampton is sadly missing from this one; yeah, her character died but that's not necessarily the end of the road in a Re-Animator movie), and composer Richard Band supplies another memorable score that borrows heavily from his music for the original. Stuart Gordon, the writer/director of the first film, was not involved in the sequel, but his frequent writing partner and producer Brian Yuzna successfully picked up the baton and continued the freaky relay. Yuzna had a hell of a horror movie year in 1989 (which I will refer to from now on as the Year of Yuzna), directing this film and his masterpiece, Society (an absolutely bonkers, uniquely unsettling, hilarious, disgusting, and prescient sci-fi/horror/high school comedy/political and social satire), and producing Warlock and, uh, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (more on that later). Yuzna co-wrote the Bride screenplay with Society screenwriters Rick Fry and Woody Keith.

A momentary Honey, I Shrunk the Kids digression. After the indie-film and VHS rental success of Re-Animator (directed and written by Gordon, produced by Yuzna), From Beyond (co-written by Yuzna and Gordon, produced by Yuzna, directed by Gordon), and, to a lesser extent, Dolls (directed by Gordon, produced by Yuzna), Hollywood came calling. In that classic Hollywood blend of perversity and capitalist exploitation, the fat cats decided the guys behind some of the craziest psychosexual gore films of the '80s would be the perfect choice to write, direct, and produce a mainstream children's movie, though there is some practical reason for this. Gordon and Yuzna were great with actors (Gordon worked in Chicago theater for years before making movies, and frequently returns to it), understood the traditional three-act structure, and knew how to assemble a special effects team capable of amazing work within a limited budget. Gordon and Yuzna were hired to write Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with Gordon directing and Yuzna producing. Unfortunately, before shooting could begin, Gordon became seriously ill (he made a full recovery) and had to step down as director. Hollywood being Hollywood, the suits fired Yuzna since Gordon and Yuzna were hired as a team. Gordon and Yuzna vowed to stay independent after that Hollywood screwjob, and they have, though they managed to retain writing and producing co-credits on the film and story-by credits on many of the sequels and spinoffs, so they at least made a little bank from the fiasco. None of this answers the question of when Yuzna was able to get some sleep in 1989.

Bride of Re-Animator opens, strangely enough, in Peru. After the disturbing events in the first film, Drs. West and Cain get the eff out of Dodge and volunteer as medics in the heart of the Peruvian Civil War, though West is his same intense self who cares more about his reanimation experiments than the altruistic possibilities of the job. Dr. Cain cares about his patients, man, and he also cares about another volunteer, the sexy Italian woman Francesca (Summer School's Fabiana Udenio). After things get too intense in Peru and Cain is injured, the docs return to their old jobs at Arkham and room together in a Gothic-looking old house in the country that used to be a mortuary and adjoins a cemetery. West continues his experiments in a lab in the basement but is also doing some secret Frankenstein-esque experiments on the sly, including attaching a woman's leg to a man's arm and making a crawling critter out of four fingers and an eye. Cain really should have figured out by now that West is a deeply shitty roommate and a cockblocker extraordinaire. "Hey, my roommate is a deeply arrogant mad scientist with a God complex, zero boundaries, rampant misogyny, and a writhing collection of reanimated creatures who will probably cause the death of your pets. Why don't we schedule our romantic rendezvous at your place instead," is some dialogue Cain really should have learned years ago.

Body parts start disappearing from the hospital, and a detective, Lt. Chapham (Claude Earl Jones), starts sniffing around West and Cain. Meanwhile, Francesca arrives in Arkham to get sexy with Cain, and the severed head of Dr. Hill finds its way back to Arkham to get freaky with everybody. Cain gets a little too fixated on a terminal cancer patient he associates with his dearly departed Megan (Crampton's character in the first movie), while West has saved Megan's heart and wants to use it as the heart in a woman he Frankensteins together from the stolen parts of deceased hospital patients. He convinces a troubled Cain to go along with his plans to create life, Frankenstein-style, as long as the heart is Megan's. Meanwhile, another doctor at Arkham, Graves (Mel Stewart), is doing a little experimenting of his own with West's reanimation serum. Everything converges at the West/Cain place in a truly over-the-top finale, with a truly inspired special effect involving Dr. Hill's head.

I've already called 1989 the Year of Yuzna™, but I think we also need to refer to it as the Season of Screaming Mad™ in honor of the special effects wizard behind Bride of Re-Animator and Society, Joji Tani, better known as Screaming Mad George. He and his team pulled off some insanely ridiculous, wildly awesome shit in these two films. Hats off, Screaming Mad George.

The once-in-a-viewing-lifetime impact of the first film can't be replicated the second time around, there's some standard-issue '80s movie sexism, and some of the minor details don't make much sense, but, on the whole, Bride of Re-Animator is one of those rare horror sequels that holds up as a satisfying experience in its own right. It's inventive, fun, ridiculous in all the best ways, bloody, slimy, and a worthy continuation of the story. 

Yuzna's last film credit was in 2011, but he worked steadily as a writer, director, and producer of horror films before his recent absence. His other directing credits include Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4, Return of the Living Dead III, Necronomicon, The Dentist and The Dentist 2 (with Corbin Bernsen as a homicidal dentist), Progeny, Faust, Rottweiler, and the final film, so far, in the Re-Animator series, Beyond Re-Animator. 
  

The Boogey Man (Ulli Lommel, 1980)

Ulli Lommel had a strange and fascinating career in film. Born into a German show business family (his dad was a famous radio personality/writer/actor/comedian/theater manager in the years between the World Wars) but intensely discouraged by his father from following him into the biz, Lommel ran away from home as a teenager to become an actor. He had successful parallel careers in theater, television, and film for years before meeting Rainer Werner Fassbinder and joining his Anti-Theater troupe. Fassbinder (one of my top two or three favorite writer/directors) was a driven, insanely prolific man with enormous talent, ideas, and work ethic and an instinctual eye for aesthetically simpatico collaborators. His personal life was a tornado of chaos, but his work was incredible, and when he died young at 37 from a drug overdose (possibly intentional), he left an enormous body of work comparable in size and scope to artists who lived well into old age.

Lommel, a striking man with jet-black hair and sharply defined features, worked on dozens of Fassbinder films and plays as an actor, production designer, producer, and assistant director. Lommel started directing himself in 1971 with the assistance of Fassbinder, though he remained a much less talented visual stylist than his mentor. His most famous film as director from this period is Tenderness of the Wolves, a gay cannibal horror film produced by and starring Fassbinder, with the rest of the cast made up of Fassbinder troupe members, including Kurt Raab in the lead.

Lommel moved to New York City in 1978, becoming a part of Andy Warhol's circle in the waning days of the Factory scene. During this two-year period, Lommel directed a couple of Warhol-produced cult films, Cocaine Cowboys with Jack Palance and Blank Generation with Richard Hell. Neither of these films have a reputation as being particularly competent, but they sound fascinating. (I have yet to see either one.) While making Cocaine Cowboys, Lommel met the woman who would become his wife and bankroll his next several films, a Dupont heiress named Suzanna Love. In 1980, Lommel and Love moved to Hollywood and made The Boogey Man.

The Boogey Man, an oddball horror film whose tone my wife accurately described after we watched it as being derivative of several other horror movies but uniquely strange, is probably the only slasher movie to involve the spirit of a vengeful murdered man trapped inside a mirror who gets released when the mirror breaks and who uses shards of the mirror to either possess people to harm themselves or others or to make reflected inanimate objects move on their own. Complicated shit, man. Lommel and Love cowrote The Boogey Man with the mysterious David Herschel (his only film credit), with Lommel directing and Love starring. With grindhouse and drive-in theaters still in reasonably good health in 1980, The Boogey Man became a low-budget hit, making a decent profit and inspiring a few sequels.

The film begins with a man and woman preparing to have sex on a couch while a little boy and girl spy on them through an outside window. The woman puts her hose over the man's head before spotting the children. We learn she's the children's mother and the man is their stepfather. Enraged, the man ties the little boy to a bed and beats him, then leaves him tied and gagged. The mother shoos the little girl away. Later that night, the girl grabs a kitchen knife and cuts her brother loose. He takes the knife and kills the abusive stepfather.

We then flash forward twenty years. The sister, Lacey (Suzanna Love) lives on a farm with her husband Jake (Ron James), her son Kevin (Raymond Boyden), Jake's aunt and uncle, and her brother Willy (Suzanna's real-life brother Nicholas Love). Willy is mute, not speaking a word since the night he killed his stepfather. He helps out on the farm and broods silently. Lacey is relatively content, but she's started having nightmares, visions, and panic attacks related to that night and sees a therapist, Dr. Warren (John Carradine). The therapist and her husband are both pretty condescending, and they decide for her that she needs to see her childhood home again to replace the memories of how it looked then with what it looks like now. For some reason, no one seems to think Willy needs help even though he's clearly still reeling from that night, too.

Lacey and Jake drive to the home, currently occupied by a family preparing to move to another state. The parents are out of town, but the two teenage daughters and incredibly obnoxious pre-teen son are home, so they tour the house with their permission. (Note: one of the teenage daughters is played by Jane Pratt, and several Internet sites claim it's the same Jane Pratt that later edited Sassy magazine and hosted a couple talk shows. I'm not sure if it's the same person. The actress doesn't really look like Sassy's Jane Pratt, but maybe it's her. Anyone know for sure?)

Weird shit happens to Lacey when she looks into the old family mirror, the mirror gets broken, and the boogey man's spirit enters the various shards of broken glass, wreaking havoc and raising hell, mirror-style. For husbandly gaslighting reasons, Jake takes the broken mirror back to the farm, painstakingly gluing it back together to prove to his wife that she's crazy. What a dick. More wild mirror shenanigans ensue, harming many people, including some wisecracking beach teens having a cookout insanely close to the water. (They also seem to be grilling only one hot dog between the four of them.)

Lommel is a pretty mediocre visual stylist (odd for someone who spent so much time with Fassbinder), but there are some pretty cool images once the mirror insanity really kicks into gear. There are also some very satisfying, darkly humorous kills throughout, and the movie goes in sometimes expected directions and sometimes weird places all its own. This is a strange movie that nevertheless satisfies most of the generic slasher horror requirements. 

I wonder if this film's story is inspired by frustration Lommel felt on the Fassbinder sets. Once Fassbinder began working with the amazing cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who had a long creative relationship with Martin Scorsese after severe burnout led to his break from Fassbinder), he was able to pull off some extremely technically complex scenes. Many of these scenes involved mirrors, and sometimes preparation for these mirror shots took hours of setup to get the lighting and camera placement just right. Lommel (and anyone else on the set not on the camera or lighting crews) must have been bored out of his mind waiting through all this preparation. I have no proof of this, but I like to imagine the evil mirror in this film is a weird love/hate tribute to Fassbinder's methods.

Lommel continued to make low-budget films for the rest of his life (mostly horror) at a suitably Fassbinder-like prolific pace. He also continued acting. He and Love wrote several more films together until their divorce (she retired from the movie business to Maine with her Dupont money), and Lommel spent the majority of his last twenty years as a director making straight-to-video films about the lives of famous serial killers. He died in 2017.  

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

This extremely loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe novella is a fairly routine horror/suspense thriller, but it looks great, has some high-powered talent behind and in front of the camera, and moves swiftly enough, and Bela Lugosi is in excellent form as Mirakle.
Director Robert Florey's film dispenses with most of Poe's story, keeping only its setting (Paris) and a handful of plot details (mostly squeezed in at the end). It even changes the story's dangerous primate from an orangutan to an ape and turns Poe's main character, the brilliant detective Dupin, into a young medical student. When a detective finally appears in the film's closing scenes, he's an arrogant buffoon.

In Poe's novella, which many literary scholars and critics believe is the first modern American detective story, an orangutan belonging to a sailor escapes and commits a double murder. Dupin solves the crime. In Florey's film, Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Mirakle, the proprietor and host of a tent show at a traveling carnival starring his pet ape. The carnival show is a front for Mirakle's real passion. He's a mad scientist and proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution who is in the habit of kidnapping women and injecting them with his ape's blood to prove his theories. This ends up killing the women, to Mirakle's chagrin, and he dumps the bodies in the river. Not the guy you want convincing people to believe in evolution. We need some PR help over here.

When medical student Dupin (Leon Ames) attends the carnival with his girlfriend Camille (Sidney Fox) and his fellow student/roommate Paul (Bert Roach) and his girlfriend, the ape and Mirakle take a liking to Camille, and Mirakle decides she's a perfect specimen for his experiments. Things proceed predictably, story-wise, but there are some beautifully expressive shots and images throughout, Lugosi gives a classic Lugosi performance, and the most of the comedic moments are genuinely funny (and just the right side of corny).
The cinematographer on the film was Karl Freund, who I wrote a lot about in my review of The Mummy a few months ago. Freund, who directed The Mummy and Mad Love but primarily worked as a cinematographer, shoots the film in deep, gorgeous black and white and captures a lot of great light and shadow on the studio sets. My favorite moments are a stagecoach scene at night drenched in shadow, a rooftop chase in the moonlight, and a bright, elegant shot of a woman being pushed on a swing.

Director Florey and star Lugosi were offered Rue Morgue as a consolation after being replaced by James Whale and Boris Karloff, respectively, on Frankenstein. Florey and Lugosi had done extensive planning for Frankenstein, which Florey planned to direct with Lugosi playing the scientist. The studio stepped in and told Lugosi to play the part of the monster instead. Lugosi felt he would be unrecognizable under the makeup and dropped out. With Lugosi out, producer Carl Laemmle, who didn't like the direction Florey was taking Frankenstein, replaced him with Whale, who really wanted the job. Whale and Boris Karloff made a great team, and the film was a hit and an enduring horror classic. Laemmle knew Florey still had a strong desire to make a horror film and decided to make it up to him and Lugosi by giving them Rue Morgue. Unfortunately, the film didn't do very well, and Universal ended Lugosi's contract.

Florey, a Frenchman obsessed with Hollywood who moved to the United States in his early twenties, had a long journeyman career directing movies and TV. He specialized in B-movies (in the classic Hollywood sense of the term) in all genres and was famous for bringing them in under budget but over schedule. (What?) Some of his better known films besides Rue Morgue include the experimental short The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, the first Marx Brothers movie, The Cocoanuts (which the brothers hated), The Woman in Red (with Barbara Stanwyck), Hollywood Boulevard, Daughter of Shanghai, Meet Boston Blackie, God Is My Co-Pilot, and The Beast with Five Fingers. His last two credits were episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits in 1964.

One last surprising name in the credits is a young John Huston, who wrote some of the dialogue. He had just broken into Hollywood as a screenwriter after publishing some short stories and journalism pieces in a few magazines, though it would be another nine years before he would make his debut as a director with The Maltese Falcon.