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For horror fans, the first time you see Re-Animator is one of those pivotal moments. It either solidifies exactly why you are a horror fan or you start to question your decisions. Needless to say, as a horror fan, it’s a film that I genuinely love. It’s disgusting, disturbing, transgressive, and funny. It’s clearly a horror film that is happy to have comedic moments without really being a horror comedy. So it’s not surprising that there’s actually a Re-Animator trilogy. Most people know Bride of Re-Animator (the natural name for a sequel to a Frankenstein-esque story), but Beyond Re-Animator is far less known.
Sadly, that’s probably for a good reason. Of the three movies in the series, this is clearly the least of the three, and not merely because it’s the third film in the trilogy, which is traditionally where a series tanks. The issue here is that it deviates from some of the established rules of the franchise.
The film begins with what is essentially the end of the previous movie—a young man and his friend witness his sister being killed by one of the corpses revived by Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs). Thirteen years later, that young boy is now Doctor Howard Phillips (Jason Berry—and a nice nod to H.P. Lovecraft, on whose work all of this is based). Doctor Phillips has been assigned to work in a prison, the one where Herbert West is currently incarcerated in connection to the situation from 13 years previous. What will soon be revealed is that Dr. Phillips got assigned to this prison specifically because West is incarcerated at this prison. Our doctor discovered one of West’s glowing green syringes at the scene of his sister’s death.
For his part, West has been continuing his research, but with few resources, he has been reduced to working with rats. Despite his limitations, he has discovered something called Nano-Plasmic Energy, which can be extracted from the brain of a living creature. The goal is to revive something recently dead and inject it with NPE in the hopes of that creature being restored essentially to full, normal life.
So how is this all going to work? Well, on Dr. Phillips’s first day, a journalist named Laura Olney (Elsa Pataky) has arrived at the prison to write a story about the place. She and Dr. Phillips are soon an item, much to the frustration of the creepy Warden Brando (Simón Andreu), who will eventually take out his frustrations on being rejected by (naturally), killing our journalist. So hey, West and Phillips have a body to work with and to test out the NPE.
If you’ve seen a Re-Animator film, you know that this is not going to go well. Eventually, we’re going to have a whole bunch of new resurrected undead monsters running around the prison, some of which will be animalistic and some of which, injected with NPE, will be self-aware. But will the NPE work the way that Herbert West things it will? And again, if you’ve seen a Re-Animator movie before, you know the answer to that question, too.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that this feels like a sanitized version of a Re-Animator film. The first movie includes a body holding its decapitated head performing cunnilingus on a woman. The second movie involves animated body parts. This film feels tame in comparison. Rather than escalating, as sequels tend to do, this minimizes the gore and insanity into something almost palatable, and certainly not nearly as explosively gory as the previous films.
And that’s the problem. Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator are not about just being gross. They’re about being transgressive. These are movies that push boundaries and push limits in ways to freak out the audience. You’re supposed to be disturbed but laughing at the same time, grossed out but entertained. Beyond Re-Animator doesn’t really do any of this. A zombi-fied inmate biting a nurse on the breast (a nurse who suspiciously wears nothing but lace panties under her lab coat) isn’t transgressive, funny, or anything but sigh-inducing. This series used to have standards.
Watch the first Re-Animator. If you like it, welcome to that strange world of odd, disturbing, comic horror movies that are fun and gross. Watch the second one, which isn’t as good but still has some classic funny gross-out moments. Skip this one. You’ve seen what you need to from the series. Beyond Re-Animator is not worth the time.
Why to watch Beyond Re-Animator: Herbert West is the best thing Jeffrey Combs has ever done in his career, and that’s saying something.
Why not to watch: The other Re-Animator films are genuinely better.
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