Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. By far the most successful H.P. Lovecraft filmic treatment is
Re-Animator. Cthulhu plays better to the pen-and-paper RPG set, the videogame arena, the internet avatar business,
stuffed toy merchandising, etc., but attempts to put him on film have been questionable, with the possible exception of the well-regarded 2005
Call of Cthulhu silent film made by the HPL Historical Society.
Herbert West, by contrast, appeared in Stuart Gordon's immortal 1985
Re-Animator and started a franchise, thanks in large part to Jeffrey Combs' committed performance. Battling for release without an MPAA rating,
Re-Animator only opened in 129 theaters, though it was still able to clear a little more than twice its $900K budget. Video rentals have kept it alive for two decades, and there's still interest - Anchor Bay released a new special edition a couple months ago, complete with chartreuse syringe highlighter and new retrospective featurette.
1990's
Bride of Re-Animator is better than one might expect;
Beyond Re-Animator eventually came along in 2003. Neither would tear up the charts, but both are tolerated on the continuing merits of Combs' performance and generally game contributions all around. The second and third installments were helmed by Brian Yuzna, Gordon's compatriot and producer of
Re-Animator.
Yuzna has announced plans to reunite Combs with
Re-Animator co-stars Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton for
House of Re-Animator, aiming at 2008. Talk started a few years ago on the project, a political entry set in a thinly veiled Bush White House. West is called into service to help maintain an illusive façade of leadership for an administration whose leader no longer possesses a functional brain - i.e., the Veep is dead.
Sadly, it's taken a long time to get financing in place, and Bush/Cheney (William H. Macy/George Wendt) will be gone by the time it arrives, but its point should be clear enough. Depending on the success of
House of Re-Animator (or, indeed, whether it actually gets made), Yuzna hopes to create a new Re-Animator trilogy.
Re-Animator Unbound would follow, in which West 'would have his own fiefdom amidst a war zone.' Finally,
Re-Animator Begins would incorporate some flashback scenes in telling of a post-traumatic West recreating his early experiments.
The horror filmmakers of the 1980s seem to be speaking up; witness also Joe Dante's
Homecoming episode of
Masters of Horror, with similar horror tones applied to political purpose moving from traditional subtext to explicit statement.
Homecoming, in turn, draws inspiration from 1974's
Deathdream, Bob Clark's
Monkey's Paw-inspired tale of a soldier returning from Vietnam. Remake rights were optioned by Eli Roth and Oliver Hudson in 2005, but that version seems to have dropped off the radar. A remarkably similar plotline had been in the works under the title
Zero Dark Thirty, but a June
report claims it was scrapped.
Combs would re-team with Stuart Gordon,
Re-Animator co-writer Dennis Paoli (contracted by Yuzna for the
Dagon script in 1985, though it would take sixteen years to reach fruition), and actors Barbara Crampton and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon (a Stuart Gordon mainstay for reasons which should be apparent even beyond Gordon's loyalty to actors and crew) for the delightfully squirm-inducing
From Beyond in 1986. It would meet with less financial success - clearing less than
Re-Animator in theaters on five times the budget - but maintain a following among loose-HPL-adaptation fans and gorehounds throughout the horror-rental-happy 80s.
Long a high-priced VHS rarity,
From Beyond will make its North American DVD debut September 11, in an unrated director's cut. Often enough this is meaningless marketing, but Gordon was forced to cut over a minute of footage to receive an R in 1986, so this actually represents a legitimate restoration of the director's vision. It's almost enough to forgive the cover art. I'm as glad as anyone that it's coming along, but this thing looks like Lawnmower Man joined Lacuna Coil and they put out an EP. Compare the original art and consider which is more evocative of indescribable otherworldly horrors...
Today Kung Fu Hustle hits stores again in a special "Axe-Kicking Edition" DVD. The original U.S. release removed or digitally altered several shots, mostly containing blood; this new version replaces those, but doesn't offer much in the special features department.
