Rating: C
Dir: Joe Lynch
Star: Heather Graham, Judah Lewis, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Davison
This is something of a successor to Re-Animator, sharing cast members Crampton and Davison, as well as writer Dennis Paoli. However, what it doesn’t have is perhaps more important. The cinematic math can perhaps be summarised as:
Re-animator – (Jeffrey Combs, Stuart Gordon and David Gale) + (Heather Graham and Joe Lynch) = Suitable Flesh
You should therefore understand why this falls some way short of its predecessor in a variety of ways. At no point, for example, does this have a severed head performing oral sex on the naked body of its heroine. I suspect cinema is more puritanical now than it was in the eighties, perhaps something for which #MeToo can be held responsible.
It’s based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Thing on the Doorstep, though likely only to about the same extent Re-Animator was. Psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Graham) gets a highly troubled new patient, Asa Waite (Lewis), who seems to have multiple personality disorder, which he blames on his father, whom Asa accuses of trying to take over his body. Dr. Derby is sceptical, but naturally, this is more or less exactly what is happening. Asa’s father is just the latest victim of a body-hopping persona, who has been using occult rituals to jump to and from its next target. Once it happens three times, the transition becomes permanent, leaving the target now trapped in the old shell. The only way it can be stopped is by total destruction of the current host.
Re-animator pretty much set the stall out with its opening scene, and rarely slacked off thereafter. Here, there are only a couple of scenes where this reaches the same level of excess. It does have a great, imaginative sequence involving the rear-view camera on a car, which Lynch has been wanting to do for fifteen years. Otherwise? A decapitation here (top), a messy stabbing there. But these seem almost perfunctory. While there is a fair amount of sex, mostly between Elizabeth and Asa, it’s mostly “net curtains blowing in the wind”. As a teenage boy, I’d have been underwhelmed by the couple of secs of Grahamboob. On the other hand, Graham and Crampton are a combined 117 years old. Both are aging gloriously well.
There’s not very much here that feels particularly Lovecraftian too. Outside of an occult manuscript, this might as well be The Hidden, with the body-hopper an alien. Admittedly, you could say the same about Re-Animator, to a certain extent, and Lovecraft has always been notoriously difficult to adapt. This just feels like a love-letter to eighties horror, which refuses to commit to what made eighties horror so memorable. Solid work from the lead actresses is mostly negated by the forgettable actors. As Dr. Derby’s husband, Davison, in particular, is no better than he was almost forty years ago, and Lewis doesn’t have the dramatic weight required when “possessed” by someone who may be centuries old. Where is Jeffrey Combs when you need him?