I don't like Stuart Gordon's adaptations of Lovecraft. Here, I said it. They
are just so bad, so… they're just bad. This time, he does his best, giving us a
trashy film done professionally. But that's about all I can say for this bizarre
movie, too much for most of us' appetites.
In the movie, Herbert West is transformed into the early eighties, with
that time's weird sense of fashion and strange ideals. I might have exaggerated
a bit there, but the movie doesn't take itself too seriously either. Herbert
messes with the dead, granting them "life" with a strange serum. Then
we got much nudity, gore and something that is supposed to be some characters
to identify with.
But I guess that I have to say something in its favor, or at least I need
to find something to learn from it. After all, if I found something to learn
from the terrible Braindead, I must find something to learn from this
re-animated dead flick. And what can I say? It got a weird sense of humor.
Humor, from quite an early stage, was associated with the horror genre. When
the movie is built around tension-and-release moments, doing the "release"
part right is mandatory. And one of the greatest release-mechanisms ever? Why of
course, it is the infamous humor.
And that's the lesson to learn from this movie- use humor, but use it
well. The reason that the head-on-a-stick is so funny is that it comes just
after so much seriousness and villainy, and suspense and so much more. After being
serious for far too long for this movie's level, it just comes with a childish
joke, breaking the ice, the statues, and our ability to take this movie seriously.
So, I don't know if I succeeded with explaining what I meant. Truth is,
this movie's sense of humor is so hard to explain also. But yeah, use humor, it
might be what you're looking for your "tension-and-release" cycle.
How about you? Have you found this movie any good? And what have you
learned from it?
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