News: How the West was won?

According to Comic Book Resources Devil's Due Publishing will be independently distributing issues 16 and 17 of their guilty-pleasure horror hit Hack/Slash as Diamond will no longer touch those two issues. The reason:

The decision follows Diamond’s receipt of a Cease and Desist letter regarding the issues from an unknown, recently registered company, Re-Animator, LLC, in connection with Dynamite Entertainment’s Nick Barrucci.

Hack/Slash is featuring Lovecraft's famed mad scientist, Herbert West, in its latest story arc. Apparently Re-Animator LLC felt this infringed on their ownership of the character.

Re-Animator LLC, a company that seems to exist solely as a Delaware PO Box, was the company that sold the rights to Dynamite Entertainment when Dynamite was featuring West in their Army of Darkness comics. However, R-A LLC seems to have been created solely for the purpose of snatching up what may be a public domain figure, the character of West, and then "selling" it to Dynamite.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to horror director Brian Yuzna, who helmed the second and third installments of the Re-Animator film franchise. Yuzna was pretty sure that he owned the character of Herbert West. Here's an annoyed Yuzna from the article:

"It may seem crazy to Re-Animator fans to think that a company that had nothing to do with the classic films could actually claim ownership of the "Re-Animator" brand and threaten to stop anyone else from creating comics, films or merchandise with the word 'reanimator' or 're-animator' in it- even the actual producer of the films that created the brand—but in this wacky world that is exactly what has happened."

According to CRB, Yuzna has owned the Re-Animator film franchise, on which both comics based their respective Wests, for more than twenty years.

All of this might be moot: various factions of Lovecraft's estate have fought for years to close off his works from the public domain. Many argue that, under existing laws, the various feuding parties claiming to speak officially for the Lovecraft estate have long since blown their chances to keep the famed author's work under copyright. However, this nebulous claim hasn't prevent these groups from behaving as if their ownership was a given. They regular cut deals with publishers, threaten web sites posting Lovecraft's works, and so on. If any of these groups were to somehow gain the force of law for their currently BS claims, then DDP, Dynamite, Yuzna, and the flimsy R-A LLC would all be screwed.

Movies: Jailhouse rot.

Beyond the Re-Animator, the third film in series, trailing Bride of the Re-Animator by more than a decade, seems to split fans of the series into two camps. Migliore and Strysik, in their comprehensive Lurker in the Lobby: a Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, are dismissive of the flick. They call it "a shadow of the gonzo wit of the original" and suggesting that the flick is little more than an exercise in sfx bloodletting that uses the existing series as its excuse. However, if the averaged ratings on IMDB reveal anything, the third film in the series is the fan favorite of the two sequels. Both viewpoints are reasonable. For fans familiar with the original literary source of the series, Beyond Re-Animator is the least Lovecraftian of the series. However, in its over-the-top approach to characterization, plotting, and gore, Beyond is clearly a product of the aforementioned gonzo aesthetic (always the least Lovecraftian element of the previous installments). Put schematically: Beyond is the first film to put extending the franchise before returning to the literary source. The result is the first Re-Animator film that owes more to the Gordon/Yuzna flicks that preceded it than to the Lovecraft story that inspired the franchise.

Yuzna's second film featuring mad scientist Herbert West picks up shortly after the end of Bride. During the carnage at chez West/Cain, one of West's re-animated corpses invades the home of the young Howard Phillips. The corpse overpowers Howie and dispatches his sister before being put down by the Arkham PD. Traumatized, Howard follows the police outside just in time to catch an irate Herbert West being stuffed into a police car. Nearby, Howie finds a glowing syringe full of reagent, apparently left behind by the absurdly sloppy APD.

Flash forward fourteen years.

Young Howie is now Dr. Phillips. Phillips takes his residency at the Arkham prison that now houses West. Obsessed with West's role in the death of his sister, Phillips thinks he can help West complete his research while, in the face of West's amoral indifference, turn West's discoveries towards good. Unfortunately, West's own casually sadistic attitude towards the living isn't the only problem facing Phillips. The prison's warden is tyrannical bully and West has run afoul of one of the prisons gang leaders. Of course, it wouldn't be a Re-Animator film without the doomed love interest: Laura, the attractive young local reporter who is in the prison fishing for the story.

After establishing our primaries, the film spends a short time on the familiar franchise plot. West and Phillips attempt various re-animations while trying to hide their experiments from the prison staff and Laura. But things disintegrate quickly and, before you can say "time off for god behavior," re-animated corpses and rioting inmates are running amuck in the prison. Surrealistic carnage ensues.

Filmed partially on Barcelona film sets and partially on location in the cavernous Prision Modelo in Valencia, the film has a grim and claustrophobic feel, a sort of dark reflection of the well-lit but no less institutional hospital setting of the first film.

The actors turn in functional performances, though it sometimes feels as if not everybody is acting in the same film: some going for the over-the-top vibe of the earlier franchise pieces while others try to hit something more like a conventional drama or horror. This feeling of disconnectedness is compounded by the use of dubbing throughout. Like many Euro films, the dialog in BtR is added post-production. Even when an actor is speaking English, you can tell that his or her dialog has been dubbed. Jeffery Coombs, the franchise's cornerstone, dials down his performance to give us a more controlled, quieter West. Instead of the pompous West of the first flick or the West of the Bride, who seems almost addicted to his power to create life, this West seems to have accepted that his work will always be done in secret and will never, in fact, produce results. He's no longer driven by the need to dominate his colleagues or to feel the rush of defeating death. Instead, he does what he does because that is all he is. He's sly, inventive, and tougher. He less pompous and instead has the wounded hauteur of deposed royalty – he's the elite who refuses to sink to the level of the scum he's now forced to deal with. It might be my favorite version of West. The only thing not to like about this take on West is that he feels underused as Yuzna spends plenty of time on the new characters, a few of which get much more screen time than they really need.

The effects, by deranged surrealistic effects man Screaming Mad George, are noteworthy. Gore hounds will certainly find plenty to keep them amused, but what makes the effects in BtR pop is how far out Screaming Mad George is willing to go on almost any gimmick. In on scene, a still-living junkie shoots several syringes full of reagents. Apparently, it produces a crazy high. It also causes the outer layers of the junkie's body to explode off. But, since the junkie is full of reagent, he doesn't die. Instead, the bloodied corpse, strips of flesh still hanging off him, asks for more hits of reagent, or at least some prescription grade pain-killers to take the edge off. The gory but goofy details of flick put it in the splatter-slapstick tradition of the earlier films, though SMG has a meaner streak in him and there's a bit of an edge here. One imagines that SMG feels his gory set pieces present people as they are, and it is people who don't look as monstrous as they should that are, somehow, the special effect. The gore satirist's misanthropic bent gives this film its less wacky tone, even when it is most trying to be humorous.

How does the parole board find? I'm going to have to side with those who feel Beyond is a worthy addition to franchise. It is interesting that the same director is behind both the "loyalist" Bride and the more revisionist Beyond. Both films pick up threads of the franchise, while managing to focus on two fairly different aspects of the original. The film is a bit darker and meaner, but the core concept is still solid. In fact, in a way, Beyond was the necessary next step. It proves that the franchise can adapt, expand, and carry more than a single creative vision. Plus, you know, there's some T & A, so that's nice.

Movies: Here comes the bride.

With all apologies to Jane Austen: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mad scientist in possession of the secrets of life and death must be in want of a bride. This is the very position that Herbert West and his perpetually unsure assistant, Dan Cain, find themselves in at the open of Bride of Re-Animator, second flick in the Re-Animator series.

After the bloodbath in the Miskatonic Uni hospital that closed the last flick, West and Cain have become Doctors Without Frontier-style volunteers helping patch up the wounded members of a disorganized and badly whipped rebel army in some third world Latin American jungle nation. We quickly learn that the good doctors are not motivated entirely by the better angels of their nature. The surrounding jungles are home to a lizard that produces a chemical that will help West perfect his frustratingly imprecise re-animating agent. Plus, living in a war-zone insures that you get plenty of access to fresh people meat for you experiments. But all good things come to an end and the good doctors are forced to scoot when government soldiers overrun the rebels' hospital. The doctors return to the MU hospital and move into an old caretakers house on the edge of a graveyard – a convenient location as West's need to re-animate dead tissue is becoming increasing like a junkie's need to hit a crack pipe. His new formula re-animating agent means he can now bring individual parts to life and West begins to express his artistic side by creating freakish beasts out of random parts and giving them life. Eventually West and Cain hit upon the scheme of creating an entirely new person out of carefully selected parts. Set against them are a Arkham PD detective who has an axe to grind with West and the still not entirely dead disembodied head of Dr. Carl Hill, West's nemesis from the first film. If that's not enough for you, we also get a new love interest for Cain.

And they pack it all into a slender 93 minutes.

Not unlike the first two flicks in the classic Universal Frankenstein series, Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator are interesting in so much as, despite the continuity of story and crew (the producer of the first flick in now the director of the second flick), the films have really different moods and styles. The first Re-Animator focused heavily on the seething creepiness of Herbert West. The plot was a slow build punctuated by ever nastier and more tasteless scenes of gross-out humor. In contrast, the second film is a demolition derby of subplots and surreal scenes. Incidents and plot points pile up willy-nilly as the flick barrels towards its conclusion. The director of the first flick, horror film's go-to Lovecraft adaptor Stuart Gordon, is a more capable and careful director. Brian Yuzna, who helms the second film, takes a more stylish and kinetic approach. Where Gordon used the clean polished surfaces and monotonous florescent lighting of MU Hospital as a counterpoint to the typical gothic trappings of a standard mad scientist flick, Yuzna throws shadows everywhere and loves packing scenes full of grisly details. In the first film, every character seemed caught up in the gravitational pull of West's barely contained insanity. Here, everybody seems to have lost it a little bit, become a little unhinged. All except for West, who comes of as a more boyish and petulant character. Viewers will get more of the bizarre effects from the first one. The gore-level is upped, West's re-animated freaks show some inventive monster design, and the bride creature is wonderfully horrific and pathetic at the same time. In only one instance are the effects not up to the task and hand: the flying head Carl Hill, which has been stitched to a pair bat wings, long pretty bad. (And this is a shame because a maniac head flapping around on bat wings is an almost perfect summary of the surreal aesthetic of this film – if only it had looked better.)

All and all, Bride is an excellent sequel. It extends the story of the first film in a logical way, but is stylistically unique enough to not feel like a retread. Is madcap pacing is a bit sloppy, but it ensures that the viewer is never bored.

Movies: Secret re-agent man.

Before we get into the review of The Re-animator, indulge me in some chatter about H. P. Lovecraft, whose "Herbert West – Reainmator" serves as the basis for the film.

I think I stated this before, but I think it’s worth repeating: the work of H. P. Lovecraft is deceptively attractive for cinematic adapters, though it is, if you think about, remarkably resistant to visual representation. There are several reasons for this.

First and foremost, Lovecraft's baroque style puts some bizarre demands on the visual form. Whatever the plot of a Lovecraft story, it is his style that is his most distinctive marker. In fact, fans and detractors alike tend to overstate just how precious and purple his prose gets. This is because it is the flights of fancy - those weird spills of archaic and awkward description – that stick in the mind. We can argue why Lovecraft was so quick to lapse in this rich and pulpy prose, and whether this tendency was good or bad for his writing, but these debates would just underscore how central his unique style was to everything he wrote. I've yet to see a Lovecraft adaptation that is as visually lavish and weird as Lovecraft's writing is linguistically overwrought and strange.

Second is Lovecraft's disdain for characterization in a traditional sense. Lovecraft's characters are either 1) intentional ciphers (see Herbert West), 2) humans that exist solely to get wiped out by forces beyond their control (see the farm family from "Color Out of Space"), or 3) shattered minds contemplating their own dissolution (see "The Tomb"), that last being a writing trick that gives them an illusory depth not unlike the vertigo-inducing suggestion of depth you get when you looking at your reflection as it is bounced back and forth between two mirrors. At his best, Lovecraft doesn't waste time with love interests, the bonds of friendship, emotional developments, and so on. His characters don't have the time or resources to handle any of that common human stuff. When you're being crushed by your maddening knowledge of the unfathomable and infinite evil that forms the very fabric of this fragile and indifferent universe, who's got time to call their girlfriend?

There is a single relationship that shows up again and again in Lovecraft's work. We'll call this relationship the "um friends." In several stories, Lovecraft pairs two gents together. One of them is the protagonist and the other is the narrator. It is not totally unlike the Holmes/Watson thing, only, instead of solving crimes, our duo shut themselves into castle-like mansions and perform "unspeakable rites to eldritch gods." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. These pairs are always old friends, the only close friends either of them seem to have. One is always the dominant friend, usually the one who lures our narrator into an "appreciation of the occult." And the narrator is always vague about just how they spent their time, supposedly because their sanity is shattered or they've seen things to monstrous to describe.

Here's Randolph Carter, from "The Statement of Randolph Carter":

As I Have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me . . . As to the nature of our studies – must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? . . . Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him . . .

The narrator of "The Hound" discussing his friend:

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui . . . I cannot reveal the shocking expeditions . . .

Again, from "Thing on the Doorstep":

I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life . . . I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit . . . what lay behind our joint love of shadows . . ."

I should point out that, despite the general grotesque cast of Lovecraft's world, the narrator's male friends are, when Lovecraft bothers to give them a physical description, usually quite lovely, and almost always in a frail and boyish sort of way. Derby, from the example above, is described as handsome in a soft and boyish way. Herbert West is described in terms Oscar Wilde might have used for a nerdy version of Dorian Gray: "a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice."

I'm not going to go so far as to come and say that Lovecraft's "um friends" are gay lovers. Actually, I'm don't think the idea would have occurred to Lovecraft. Instead, let's just say that hyper-intense secretive same-sex social bonds are frequently at the center of Lovecraft's stories and that these relationships occasionally suggest more than friendship.

I bring all this up, because it is yet another aspect of Lovecraft's work that might make filmmakers gun-shy about trying to adapt his stories.

Stuart Gordon's 1985 film, H. P. Lovecraft's The Re-animator is an interesting study on how one filmmaker tackles the issues presented above.

Gordon handles the problem of Lovecraft's unique and bizarre tone by simply shifting the mood of the entire story. What was surreal in Lovecraft's original becomes farce in Gordon's film.

The shift doesn't damage the plot all that much. After failing to bring back his mentor in an Austria medical school, Herbert West (played with wonderfully creepy intensity by Jeffrey Combs) transfers to good Miskatonic U. in Arkham, Mass. There he rooms with Dan, a fellow med student who just happens to be bumpin' uglies with Megan, the dean's daughter and another med student at Ol' Misk. West comes into immediate conflict with Dr. Hill, a famous professor who has a secret creepy crush on the dean's daughter. West eventually drags Dan into his experiments, the dubious and illegal nature of which is revealed to the dean and which leads to the expulsion of West and the withdrawal of Dan's financial support.

Of course, these punishments don't stop West and Dan. Mad science types so rarely just shrug their shoulders, bemoan the lack of funding, and then start up new projects in more secure and better-funded fields. Instead they bust into the school hospital and attempt to revive one of the bodies in the morgue. Things go all pear-shaped on them when the dean comes in and their recently revived subject offs him. Oops. They off subject one and decide to use the re-agent to safe the dean. Things just get worse from there.

Besides updating the story for the 20th century, Gordon condenses what is decades of action into what is maybe a week of plot. He also ups the gore, replacing Lovecraft's precious gothic dread for outright splatter. Finally, the whole thing is given an almost slapstick, over-the-top feel. Not that this is a bad thing. Gordon gets the mix of shudders and scares down pretty well and the result will appeal to those who enjoy horror-comedy flicks like the later Evil Dead 2.

As for the second problem, Gordon does here what he'll do with nearly every Lovecraft adaptation he helms: he'll add a love interest. What better way to give the characters a little development and avoid that pesky insinuation of homosexuality than to add a chick to the flick? In The Re-animator Megan is on-hand with some screaming and some full frontal nudity to ensure the characters are properly motivated and secure Dan's hetero bonifieds. In fact, the movie most diverges from the original story in the last quarter, when Hill develops into the flicks clearest villain and he and Dan struggle over Megan (who, distressingly, also ends up on the business end of the most out of place and disturbing sexual since the tree assault of the Evil Dead series).

The Re-animator, despite the claims of the full title, is not a great Lovecraft adaptation, but is a stand-out in the subgenre of gross-out horror/comedy. Gordon's done better adaptations, but few of those have the sort of anarchic energy and splatter thrills of this flick. Using my top secret Impact Crater on the Anti-Saturn Hemisphere of Saturn's Moon Enceladus Movie Rating System, I'm giving this flick a solid Shakashik. Sure, the thing would probably give Lovecraft a heart attack, but he's already dead so don't worry about it.