- Director: Stuart Gordon
- Writers: H.P. Lovecraft, Dennis Paoli
- Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 44 Minutes
- Link:
Synopsis
The nurse pounds on the door, “Doctor Gruber!” There’s a crashing inside, so the police break in. Herbert West is standing over Gruber, who is having some really dramatic reaction to something he injected. “You killed him!” the nurse accuses. He responds indignantly, “No I did not, I gave him life!” Credits roll.
We return to Miskatonic University, in Arkham Massachusetts, where medical student Dan Cain works on a dying man. The patient dies, and Cain is told to wheel her to the morgue. He meets Dean Halsey and new student, Herbert West, as well as Dr. Hill, who is doing an autopsy. West isn’t impressed with Hill, “Your work on brain death is outdated.” Dan is dating Dean Halsey’s daughter, Megan.
West comes to Dan’s place, he wants to be the new roommate. At Dr. Hill’s class, he talks about people wanting to live after death, but that’s just impossible. West annoyingly breaks pencils throughout the lecture. Megan thinks Herbert is weird, but Dan sticks up for him; when she finds her cat dead in the refrigerator, she likes him even less. He claims to have found the cat dead already.
That night, Dan hears the cat howling. But the cat’s dead, right? No, the cat’s attacking Herbert in the basement. They chase it all around with a baseball bat and croquet mallet until Dan finally kills it again. Herbert explains that his reagent will wake up the freshly dead. When Dan doesn’t believe him, Herbert re-animates the cat a second time. Megan catches them; the Dean then says he is going to expel West and cut off Dan’s student loan.
Dan sneaks Herbert into the morgue. “All we need tonight is simple evidence of a conscious reaction,” West explains. The Dean comes looking for Dan, and he heads to the morgue after him. Herbert injects his serum, and the man gets up and… shows some signs as he beats Dean Halsey to death.
West uses a medical instrument to drill a hole through the reanimated man. “He wasn’t fresh enough,” laments West. Where would they find a fresher body? They look at Halsey. They inject him, and he soon gets up, but he’s not quite the man he used to be, so they lock him in a padded room. Dr. Hill wants to operate on Halsey, and he starts hitting on Megan as well. Soon, Hill has Halsey lobotomized for easier control.
Hill knows more than he lets on and soon confronts West in his lab. Hill wants West’s formula. When Hill is distracted, West whacks him with a shovel and chops his head off. West wonders, could he just wake up the head? What about the headless body? Yes, both! Except Hill and his body soon escape. When West wakes up, all his stuff is missing.
Hill goes to his lab and injects himself with more serum and goes back to the morgue to work. Meanwhile, Halsey attacks Dan and Megan and makes off with Megan. Halsey brings Megan to Headless Hill in the morgue and undresses her, much to Hill’s satisfaction. We then get one of the weirdest sex scenes ever.
West distracts Hill while Dan gets Megan out of there. Suddenly, all the bodies in the morgue get up, under Hill’s control. Things start getting exciting until Halsey revolts and attacks Hill. West decides to test his “overdose” theory on Hill. Things get a little weird at this point, but Megan is killed. Dan, of course, realizes that this isn’t as big a deal as it used to be and injects her with Wests’s serum. What could go wrong?
Commentary
I was really surprised how well this one holds up. This is nearly a perfect horror movie. It’s got great gore, a good story and characters, and a lot of humor. Just watching Headless Hill walk around with his head in a pan is enough to make this a classic. Jeffrey Combs went on to become an icon of horror after this film, and it was, of course, completely deserved. Only he could make the line, “Who’s gonna believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow” work.
Trivia: This was the first time glow-stick liquid was ever used in a film.