"I gave him life."

I didn't always have the prestige of a blogspot address. Way back when I still had my own personal Facebook page, I heard tell of an unfortunate mortal, so young, so innocent, she had not grown up going down to the local video store to rent horror movies. Streaming video was the only world she had ever known, and thus, she lived in slobbering ignorance of one of the greatest films of all time.

Her conundrum inspired me to report in a Facebook status that the movie was on Netflix, just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by a new generation of fans. That simple, three-sentence review I wrote has been lost to the ages, and the movie is still sitting there, which has to be some kind of record for a good movie to still be on Netflix.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Re-Animator.

This 1985 Stuart Gordon film is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story called "Herbert West: Re-Animator". Jeffrey Combs plays West, a student who studied under the famous Dr. Gruber in Munich. One day, they were doing an experiment and Dr. Gruber's eyeballs exploded all over the place, so West had to switch schools. He attends Miskatonic University and immediately confronts his instructor Dr. Hill (David Gale) with charges of plagiarism, and the two build an adversarial relationship consisting mostly of mad scientist smack talk.

West rents a room in the house of fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Cain is dating the dean's daughter, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), who spends a fair amount of her screen time naked. West shows Cain the special reagent he developed with Gruber. The reagent raises the dead. If you could raise the dead you'd be the best doctor ever, right? So why not study it?

There are really only two problems:

1.) West can never seem to find a fresh enough cadaver. Mere minutes of decomposition so compromises the specimens so on returning to life, they come back as juiced-up rage zombies.

2.) Miskatonic University frowns on medical research about raising the dead, which seems pretty conservative considering its reputation in the Lovecraft mythos as a place where people are always summoning trans-dimensional demons because the library keeps loaning out the instructions. You'd think they had admitted West on the strength of his essay, entitled, "I have a syringe full of glowing green shit that makes dead people jump up off the gurney and try to kill everyone they see," but that's not the case, I guess. If West and Cain are caught, their careers are over.

What Re-Animator does so well is blend silliness and gore. The mid-1980s saw a lot of horror-comedies, and I'd put this one up there with the greats like Evil Dead II and Return of the Living Dead. It's one of my all-time favorites, and it streams on Netflix and Shudder.