Question Re-Animation

You can always tell a new Netflix user from an old one. A friend of mine who joined less than a year ago was surprised to hear I rarely visit my queue to rearrange and organize my movies. Indeed, after a few years and having seen most of the films I needed to see, I sort of stopped visiting that page. Whenever I add a film I want to see immediately, I can hit a button to bump it to the top of the list without visiting the actual list. Since my list is consistently close to the 500 DVD limit and the page takes some time to load, this is an appreciated feature.

So from time to time, surprises rise to the top of the list, movies I didn't remember adding in the first place. Such was the case with Re-Animator, a cult ‘80s zombie flick based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. There was blood and violence and gratuitous nudity, all on par with the likes of Evil Dead. There was a certain tongue-in-cheek quality as well, dark humor mixed in with the gothic tale of a young scientist who perfects a reagent, a chemical that can re-animate dead tissue, bringing corpses to life but inducing violent reactions as well. The acting was, for the most part, on par with a bad soap opera, but then one doesn't watch gore for acting. As the film went on, I found the most over the top performance by Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West to be a major saving grace.

Combs delivered his lines with cold affectation and restrained glee, laughing at inappropriate times like a nerd with no social skills, speaking to professors and doctors not just as equals, but as inferiors. His detachment gave his character a certain freedom in the face of things that horrified his companions. In one scene, he casually strolls into a morgue, gently pushing aside the arm of a zombie to confront the evil severed head of a rival professor tormenting a helpless coed. Honestly, how many films can be described with a sentence like that last one?

I was surprised I'd never heard of the actor, although there was some familiar quality I couldn't place. There were two sequels to the film, which I discovered were already on my queue, likely added at the same time as this one. 1990's Bride of Re-Animator picked up roughly where the first movie left off, ignoring certain things to make the plot make sense. It took itself even less seriously and bordered on comedy as West, in full mad scientist mode, experiments with cobbled together body parts. One horrific creation is an eyeball attached to several fingers, and the thing runs around like a spider. By the time a head is flying around on bat wings, you're either along for the ride or you've already removed the DVD and placed it in a return envelope. Again, Combs' performance made the film more than watchable, and by the third movie, Beyond Re-Animator, the actor is practically the only good thing. That one reminded me of Prison Break with zombies, and might have been better if the majority of the cast were not speaking in badly dubbed English over their native Spanish.

Still, I was surprised this guy hadn't achieved a Bruce Campbell status. Perhaps he had, and simply lacked the mainstream exposure that Campbell gained with his television work and smaller roles in bigger budget films. I was probably out of the loop, and yet I couldn't shake that I knew him from somewhere. In my research I found a variety of credits throughout several Star Trek series, almost always playing an alien in heavy makeup. At one point he apparently played two different characters in the same episode of DS9, a series I've yet to go back and watch beyond the first season. When I saw he played Shran, the lead blue alien on Enterprise, I finally connected the dots. I gave up on Enterprise by the second or possibly third season, but caught enough episodes to realize the voice coming out of that recurring alien was quite similar to that of Dr. West. And yet, that wasn't the voice credit I was most familiar with.

One of the best story arcs in Justice League Unlimited involved the crazed conspiracy theories of The Question, whose discovery of the horrific actions of his fellow heroes in an alternate reality lead him to take drastic steps to prevent the same thing from happening in his own. I hadn't been all that familiar with the character prior to that series, a ‘60s noir character with a fedora and a faceless mask. Rorschach of the Watchmen was a direct homage to The Question. He was definitely one of my favorite characters in JLU, a surprise “B” level character that gained more importance and significance in the animated series than he had in the books. It was also not Combs' first outing in the DC Animated Universe, and when I first heard The Question I should have remembered his stint as Scarecrow in Batman.

Going forward, I'll probably recognize Combs' work now, whether from a sound booth or beneath face paint and prosthetics. On September 11th, Combs was mistakenly reported dead when a Jeffrey Coombs was listed among those on board one of the crashed flights. Combs is still with us and still working, and a new Re-Animator sequel is set for a 2010 release date. Like Herbert West, he'll likely inject life into a franchise that most would not have expected to last beyond the first film.