The night before principal photography was set to begin on the long-awaited sequel to Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, director Brian Yuzna‘s house caught fire. It was his second feature as a director; the script had gone through quite a bit of tumult (to the point that a completed shooting script barely existed), and it had taken six years to get the movie to production in the first place. It’s a minor miracle Yuzna even stuck around.
This is the narrative that emerges through the jam-packed special features lineup on Ignite Films’ new 4K remaster of Bride of Re-Animator, a gnarly and glisteningly gory movie even by the standards of the classic original. It almost didn’t happen; it took a long time to get going, and by the time it was going, it wasn’t exactly a well-oiled machine with a massive budget to play with. But it happened, and now it’s got the box set release it deserves.
I first came upon Bride of Re-Animator in the VHS era, so on the surface level it’s just great to see a Yuzna-approved 4K version of this thing out in the world, where you can see every hand-sculpted vein, every wild gag, every beam of light rendered not just with detail, but with an eye toward preserving the kind of intimate zaniness of the film.
So much of Bride of Re-Animator takes place in a basement, as Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbot) try to wield a new and improved version of their glowing green re-animator serum to take things beyond simple restoration and into the realm of creation. It’s dingy, it’s dark, and it’s cramped, and yet cinematographer Rick Fichter finds so many places to put unexpected light, from the stained glass windows around the house to the strategically placed bulbs around the lab, that the film just crackles with a quirky sci-fi glow. It looks gorgeous, and the 4K never lets go of the Gothic shadows in service to bringing in even more light, so it still looks balanced and intentional.
Throw in solid audio, including that witty Richard Band score, and even the more affordable standard edition (Bloody Disgusting was sent the Deluxe Edition Box Set, which includes everything except the new finger creature collectible phone holder) will be a welcome addition to your collection.
But then we get into the new features, headlined by Till Death Do Us Part: Making Bride of Re-Animator, a 60-minute documentary featuring Yuzna, Combs, Abbott, Fichter, Band, makeup effects legend Howard Berger, and more. As making-of docs go, it’s pretty standard fare, but the interviews are gold, as the cast and crew discuss the more comedic tone, the troubled production, the gore, and more, covering everything from the influence of The Bride of Frankenstein to Yuzna’s house fire and the stress that added to a movie that basically never shows the stress of making it in any shot.
Other new features, like lobby cards and a commentary track from Sarah Sherman, feel like you’re watching a movie with your cool horror-comedy friend, and it’s a blast to explore all the new wrinkles in this film’s still-expanding legacy. I would have loved more new deep dives, particularly devoted to the makeup effects, but this certainly doesn’t feel incomplete.
One of the reasons those of us who went crazy for the golden age of DVD bonus features 25 years ago long for box sets like this one, with new commentaries and documentaries and other treats, is because when they’re done properly, they tell a story unto themselves. There’s the narrative of the film, but there’s also the narrative of the people who made it, what they were thinking and feeling and fighting to achieve in that moment in their lives, and how it makes them feel now.
Mere weeks before this box set arrived at my door, we found out we’d lost makeup effects legend Screaming Mad George, who developed the look of Herbert West’s many orphaned mutant creations in the film. His absence adds weight to this release, lends more meaning to how hard all of these young, crazy, creative people worked, and accentuates the power of the kind of raw imaginative energy that went into this movie.
That’s the narrative here. Bride of Re-Animator is the story of a scientist breaking all the rules, but it’s also the story of a group of horror luminaries somehow finding a way to make one of the best horror sequels of all time, and this box set not only points to that; it expounds on it. It gives us more of the story, with all the heart and chaos and humor that it implies, and that makes it a delight from slipcase to essay, lobby cards to commentaries. It’s about as complete as a release like this can get.
Bride of Re-Animator is now available in 4K from Ignite Films.
