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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Herbert West is clearly insane, but how much of it is natural madness and how much of it is artificial psychosis induced by simultaneously forsaking sleep and regularly shooting up with a chemical compound of gods-know-what?
  • Complete Monster: In the Novelization by Jeff Rovin, Dr. Carl Josiah Hill is a scientist and hospital researcher who is also an unapologetic plagiarist who ruins the lives and careers of his victims. When Hill discovers Dr. Herbert West's Re-Agent, he lobotomizes the revived Dean of the college and proclaims his intent to steal West's notes. Murdered by West and revived, Hill takes on new powers and begins reviving and lobotomizing other corpses as slaves with intent to kill and revive countless humans to worship him. Hill intends to kill his rivals, revive their severed heads and keep them in states of unending torment before launching them into space, sexually assaulting Halsey's daughter Megan before proclaiming he'll revive her if she dies in the battle with West.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • Okay, West killing Dr. Hill can be justified, he had it coming... But him decapitating him wholly and then re-animating the head and body separately for what amounts to shits and giggles? Seriously!
    • As usual, he justifies this with For Science!; he's never tried reanimating individual body parts before - and it works! Hill wakes up with his intelligence intact. Of course, bringing that guy of all people back was a bad idea, but at least it impacted how his research continued in Bride. This is actually directly adapted from the short story though there West did not kill the victim himself, but that was after decades of failed experiments when West's Motive Decay had begun to set in, not in the span of days like in the movie.
    • West's half-assed attempt at a cover up story when he and Cain get caught alongside a freshly Re-animated Dean Halsey...and a dead body.
    • Just before that is West, after another re-animation attempt gone wrong, immediately moves on to experiment on the freshly deceased Halsey and casually demands Cain for assistance. And then when the subject revives and goes berserk, West in his excitement tells Cain to get the recorder while the Re-animate has Cain in a chokehold.
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: It's very common that people interpret West as autistic as he's not a very social person, tends to fiddle with things, and his fixation on the idea of defeating death.
  • First Installment Wins: While the next two have their fanbases, this one's usually considered the best.
  • Ho Yay:
    • While Herbert is more likely to be asexual (even being confirmed by Jeffrey Combs), many fans have had fun interpreting his relationship with Dan like this, being akin to a Stalker with a Crush. Especially the scene where Herbert puts a blanket over Dan when he's rendered in shock after he Re-Animates Dr. Halsey.
    • It's not just the fans. Bruce Abbott has a brief giggle about it on the DVD commentary, and Brian Yuzna included a third-party essay discussing the homoeroticism of the movies with the Bride of Re-Animator special edition. The novelization of the first movie also features multiple hints, going so far as to have one character flat-out ask Herbert and Dan if they're lovers.
  • Inferred Holocaust: Played with; later films refer to the events at the first film's climax as "The Miskatonic Massacre", but in the film itself, the only casualties we see are the zombies of Dr. Hill and Dean Halsey, with the inferred destruction of the other zombies by the police off-screen. Beyond Re-Animator would later show at least some of the zombies escaped the morgue and killed innocent people in Arkham before being brought down, but it goes unexplained in Bride Of Reanimator.
  • Poor Man's Substitute: It's not hard to see that David Gale as Dr. Hill was trying to emulate horror icon Christopher Lee, right down to the aspect of having Blood from the Mouth upon getting re-animated that could bring in mind Lee's iconic performance as Hammer Horror's Count Dracula.
  • Slow-Paced Beginning: The entire purpose of the opening scene with the scientist's exploding head is because some crew members were worried the movie would otherwise take too long to get to the good stuff.
  • Squick: Plenty, but the scene where Dr. Hill brings a whole new meaning to the term "giving head" stands out in particular.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: By composer Richard Band's own admission, the theme music is essentially stolen from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The credits even acknowledge this, with the film's score being credited to Band, "with humble apologies to Bernard Herrmann".
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • The movie is actually really good in this regard, especially for a b-movie from the 1980's... with one glaring exception; Rufus the cat. The model they used isn't even slightly convincing and looks more like they disemboweled a rejected Muppet than a cat.
    • The intact Rufus clinging to the back of Mr. West a few minutes earlier isn't any better, no matter how much Jeffrey Combs flails arounds it's very clearly an unmoving stuffed animal.
    • Also, the effect of Dr. Hill's disembodied head, either being carried around or left in the pan, is generally unconvincing. While it's definitely not the worst effect in the world, this trope is on full display during Hill's final confrontation with West, where his head is being held by his body just above his waist, which all of a sudden looks about a foot and a half wider than it did at any other point in the movie.
  • The Woobie: Poor, poor Dan Cain. He had just about everything until West stepped in and it all went downhill from there.


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