Re-Animator

Herbert West arrives at Miskatonic University with a glowing green reagent that returns the dead to life, badly.

Stuart Gordon staged it originally as theatre and the film keeps a farce structure: doors, timing, a cat, and an escalating series of problems that each solve the last one worse.

Jeffrey Combs plays West as a humourless, arrogant undergraduate who is annoyed that nobody is taking his research seriously, and the deadpan is why the film works.

Richard Band's score is a deliberate, near-actionable pastiche of Herrmann's Psycho theme, played as a joke.

The severed head sequence is the most notorious thing in it and was cut everywhere. It is played for comedy and is still difficult.

Released unrated because cutting it for an R would have removed the film. It made money anyway and Gordon and Combs made several more together.