The two middle-aged academics in Stuart Gordon‘s Re-Animator (1985) are hardly charmers. Well, they really get their comeuppance in this crazy horror flick, and likewise with the arrogant young med student, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who knows how to re-animate corpses. He’s unworthy of the discovery.

Based on writings by H.P. Lovecraft, this cult concoction turns into an adult fairy tale with a damsel in distress. Such actors as Combs and Barbara Crampton are delightfully adept, but David Gale and Robert Sampson are also wildly, creepily convincing. Moreover, Re-Animator is one of the most sensual American movies I’ve seen. The pronouncedly attractive Ms. Crampton has breasts that are comely from every angle, and are fondled by a headless reprobate! Her damsel-in-distress scenes compete well with, say, Giovanni Baglione’s painting, Judith and Holofernes. I mean it. There are some other nude bodies in the film, in dim lighting, but they aren’t sensual.

Nice, smooth work by director Stuart.

Re The Hospital, directed by Arthur Hiller:

Some strange deaths are occurring in a New York City hospital, and there is enough breakdown there as it is. The hospital is under assault, and frankly so is society. For one thing, people living in a condemned building are angry that the hospital has purchased the building in order to raze it and expand medical functions there. Crafted by Paddy Chayefsky, the tragicomic plot is rickety, but the dialogue and George C. Scott‘s performance as a despairing (but then happy) doctor are great. A worthwhile opus, this.

A 12-year-old boy called Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) keeps reminding himself that suffering or hardship is relative. For long stretches of time, he lives what appears to be a dog’s life—this a reality in the 1985 Swedish film, My Life as a Dog, directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Ah, but this comic confection would be much better if it wasn’t childishly preoccupied with female breasts, primarily through spoken references to them. To be sure, dollops of kid and adult nudity are here too, and so, curiously, are flatness and insufficiency. Who, really, is the sexy Berit (Inge-Marie Carlsson), and even Ingemar’s goofy uncle (Tomas von Bromssen)? More annoying is that Dog is vulgar enough to almost smile on child sex. This Dog has had its day and should now be forgotten.

(In Swedish with English subtitles)

The 1956 John Ford film, The Searchers, isn’t perfect but it’s riveting. To me it seems longer than two hours and I’m glad of it, since the plot is sturdy and the Monument Valley and San Juan River scenes are gorgeous. John Wayne, even so, tries to make main character Ethan Edwards a hero, but the man is not a hero. It is Ward Bond‘s Reverend/Captain Clayton who is a largely decent soul; Ethan, a narrow-minded monster until the end, isn’t. . . As for the acting, Wayne is simply too limited, and most of the other actors rant and fret excessively. Bond, I think, is fine, but I dislike Jeffrey Hunter.

In Tom Perrotta‘s short story “Backrub” (from the book, Nine Inches), the teenaged Donald stands up to a middle-aged, homosexual cop who wants to give Donald a backrub. Good. All the same, the young dude is proving to be a moral disappointment—to his parents and, well, even the world. He backs away from a commitment to travel to Uganda and help orphans there. Eventually he gets into big trouble with the police.

Donald senses that he can afford to be an “asshole” or a rebel of sorts. This is a “backrub” he can live with. He’s wrong, though. This seems to be a coming of age story (in an oh-so-liberal world)—a rich and assuredly not-boring one. The “Steinbeck of suburbia,” as Perrotta has been called, has done it again.