Video Scripts: Cat People (1982), Bride of Re-Animator, Con Air
Cody shares more videos he wrote for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; two for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and the other for JoBlo Originals.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I looked back at director Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of the 1942 classic Cat People:
Cat People script:
INTRO: Near the end of the 1970s, Universal Pictures was able to gain access to the library of films that had been made by RKO decades earlier. A plan was set in motion: they were going to release a series of remakes of RKO classics. This plan led to them bringing the world updated versions of two RKO horror films in 1982. Unfortunately, both of those remakes were box office disappointments. Their failure killed the whole remake series idea. One of them was director John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is now widely considered to be among the best horror movies of all time. The other was director Paul Schrader’s take on Cat People – which may be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Released in 1942, the original Cat People exists because of Citizen Kane. While many consider it to be the best movie ever made, Citizen Kane was not successful at first. RKO lost money backing it, and in an attempt to recoup their losses they hired producer Val Lewton to make a bunch of low budget horror movies for them. RKO would provide the titles and Lewton would turn them into movies that should run no longer than seventy-five minutes and cost no more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Provided with the title Cat People, Lewton hired DeWitt Bodeen to flesh out a story that director Jacques Tourneur would bring to the screen. The story centers on a young woman named Irena, who has come to New York City from a small village in Serbia that has a dark history. It’s said that, long ago, the people of her village had gotten into dark magic and Satanic practices. Some of the women gained the ability to turn into panthers, “in jealousy or anger or out of their own corrupt passions”. Many of these evil people were executed, but some escaped into the mountains. Fearing that she’s a descendant of these cat people, Irena isolates herself. She doesn’t allow herself to get close to people. Once she finally does, there are disastrous results.
When development on the remake began in the ‘70s, Paul Schrader was not the first choice to direct. Which makes sense, because he didn’t have any horror credentials at the time. The first filmmakers to get involved were Black Christmas director Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby. Who had worked with Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged, and Deathdream. These guys had plenty of horror cred going into Cat People. Clark soon departed the project, but Ormsby would remain on board as writer.
Under the guidance of producer Charles Fries, Ormsby set the story in New Orleans and made voodoo the reason for the cat transformations. His approach to the material was to play up the sexual side of the concept. The idea of a woman turning into a panther if she gives in to passion. Roger Vadim seemed to be the perfect director for this take on Cat People. He had directed horror before, with Blood and Roses and Spirits of the Dead. And sex was often a prominent topic in his films. He had a reputation for turning actresses into global sex symbols, like his exes Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Vadim was concerned that a movie about a woman turning into a panther if she has sex would be perceived as sexist. So he suggested that Ormsby add a male cat person into the mix as well.
Like Clark, Vadim soon moved on from Cat People. This is when Universal turned to the unexpected choice of Schrader. Not only was Schrader new to horror, but he had also never directed someone else’s screenplay before. He had written films for major directors like Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, and Brian De Palma. He was best known for writing Taxi Driver. The reception of that movie allowed him to start directing his own films. Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo. And it was the box office success of American Gigolo that made him appealing to Universal. They happened to approach him at just the right time. Schrader was working on a project that was difficult to get into production because the subject matter was too personal. All of his films had been personal in a way. So when he was offered Cat People, he thought it would be fun to do something that wasn’t personal for a change. To get off the self-examination pedestal, as he put it. He could make this movie and the focus would be on the horror and special effects instead of himself. But as it turned out, Cat People ended up being one of the most personal films of his career.
Not surprisingly, Schrader did his own uncredited rewrite of Ormsby’s script. The voodoo element was removed. In its place, we’re told that the cat people are descendants of an ancient tribe that would sacrifice children to leopards. The souls of the children then grew inside the leopards, turning them into humans. These cat people were seen as gods at the time. Now their existence is kept secret from the public. We’re given a glimpse of this ancient tribe in a prologue that Schrader added to the story. He also changed the ending, replacing Ormsby’s typical creature feature scenario of the monster being trapped in a burning house with something much more twisted.
Bo Derek, at the time very popular for her appearance in the Blake Edwards movie 10, was considered for the lead cat person role. Instead of Derek, the part went to Nastassja Kinski, who had previously earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film Tess. Schrader would later admit that her acting ability wasn’t his main reason for casting her. He said, “I had pretty well decided on her without ever seeing her act. I had seen her once in Cannes, walking out of a hotel. She had this ethereal, odd beauty. Like it fell from the sky. It seemed unearthly. Just right for this role.”
Kinski plays Irena, a young woman who has come to New Orleans to reconnect with her older brother Paul. The pair were separated when they were children, after their parents died. Schrader cast Malcolm McDowell as Paul, and McDowell said he was hesitant to sign on because he didn’t think the original Cat People had been very good. His character was not in the original. He’s the one who was added in at Vadim’s request… and he brings a whole new level of oddness to the concept. While Irena doesn’t yet know that they’re cat people, Paul is fully aware of how this all works. He reveals that cat people are an incestuous race. They can only have sex with their relatives. If they have sex with someone outside of their family, they will transform into black leopards. And then the only way to regain human form is to kill. Since Irena is a virgin, she has never transformed.
While waiting for his sister to give in to him, Paul meets up with a prostitute played by genre regular Lynn Lowry. She had previously been seen in George A. Romero’s The Crazies and David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Although the script has tied the cat transformations directly to sex, the movie doesn’t quite play by that rule. Transformations happen without sex. Paul has already turned into a leopard before the prostitute gets to his hotel room. But when something is this weird, you can’t get too nitpicky with it. Paul doesn’t manage to kill the prostitute, so he’s stuck in leopard form until he can take a life. In the meantime, he is captured by local zoo curator Oliver, played by a then-virtually-unknown John Heard. Heard is another actor who was hesitant to sign on. In his case, it was because the story was so sexually charged, he was concerned the movie would be pornographic.
The leopard Paul is set up at the zoo, where Oliver works alongside his ex Alice, played by Annette O’Toole, and Joe, played by Ed Begley Jr. We also get a fun cameo from John Larroquette as a clueless zoo official. While seeing the sights of New Orleans, Irena finds herself drawn to the leopard’s cage in the zoo. There, she catches the attention of Oliver, who instantly becomes enamored with her. Now we have the makings of a deadly love triangle, as Irena is caught in a rivalry between Oliver and Paul. Either she’s going to make love to Oliver and become a bloodthirsty creature, or she’ll end up with her insane brother.
Other characters we meet as the story plays out include Frankie Faison as a detective – but Schrader decided to have Albert Hall dub over his voice. And Ruby Dee as Paul’s housekeeper Femolly, a character who wasn’t named at birth, so her name is a mispronunciation of the word female. The scene where Femolly explains her name is pretty much her standout moment in the film. She wasn’t given a lot to do otherwise.
The panthers in the films are played by a mixture of actual black leopards and cougars that were dyed black. Since the leopards couldn’t be trained, the cougars had to handle any moments where the big cats needed to hit marks and perform specific tasks.
BACKGROUND: For Schrader, Cat People evolved from an impersonal genre piece into a very personal project because he fell for Kinski during production. He has said that he became obsessed with her. So his reality began to reflect the film, where Oliver and Paul are both obsessed with Kinski’s character Irena. He was engaged and planning to have a family with his longterm girlfriend, but he ended that relationship to pursue one with Kinski. He was ready to propose to her as well, but their affair didn’t last long enough to reach the proposal. They had broken up before the movie wrapped, which made it difficult for them to work together at times.
Matters of the heart weren’t the only things causing trouble on this set, as Schrader has also admitted that he had a serious addiction problem at the time. An entire day of filming was lost because he was in his trailer doing cocaine. When crew members were sent to get him out of the trailer and bring him to set, they would end up doing cocaine with him instead.
But despite these distracting personal issues, Schrader was able to deliver a well-crafted film. Cat People is disturbing, but captivating. Lurid, but elegant. Like the original film, it takes a goofy horror B-movie concept – the idea of people turning into panthers – and turns it into a prestige picture. But Schrader wasn’t a big fan of the original, and did not like it when viewers compared his movie to it. Aside from the were-cat idea, the two films have very little in common. A few characters have the same first names as characters in the 1942 film. A few scenes were recycled in homage. Irena sketches a caged panther in both films. She’s approached in public by a strange woman who refers to her as “My sister”. And in both versions of Cat People there’s a scene where the Alice character is stalked at an indoor swimming pool. Aside from names and those few moments, the director and writer rebuilt Cat People from the ground up. So when some viewers started saying the remake wasn’t as good as the original, Schrader began to feel they should have changed the title as well. That wouldn’t have made sense, of course, because most remakes exist solely to cash in on titles.
Attempting to cash in on the Cat People title didn’t work out for Universal. Made on a budget of twelve-point-five million dollars, the remake barely broke into the box office top ten during its opening weekend. It only made a total of seven million at the domestic box office. It did slightly better internationally, for a final gross of twenty-one million. When it wrapped up its theatrical run, Schrader was left feeling that the film’s style had worked against it. He said, “Cat People wasn’t successful. It really fell between two stools: it was an attempt to have things both ways, which is to have a classy film and a horror film. Well, the horror audience went and said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like a horror film, it’s not for us’, and the sophisticated audience went and said, ‘Hey, this is just a horror film.’ So it wasn’t really satisfying.”
The film did eventually find its own audience, and has gained a cult following – as well as more respect – over the years. It has received special edition releases on both DVD and Blu-ray with commentaries and interviews that allow fans to gain further insight into the production. It was also briefly covered in Peter Biskind’s popular book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But the most famous and enduring thing about the movie may be the theme song “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”, performed by David Bowie. Bowie later re-recorded the song for his album Let’s Dance. Over the years it has been covered by several other artists and featured in movies and TV shows like Inglourious Basterds and The Office.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Schrader saved the Bowie song for the end credits, but there are elements of it throughout the film, in the incredible score composed by Giorgio Moroder. The sound of Moroder’s synthesizer helped the director achieve a very dreamy tone for his movie. Schrader has said that while his previous projects were about daydreams, this was his first movie about nightmares. It is a rather subdued nightmare, though. There are shocking moments and bursts of bloody violence, but the film’s main goal is to immerse the viewer in its strange atmosphere.
The low-key approach extends to the presentation of the cat transformations. Cat People was released around the same time as several other horror movies that featured stunning special effects sequences. Rather than try to compete with the likes of The Howling, Schrader decided to take a more psychological approach to his movie. He keeps the transformations off screen as much as possible. We mostly see the beginnings of transformations or the gross aftermath. Including one disgusting scene where Paul pulls some skin off his stomach and pops it in his mouth. But, when Schrader had already shot about seventy-five percent of the movie, Universal decided they wanted to see a more graphic transformation in Cat People. Something along the lines of the transformation scene in their new release An American Werewolf in London. So toward the end of Cat People, Schrader shows us more of a transformation – and special effects artist Tom Burman brought Ormsby’s vision of a leopard tearing itself out of a human’s skin to the screen.
The movie is filled with stunning visuals even when people aren’t turning into monsters. With the help of cinematographer John Bailey and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti – who is credited as a visual consultant because he was non-union. The most showy of these visuals come in flashbacks and visions of the desert the cat people tribe used to inhabit. The sand of this desert is red, and as it blows through the air the entire screen is saturated in red.
Aside from impressive imagery, Cat People also features strong performances from its cast. McDowell plays unhinged very well, and Kinski makes us care about Irena as we watch her struggle to deal with the mind-blowing, terrifying reality of her ancestry. She fights against her true nature for as long as possible, even though it seems like a hopeless situation. Oliver may be just as obsessed with Irena as Paul is, but Heard makes sure his interest in her never comes off as creepy. He loves her, he wants to take care of her. He’s a good protagonist character who isn’t really able to stop anything bad from happening. In a way, O’Toole’s character Alice accomplishes more than Oliver does. So it is somewhat odd that she has a heroic moment that’s soon followed by the scene of her being naked and vulnerable in the swimming pool.
BEST SCENE(S): The scenes Cat People ‘82 re-used from the 1942 version don’t feel completely necessary, but the swimming pool scene is one of the most popular moments in the first movie. If it wasn’t in the remake, viewers probably would have been disappointed. It was so well-known, Schrader did his best to replicate it. For traditional horror scenes, it is one of the standout moments in the remake as well – and in an interview O’Toole confirmed it was an unnerving scene to film. She said, “It was scary, because it was shot in Pasadena at this really old YMCA. It was the first time I had ever experienced being followed by this camera that was being operated from another room. So there was no one in the pool room, except me and this enormous crane thing with the camera following me. It really was quiet and creepy and my voice would echo in the place, so it was not hard to be scared out of my mind. Plus I was wet and cold and I was naked, which helped.”
All of the cat attack sequences in the film are great. Genre fans will also be happy to see the special effects displayed in a scene where Oliver performs an autopsy on a cat person’s corpse. Schrader somewhat regretted shooting this scene because he said it was “too genre” for his taste. But he also admitted that horror movies should have moments like this.
Another great aspect of the film is the ending that Schrader wrote to replace Ormsby’s burning house climax. It may not be as exciting as the fire sequence would have been, but it’s the perfect ending for this weird, dreamy, low-key movie.
PARTING SHOT: Oliver can’t be with Irena. Every time they make love, she’ll turn into a leopard and have to kill somebody to become human again. But he finds a way to take care of her and give her what she wants. As Schrader describes it, Oliver enshrines the object of his affection. Like the obsessions characters have for Irena reflected the obsession Schrader had for Kinski, the ending of the film sort of reflects the end of their relationship as well. They didn’t end up together, but Cat People feels like a shrine to Kinski. It’s also a fascinating, troubling horror movie that still holds up as something special decades after it came and went at the box office.
My next video script was also for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, and this time the subject was an underappreciated sequel. Brian Yuzna's 1990 follow-up to Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator:
Bride of Re-Animator script:
INTRO: In 1985, Brian Yuzna produced director Stuart Gordon’s feature debut, the low budget horror film Re-Animator, based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. The movie Gordon and Yuzna made was quickly embraced by genre fans, with many considering it to be one of the best horror movies of the ‘80s, if not of all time. So it’s no surprise that it was followed by sequels, with Yuzna taking over as director. Released in 1990, the first sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, proved to be more divisive than its predecessor. There weren’t a lot of fans who celebrated it as an instant classic. But if you’ve only seen Re-Animator and haven’t taken a look at its sequels, we’re here to tell you that Bride of Re-Animator is a very worthy follow-up. It might even be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Stuart Gordon made Re-Animator because he felt that too many Dracula movies had been made and he wanted to see more Frankenstein stories. But rather than do another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, Gordon based his movie on a lesser known, but also public domain, story. One written by H.P. Lovecraft. The adaptation scripted by Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and William J. Norris centered on Herbert West, a med student at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. West has created a serum that he believes is a way to beat death. And it does bring people back to life when it’s injected into their corpses. Problem is, it tends to turn them into bloodthirsty maniacs. West’s classmate Dan Cain, who is dating the Dean’s daughter Meg, gets mixed up in his experiments. Then Meg gets involved when her dad is killed and she’s assaulted by the headless-but-living corpse of Doctor Hill. A rival of West’s who always had a twisted obsession with Meg. When the morgue at the Miskatonic University hospital is overrun with zombies created by Hill, Meg gets strangled to death by one of them… And the loss of Meg is a major part of the story for Bride of Re-Animator.
Yuzna didn’t originally intend to direct the sequel himself. Gordon was still on board when development began. He came up with a couple different ideas. One would have had Herbert West and Dan Cain cruising around the city in a hearse, looking for fresh corpses to experiment on. Another was inspired by John Hinckley Junior’s attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The story would have started with Dan trying to re-animate Meg. Then he would be captured by government agents and taken to the White House, where he and West are ordered to re-animate the dead president. This is an idea Gordon would return to during the George W. Bush administration, but it didn’t go into production then either. A few years after the release of Re-Animator, Yuzna was able to secure a production deal with a company called Wild Street. They funded Yuzna’s directorial debut, the slime-coated horror film Society, and also had two-point-five million dollars they wanted to put into a Re-Animator sequel. Unfortunately, Gordon was busy working on other projects. Specifically, he was going to be making The Pit and the Pendulum for Full Moon. It was going to be filming at the same time Wild Street wanted to go into production on the Re-Animator sequel. So Gordon had to drop out. Yuzna took the helm, and set aside any story ideas Gordon, Paoli, and Norris had provided. He had Society writers Rick Fry and Woody Keith come up with something new. Something that drew inspiration from elements of Lovecraft’s story the first Re-Animator didn’t cover. And which followed in the footsteps of the best sequel Yuzna could think of: The Bride of Frankenstein.
Yuzna said, “Sequels are usually doomed. If the first film was really good, it’s almost impossible to tell the story again. What are the sequels that have had a real degree of success? I think you have to go back to The Bride of Frankenstein. It was good, an equal to the original. To me, Bride of Re-Animator is as much Mary Shelley as it is Lovecraft. Shelley wrote the story for modern horror. Her themes are so monumental; the grandeur of it all, the reaching for the stars, the idea that there’s nothing in the universe until you create it. Herbert West and Dan Cain are the two sides to Victor Frankenstein. And I love the pathos of the creation being rejected by the creator. … The first one was about sustaining and reanimating life, this one’s about the creation of life.”
Although it was made a few years after the first movie, the sequel picks up just eight months after the events of Re-Animator. The massacre at the Miskatonic morgue is still a mystery to some, but West and his reluctant assistant Dan have moved on. When we catch up with them, they’ve been spending some time serving as battlefield medics in a war in Peru. Which gives West some very fresh corpses to experiment on. During this time, he has discovered that amniotic fluid extracted from iguanas can make his re-animation serum even better. Soon, West and Dan return to Arkham. They move into a large house that sits at the edge of a cemetery. In his basement lab, West continues to experiment with his improved serum. And during the day, they do their best to appear to be normal doctors at the Miskatonic hospital.
Since Doctor Hill was able to control his body even after his head was severed, West has come to realize that consciousness resides in every part of the body. Not just the mind. So individual parts of a person can be re-animated, it doesn’t have to be a complete corpse. This leads to him conducting even more bizarre experiments. He creates hybrid creatures by combining body parts he steals from the hospital. And from the tombs next door. Things like a dog with a human arm. And a creature that is nothing but an eyeball attached to fingers. West begins to see that he would be able to create an entire new human being from assembled body parts. So he starts putting together a female body. The Bride of the title.
Herbert West and Dan Cain were played by Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott, respectively, in the first film. Yuzna was able to get them to reprise their roles in Bride of Re-Animator. But he couldn’t get Barbara Crampton, who had played Meg, to return for a cameo. At the time, it was said that she couldn’t get away from the soap opera she was working on to go to the Bride set. Crampton would later admit that her agent had advised her against making such a short cameo in the movie. The role of Meg was recast with Mary Sheldon, also a soap opera actress, for a scene where Dan mistakenly tries to revive her with West’s serum. That scene didn’t end up in the movie, though.
In Re-Animator, West had insulted Doctor Hill’s talking severed head by telling him to get a job in a sideshow. Another scene deleted from Bride along the way would have shown that Doctor Hill’s head was being displayed in a carnival sideshow. The Famous Talking Head from the Miskatonic Massacre. Hill’s head appeared to be destroyed at the end of the first movie, but when actor David Gale heard a sequel was in the works he called Yuzna and asked if there was anything for him to do in it. So Yuzna had Hill’s head written into Bride. He’s still around, he still hates Herbert West, and he wants revenge. Mel Stewart was cast as Doctor Graves, who works at Miskatonic and has been put in charge of the body parts left over from the massacre. He tries to figure out why they’re not decomposing. Messes around with a bottle of West’s serum that was left in the morgue. And when Hill’s head is brought back to the hospital, Graves finds out just how unpleasant the guy is. By the end of the film, Hill’s head will be flying around with a pair of bat wings that have been stuck on him.
Another character West and Dan have to be wary of is police detective Leslie Chapham. He’s determined to get to the bottom of what happened in the Miskatonic morgue because he has very personal ties to the massacre. Not only was his partner attacked by a resurrected corpse that night, but his own wife is one of those resurrected corpses. Now she’s a mindless zombie, locked up in a psychiatric ward, along with a couple of the other re-animated dead people. Charles Napier of Rambo: First Blood Part II and The Silence of the Lambs read for the role of Chapham. So did Michael Parks of From Dusk Till Dawn and the Kevin Smith movies Red State and Tusk. The role ended up going to Claude Earl Jones of Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Evilspeak.
Dan is still mourning and reeling from the death of Meg, but he gets two new love interests in this movie. In Peru, he meets an Italian woman named Francesca, played by Summer School’s Fabiana Udenio. Francesca comes to visit him in Arkham… and discovers that spending the night in the same place as Herbert West is not a pleasant experience. The other love interest is a cancer patient named Gloria, who Dan becomes infatuated with. He even comes to think of her as Meg. “Meg who lived.” Unfortunately, she doesn’t live for very long. After she dies, West realizes the perfect way to get Dan invested in his new corpse bride experiment. The body he puts together from pieces taken from multiple corpses, “the remnants of a meaningless existence”, as he puts it, includes: The feet of a ballet dancer. The legs of a prostitute. The womb of a virgin. The arms of a waitress. A lawyer’s hand. The hand of a murderess. The heart of Meg, stolen from Doctor Graves’ collection. And the head of Gloria.
The casting of Gloria came down to two contenders. Patricia Tallman, who genre fans would soon see taking on the role of Barbara in the remake of Night of the Living Dead. And Kathleen Kinmont, previously seen in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Kinmont won the role – and since she plays Gloria, she also plays the Bride with Gloria’s head.
BACKGROUND: Once Wild Street had the financing in place, Bride of Re-Animator was on the fast track to production and Yuzna couldn’t get it to slow down. Wild Street wanted cameras to start rolling on June 5th, 1989. In February of that year, Yuzna was thinking of basing the film on an outline that had been written by Dennis Paoli. By May, Rick Fry and Woody Keith had turned in a draft of their own script. Yuzna was hoping Wild Street would give them more time to do any revisions that might be necessary, but they stood firm on the June 5th production start date. So not only did Yuzna have less than a month to get the script in satisfactory shape, he also had to cast the movie in that time. And get the effects crews started on the many effects that would be required for the film.
There were so many effects, they had to be delegated to multiple companies. John Carl Buechler’s Magical Media Industries worked on the first movie, so they were brought back for this one. The company’s Mike Deak and Wayne Toth handled all of the effects that involved Doctor Hill’s head. Tony Doublin of Doublin FX created the fingers-and-eyeball creature, which was brought to life through Dave Allen’s stop-motion animation. Doublin also created a puppet to play a dog with a human arm. Most of West’s hybrid creations were the work of Screaming Mad George. Wayne Beauchamp did the mechanical effects. And KNB provided the gore, and created the Bride. Turning Kathleen Kinmont into the Bride was a six hour process for the KNB crew. They had a large leg brace they considered adding to the Bride design. When they decide not to, they kept the brace so they could use it in a different movie. Leatherface wears it in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3.
The effects artists said they tried to make their work over-the-top on this one, as Yuzna didn’t want subtlety. The director confirmed that, saying, “I hate movies that don’t go far enough. I like to be outrageous. … Stuart Gordon is against doing anything you couldn’t do on stage. As far as I’m concerned, every gimmick is worth pursuing. I really enjoy the fantasy stuff.” And that’s why the sights we’re shown in Bride of Re-Animator are even more insane than what we saw in the first Re-Animator.
Jeffrey Combs’ performance as Herbert West has made the character a genre icon, but for a while it looked like he wouldn’t be in this sequel. He had already been cast in Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum, with its shooting schedule that conflicted with the schedule Wild Street demanded for Bride. Faced with having to recast West, Yuzna considered giving the role to Brian Bremer, who he had worked with on Society. And would later cast in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker. Just eleven days before Bride of Re-Animator had to start filming, The Pit and the Pendulum was delayed. Combs would be able to play Herbert West again after all.
Once Combs was signed on and Yuzna was beyond the rush to get the project ready for filming, things seemed to go smoothly on Bride of Re-Animator. The cast and crew made it through the six week filming schedule without any serious issues, and everyone involved did a great job. Yuzna would end up feeling that the film was slightly compromised by the fact that it was done in a hurry. But there is no indication in the finished film that everything was thrown together as quickly as it was.
The biggest problems arose when it came time for the film to make its way out into the world. It was not received positively by critics, who compared it unfavorably to the previous movie. It was called a rehash, a lesser copy of what had been done before. It also didn’t receive a great release. Once set for a fall 1990 release by Taurus Entertainment, it was instead passed over to 50th Street Films, who sent an R-rated cut to theatres at the start of 1991. This theatrical release seems to have been rather minor, as there aren’t even any box office records available online. Then Bride of Re-Animator made its way to home video in both R rated and unrated form. The film did receive some love from members of the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, who nominated it for Saturn Awards in two categories: Best Horror Film, and Best Supporting Actor, Jeffrey Combs.
The movie has never slipped into obscurity simply because it’s connected to Re-Animator. It has always had a fan base because of that. It gives us another chance to watch Combs play Dr. Herbert West, which is appreciated. But it deserves more positive attention than it gets.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Bride of Re-Animator has the same uncomfortable atmosphere as the first film. But like many horror sequels, it also cranked up the humor element. There was already dark humor in Re-Animator, and Bride takes it even further. While Yuzna and the writers were smart to have West’s experiments reach another level in the sequel, they were also aware his experiments in this one are absurd. The eyeball and fingers creature, for example. There’s a moment where West has nothing else going on, so he sticks an arm and a leg together and brings them to life. He gets kicked in the face for his trouble. Yuzna had fun making these experiments come off as comedic.
The film never makes a joke of Herbert West, but he does have some very amusing lines. He just doesn’t intend for them to be funny. Like when Francesca storms out of their home after seeing that West has re-animated her dead dog and stuck a human arm on it. He tells Dan, “You’re better off without her.” He’s being completely serious, but it’s hilarious. Combs turned in another incredible performance here, securing Herbert West’s place high on the list of the all-time great mad scientists.
Bruce Abbott is also great as West’s sidekick Dan, who rarely agrees with what West is doing but always sticks around. Abbott felt that Dan was, as he put it, a “borderline wimp” in the first movie. He was glad to find that the sequel gave him more layers of the character to play. He told Fangoria magazine, “Dan gets a little demented, a little warped. He goes a bit further into the darkness. He’s more affected by the turmoil, the guilt.” The character is clearly still suffering from having Meg die in his arms. When Gloria dies as well, it pushes Dan over the edge. West uses his grief to his advantage, putting Gloria’s head and Meg’s heart into his Bride creation. Because the body has parts of both of these women Dan cared about, he’s just as into the Bride idea as West is.
Of course, everything goes terribly wrong. West’s experiments never seem to turn out as intended.
BEST SCENE(S): Those experiments gone wrong make for some great scenes, though. At one point, West and Dan are visited by Lieutenant Chapham while the finger creature is running around inside their house. They have to deflect Chapham’s suspicions while trying to keep the creature out of his sight. This scene could have come right out of a sitcom. A very twisted, strange sitcom.
One of the funniest lines in the movie comes after West has killed and re-animated Chapham. Like most of the people West brings back to life, Chapham becomes a total maniac. Dan grabs the detective’s gun and West, who has figured out a dark secret about Chapham’s past, wants him to shoot the walking corpse. He urges Dan to pull the trigger by telling him, “He’s a wife beater, Dan, use the gun!”
Much like The Bride of Frankenstein, Bride of Re-Animator makes us wait until the climax of the film before the Bride rises from her slab. In both films, it’s worth the wait. And Kathleen Kinmont was definitely paying tribute to the original Bride Elsa Lanchester with some of her movements. Everything involving the Bride is terrific. Trouble enters the picture when Dan has to choose between a living woman, Francesca, and this woman he and West created from pieces of corpses. The only disappointment here is that the Bride is only in the movie for roughly ten minutes. Even Yuzna was left wishing there had been more screen time for her. He tried to make up for that when he made Return of the Living Dead III, which follows a young woman’s unique transformation into a zombie over the course of the entire movie.
PARTING SHOT: Bride of Re-Animator is an exemplary sequel. It manages to recapture the feel of the first movie while finding its own tone with the increased humor. The script by Rick Fry and Woody Keith may have been rushed, but the story they told works perfectly. It continues the story of Herbert West in a smart and entertaining way, giving him new types of experiments to conduct, while also dealing with the fallout of the experiments in the first film. West always just brushes off the terrible things that happen. But Dan, Chapham, Hill, and Meg all paid a price for what he did in the first movie, and Bride of Re-Animator picks up on that. While also being a great homage to The Bride of Frankenstein.
Yuzna has always wanted Re-Animator to be a bigger franchise than it turned out to be. By the time Bride wrapped production, he was already thinking of the next sequel, Beyond Re-Animator. He wasn’t able to get that made until 2003. He hoped to follow Beyond with a trilogy of sequels, starting with Stuart Gordon’s story set in the White House. Then continuing on with films that would deal with West building a Hadron Collider. Tearing open a rift in time and space. And having to answer for things he did in Switzerland before the events of the first Re-Animator. None of these sequels have ever made it into production, and not for lack of trying. There’s still hope we’ll see Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and Bruce Abbott as Dan Cain again someday. But while we wait to see what the future holds for Re-Animator, Gordon and Yuzna made some great movies that we can keep going back to.
And for the non-horror Revisited series, I wrote about the 1997 action movie Con Air, starring Nicolas Cage:
Con Air script:
INTRO: Nicolas Cage made his action movie debut with The Rock, a Jerry Bruckheimer production that was released in June of 1996. That same month, filming began on Cage and Bruckheimer’s second collaboration, a project that took Cage even further into action hero territory, casting him in a role that is said to have inspired the Kid Rock song “American Badass”. If The Rock is “Die Hard on Alcatraz”, this one could be called “Die Hard on a prisoner transport plane”… but its title is Con Air, and we’re looking back on it fondly in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: Con Air was inspired by a 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times about prisoner transport planes, which transfer convicted criminals from prison to prison throughout the United States. The executives at Touchstone Pictures thought this concept would make a solid foundation for an action movie – and it already came with a clever, amusing title attached to it. The term “Con Air”, a play on the name of the Conair Corporation, a company that has been selling appliances and personal care products since the 1950s, was there in the article. While they were searching for a writer who could flesh the idea out into a screenplay, a crime thriller spec script called Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead caught their attention. They didn’t want to make that movie, it ended up at Miramax, but they did feel that writer Scott Rosenberg was a good match for their prison plane project.
Rosenberg was listening to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers tunes when he figured out how to turn that L.A. Times article into an interesting, entertaining action story. The lead character would be a convict who is trying to get back to sweet home Alabama to see his wife and the daughter he has never met, as she was born soon after he was locked up. This would allow the story to have heart and emotion at its center, keeping the audience invested in the hero’s journey even while everything around him is completely insane. He also had to make sure the hero, whose name is Cameron Poe, wasn’t convicted of a crime the audience wouldn’t be able to forgive. Poe was jailed for manslaughter after killing a man in a bar fight. We’re shown this fight, we see that the guy who got killed was a jerk, we know Poe was provoked into fighting because the guy insulted him and made moves on his wife. The average viewer probably even wants to see Poe throw him a beating. He just hits too hard.
So we understand where Poe’s coming from and want to see him get a happy reunion with his wife and child. He serves his time in California’s San Quentin State Prison, and when he’s released he’s loaded onto a prisoner transport plane that will fly him back to Alabama. Giving a nod to history, Rosenberg set the events of the story on July 14th – which is Bastille Day, the date of the prison break that was an important step in the French Revolution. As Poe catches his plane, we find out that this isn’t just any con air flight. A new super-max prison has been built in Alabama, a place designed to hold the worst of the worst, and it needs to be populated. Poe is joined on his flight home by murderers and rapists who are either serving life sentences or sitting on Death Row. And the plane has barely gotten off the ground when it’s revealed that several of these prisoners have worked together to figure out a plan to hijack the plane and fly themselves to freedom. They just have to make two stops along the way: they’re going to land in Carson City, Nevada to pick up more prisoners and drop off a few, then meet up with associates at an abandoned airfield in the desert. Poe could get off the plane at either point and let the authorities deal with this situation… but he feels like he needs to stick around to protect a couple of the passengers. One is his friend Baby-O, who spends most of the movie on the edge of death because he needs an insulin shot that Poe has to obtain for him, then returns to the edge of death when he gets shot in the stomach. The other is a female guard who gets taken hostage by the prisoners and is in danger of being assaulted by a rapist. To keep Baby-O and the guard safe, Poe stays with the plane and plays the hero.
Touchstone specifically told Rosenberg they didn’t want Con Air to be “Die Hard on a plane”, but the comparisons are inevitable. A group of criminals, headed up by a somewhat charismatic lead villain, take control of a location. Or vehicle, in this case. One man, greatly outnumbered and wearing a tank top, has to stop them. While he’s figuring out how to take down the bad guys, there are men on the outside who have differing opinions on how to handle the situation. You have the hot-headed idiot whose suggestions are always the worst and put the hero in more danger, and you have the ally on the outside who understands what the hero is doing. There’s even a point where Poe sends his ally a message by dropping a body onto a car from a great height. Much like John McClane getting Al Powell’s attention by dropping a body onto his car in Die Hard. So Con Air is Die Hard on a plane, and that’s fine.
During the scripting process, Rosenberg spent three days riding on Con Air flights and observing how it all worked. The guards insisted there was no way prisoners could really hijack a Con Air flight, so they told the writer to let his imagination run wild. He did, and put together a script that soon found its way into the hands of highly successful action producer Jerry Bruckheimer. At the time, Bruckheimer had a producing partner, Don Simpson, with whom he had made movies like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Bad Boys. While Bruckheimer was interested in the Con Air concept, Simpson was not into it at all. But The Rock was going to be Bruckheimer and Simpson’s last movie together, so Bruckheimer was free to take the Con Air script and run with it on his own. It became the first movie he made after the dissolution of his partnership with Simpson. Sadly, Simpson died soon after he and Bruckheimer decided to part ways.
Having just had success giving commercial and music video director Michael Bay the chance to make his first features – Bad Boys and The Rock – the producer decided to try to replicate that success by giving another commercial and music video director the chance to make Con Air their first feature. The director he chose for this one was Simon West, whose greatest previous work was the video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Yes, West is partially responsible for the Rickroll phenomenon. Pretty much every action star you can think of was considered for the role of Cameron Poe at one point or another, but Bruckheimer decided to cast the actor he was working with on The Rock: Nicolas Cage. Bruckheimer and West had their first meeting with Cage to discuss Con Air immediately after The Rock had finished filming – and on the same night Cage won a Screen Actors Guild award for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas. A performance he would soon win an Oscar for as well.
When working on The Rock, Cage had made suggestions that turned his character into less of an action-ready hero than he was in the script. The suggestions he brought to Con Air took Cameron Poe in the opposite direction. He felt the character should be a hero before we ever meet him; he’s a decorated, honorably discharged Army Ranger. The combat veteran has just left the military and is still wearing his uniform when he meets his wife at the bar where the life-changing fight will take place. It could have been argued that Poe killed the antagonist in self-defense, but due to his military skills the judge considers him to be a deadly weapon and throws the book at him for accidentally killing the guy. That’s why he’s locked up for seven to ten years. The rabbit plushie that Poe is bringing to give the daughter he’s never met before, that was also added at Cage’s suggestion. And West and Cage worked together to craft the montage sequence that shows the time passing as Poe serves his prison sentence. He spends his days working out, exchanging letters with his wife and daughter, and growing a magnificent mullet.
The fact that Poe is a former Army Ranger helps make it more believable that the character is so dedicated to staying on the plane, protecting people, and bringing the villains to justice. If he was just a regular guy, some viewers may find it difficult to side with him as he repeatedly risks his life when he’s supposed to be going home to see his daughter for the first time. But with the Army Ranger addition to the character comes an opening narration where it’s said that Rangers never leave a fallen comrade behind, no matter what the odds or the enemy. Now Poe’s actions make even more sense.
With the star attached and bringing good ideas to the table, West proceeded to surround him with a mind-blowing supporting cast. The criminals on the plane with Poe are played by the likes of Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, Nick Chinlund, M.C. Gainey, Jesse Borrego, Renoly, and Danny Trejo. Mykelti Williamson, fresh off playing Bubba in Forrest Gump, was cast as Poe’s beleaguered buddy Baby-O. Rachel Ticotin plays Guard Sally Bishop, with Monica Potter and Landry Allbright as Poe’s wife and daughter. Colm Meaney is Duncan Malloy, the annoying DEA agent who won’t listen to reason, while John Cusack entered the action world to play U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin, Poe’s ally on the ground. Cusack took the role because it offered good pay and was a chance for him to get his name above the title and his face on a billboard. Something he might be able to use to help get lower budgeted passion projects off the ground. But he didn’t completely sell out: he made sure his character was wearing sandals. He wanted footwear that wasn’t appropriate for an action movie.
The plane the characters ride in, the Jailbird, is a character in its own right. Rather than use a regular commercial jet like the real Con Air flights do, the filmmakers chose an old C-123K military transport plane to play the Jailbird. Simply because it was more visually interesting. Unfortunately, there are two real-life tragedies associated with the plane. Phillip Swartz, a welder working for a special effects company, was killed during production when a model of the plane fell on him. The movie is dedicated to him. After filming was finished, the plane used for flight scenes was sold to a freight-hauling company in Alaska. It crashed in 2010, killing the three crew members on board.
The most difficult role to cast in Con Air was the lead villain, Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, who is described as being the poster child for the criminally insane. Online trivia pages name two dozen actors who were either considered for or auditioned for the role, including Gary Oldman, Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Willem Dafoe, and Robert De Niro. Jason Isaacs auditioned and was terrified when a camera assistant pulled out a real gun for him to hold while delivering his lines. Mickey Rourke allegedly brought a real knife to his audition. But the role ended up going to John Malkovich, who was cast just days before filming began. He was reportedly unhappy during production because the script was always being changed – not only by Rosenberg, but also by uncredited script doctors Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams. Malkovich doesn’t think highly of the finished film, but he comes off well in it. He was a great choice for Cyrus.
REVIEW: West said he worked with the writers to turn Con Air into a more complex and emotional drama than it was before he got involved… but that’s not quite what the movie is. Rosenberg took delight in filling the script with crazy characters and the most absurd dialogue and set-pieces he could think of. Cusack has said that this project’s dark irony and sense of the absurd was appealing to him. West played up that element of the film, because he felt that the violence would be more palatable for the audience if it was evened out with a dash of humor. But there’s more than a dash of it in there. Con Air is really goofy, often playing like a comedy. It’s over-the-top, with ridiculous dialogue – but the kind where you can tell the people writing it knew it was ridiculous while they were typing it out. Increasing the humor quotient even more is Dave Chappelle, who spends his scenes tossing out a steady stream of ad-libs.
Con Air moves through its one hundred and fifteen minutes quickly, and manages to be exciting and suspenseful despite the fact that the logistics of the situation on the plane – which is wide open from front to back – causes our hero to be unusually passive for a long stretch of the film. There isn’t a whole lot Poe can do on board the Jailbird other than sit in his seat and watch what the other convicts are doing. In the first hour, the most he has accomplished is managing to alert the authorities. Twice. Thankfully, he gets more to do, and gets to show off his fighting skills, in the second half of the film. And when the action breaks out, Cage did a lot of his own stunts because the filmmakers wanted to see his face when he’s fighting and when explosions are going off around him.
Even while Poe is forced to sit and observe, there’s still a lot going on in the movie, with Larkin working to bring the situation to an end from the ground and getting caught up in the action himself. And when things aren’t blowing up and guns aren’t being fired, the movie continues to hold our attention because West assembled such an awesome cast. These actors are captivating no matter what they’re doing. It’s fun to watch them interact and bounce amusing lines off each other.
One of the standout characters is serial killer Garland Greene, played by Buscemi. As crazy things happen around him, he remains even more passive than Poe has to be. Nothing gets much of a reaction out of him, he just has wry observations to make about the other prisoners. He’s a terrible person, he killed thirty people and drove across three states while wearing a girl’s head as a hat… but we didn’t see him do those things, so somehow he’s oddly likeable. And due to the inclusion of Garland Greene, we get a scene in a big summer blockbuster that was inspired by the original FRANKENSTEIN. While the others are blasting away at the authorities at the desert airfield, Garland has wandered off to have a tea party with a random little girl. Rosenberg has openly said that he stole this idea from the scene where Frankenstein’s Monster meets a little girl in the 1931 film. Thankfully, things turn out better for the little girl in Con Air than they did for the girl in Frankenstein. Leading to a moment where Garland sings “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” while bullets are flying around him.
There is more action in the finished film than Rosenberg intended there to be. As far as he was concerned, the climax should be the moment when the Jailbird comes crashing down to Earth. In his script, it smashed into the White House when it crashed. But Bruckheimer wasn’t into that being a location, and the White House has just been blown up in Independence Day. Seeing a plane smash into it wouldn’t be such an impressive sight after movie-goers had already seen aliens destroy the place. So he moved the crash site to Las Vegas – and lucked out, because the Sands Hotel was about to be demolished. Bruckheimer got the owners to delay the demolition so he could film the Jailbird crashing into the front of the building.
To the disappointment of Rosenberg, the action continues after the Jailbird has crash-landed. Forced to add one more set-piece, he came up with what he calls the worst part of the film. The climactic chase sequence in which Cyrus and a couple of his cohorts escape from the crash site in a fire truck and Poe and Larkin give chase on motorcycles. Now, we’ve used the words ridiculous and absurd to describe Con Air before this sequence, but this is where it truly goes off the rails. The fire truck chase is ludicrous, with a random broken-down armored truck dropped into the mix and Cyrus getting his comeuppance by falling into roadside machinery that appears to be operating entirely on its own. It is a letdown that such a good villain comes to such a laughable end. Rosenberg couldn’t remember how Cyrus was defeated in his initial script, but he said that whatever it was, it was better than what’s in the movie.
But not even a bad ending can bring down the entertainment value of Con Air. The film has been so much fun to watch that okay, sure, we’ll go along with Cyrus being taken out like a cartoon character.
LEGACY/NOW: Con Air reached theatres on June 6, 1997, one day shy of the one year anniversary of the release of The Rock. And like its predecessor it was incredibly successful, pulling in two hundred and twenty-four million at the global box office on a budget of seventy-five million. Three weeks later, another Nicolas Cage action vehicle – Face/Off – arrived in theatres and did even better than Con Air, ending up with almost two hundred and forty-six million. It truly was the summer of Nic Cage: Action Hero.
Con Air also made an impact on the radio airwaves, as the country song “How Do I Live”, performed by Trisha Yearwood and used as the love theme for Poe and his family, was a hit. The Yearwood version of the song was released the same day as a version that was recorded by LeAnn Rimes, which was also very successful. But it was the Yearwood version that won a Grammy, and due to its inclusion in Con Air, was also nominated in the Best Original Song category at the Academy Awards. But that was the year of Titanic, so of course it lost to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”. Con Air was also nominated for Best Sound, and lost to Titanic in that category as well.
Con Air didn’t win an Oscar, but it did go home with a Razzie Award. While “How Do I Live” lost in the Worst Original Song category – that award went to the score for The Postman – the film won in the category of Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life and Public Property. To win that prize, it beat out the likes of Batman & Robin, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Turbulence, and Volcano. Well done, Con Air!
This isn’t a highly respected movie, it’s not one that you see listed as one of the best action movies ever made on a regular basis, but it made plenty of money and has a solid fan following. Throughout the years, there have been rumblings now and then that a sequel may be in the works. Soon after the release of the film, there was even a rumor that a follow-up would take place on a prison bus instead of a prison plane and would be called Convoy. That didn’t happen, and now twenty-five years have gone by without Cameron Poe going on any further adventures, despite Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, and Simon West all saying that it could be interesting to revisit the concept and characters. Speaking with Screen Daily, West even pitched an idea for a sequel that would be really insane. West said, “I would do (the sequel) if it was completely turned on its head. Con Air in space, for example. A studio version where they’re all robots or the convicts are reanimated as super-convicts, or where the good guys are bad guys and the bad guys are good guys. Something shocking. If it was clever writing it could work.”
That’s probably not the sort of sequel any Con Air fan has been waiting for, but it certainly would be a strange curiosity to witness. In the end, we’re probably better off without a Con Air sequel. Cameron Poe served his time, he beat the bad guys, and he made it home to his wife and daughter. Let’s allow him to live in peace while we keep looking back at the craziness he lived through in the summer of 1997.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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