Metacritic reviews

A deft, funny, fearless, and gloriously tasteless mix of horror and comedy, Re-Animator proves that entertainment value trumps virtually every other concern.

The script is very clever, funny and tightly written, and manages to avoid almost every horror movie cliche.

It is almost as though these filmmakers are afraid they’ll never get the chance to make another one, and Re-Animator doesn’t hesitate in being an almost operatic, larger than life comedy of splatter. While it paints with a big (red) brush, it is never boring.

Re-Animator remains a splashy hark back to the glorious 80s love affair with all-things bloody — to the point that Gordon was convinced he'd used more fake blood than anyone else in the history of horror.

One of the pleasures of the movies, however, is to find a movie that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird. Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator is a pleasure like that, a frankly gory horror movie that finds a rhythm and a style that make it work in a cockeyed, offbeat sort of way.

A major-league splatterfest, RE-ANIMATOR has a number of horrifying moments, made even more macabre by the grisly humor evident in almost every unforgettable scene (the most memorable and bizarre being the sex scene with a cadaver's detached head).

And yet if Re-Animator offers only a few laughs, that still puts it smiles ahead of George Romero`s awful ''Return of the Dead,'' the third in his zombie series, which suffered from tired blood. At least director Gordon`s ghoulies drool on naked women and decapitate each other with shovels. Hoe, hoe, hoe.

The injection of humour into HP Lovecraft's 1922 tale is what saves this splatterfest from being mere fodder for gorehounds.

Pic has a grisly sense of humor, and sometimes is so gross and over the top the film tips over into a bizarre comedy.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.