Nerding Day: Move Your Dead Bones (Patreon)

Re-Animator is the perfect conflux of '80s genre filmmaking talent. Directed by Stuart "Robot Jox" Gordon, produced by his buddy Brian "The Guyver" Yuzna, and starring horror royalty Jeffrey "Weyoun on Deep Space 9" Combs and Barbara "Literally Barbara Fucking Crampton" Crampton, it's a loose adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story that ditches the turboracism and picks up on the inherent comedy potential of a special juice that makes dead people walk around. It also spawned a dedicated community of perverts who believe that the mad scientist Herbert West and his reluctant assistant, Dan Cain, are in love. God bless them.

The sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, didn't get a theatrical release. It was fine, even with Yuzna stepping in as director and Crampton bailing to star in daytime soaps. And then, with Combs busy appearing as seventeen different guys on '90s Star Trek and Stuart Gordon falling into the Honey, I Shrunkiverse, it seemed as if the ballad of Herbert West had come to a conclusion.

But where do genre legends go when they begin to fade away? This isn't a rhetorical question. There is a place that embraces everyone who has ever starred in a major motion picture. A beautiful land where the stars of yesteryear can demand upwards of five million Hungarian forints and all the goulash they can eat for a day's worth of filming.

Hence: Beyond Re-Animator, a Spanish/American co-production that premiered on the Sci-Fi channel in 2003. Combs and Yuzna are the only returning elements from the first two films, with writing and production duties carried out by Spanish men whose names aren't hyperlinked on Wikipedia. The cast was mainly composed of local film and television actors whose dialogue all had to be overdubbed to convincingly portray an American setting. That, and the turn of the millennium digital effects replacing the fantastic practical work of the original flick, made Beyond Re-Animator a pretty limp final entry in the series.

But we're not here to talk about the movie. We're here to talk about the tie-in song.

What do Europeans love more than low-budget films starring over-the-hill Hollywood actors and having semi-functional social safety nets? Dance music. They can't get enough of the stuff. And so, Beyond Re-Animator's credits rolled over a song titled "Move Your Dead Bones," a semi-expository theme rendering the series' core conceit of science gone too far into a high energy anthem about fucking and partying. Attributed to "Dr. Reanimator" but in fact produced by Eurodance artist Jordi Cubino, someone apparently loved the track so much they released a music video for it which appeared on the US DVD release of Beyond. It stars an unknown handsome man who is doing fun cosplay as Herbert West, if Re-Animator were a gay porno. Which it turns out, it kind of is to a lot of people!

First note: this song goes fucking crazy. It's been stuck in my head for days, so fair warning if you go and listen to it yourself. Next note: what's going on with the pose we open on? My guy is stanced up to the max. I've heard of Slav squatting, but this is something different. This is like, Euroslouching.

The handsome man opens the proceedings by inviting all of the "boys and girls" to come a little closer, because he's the Re-Animator. The beat picks up over shots of Science Materials, and then Dr. Reanimator kicks things off proper with the line "re-animate your feet!" The director of the video took this as literally as they possibly could with a shot of the good doctor's feet as he's ushered into prison by sexy guards.

This mirrors the shot from the film, featuring decidedly less sexy guards and inmates.

The contrast between the ecstatic visions of the party hunk phonetically mouthing the lyrics and the scenes of Jeffrey Combs doing his best to bring some gravitas to a film that never should have been made are exquisite. Here's Combs as Herbert West discovering that he can use electrical energy in combination with his reagent to create zombies who can do more than scream and kill things:

And here's Dr. Reanimator grinning suggestively as the camera wobbles drunkenly:

Here's Herbert West: a tired, middle-aged man who's lost his boyish impetuousness but still kindles that same relentless desire to push the boundaries of medical science:

And here's Dr. Reanimator as seen from the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo, baring his teeth to establish dominance.

One more. Here's West, working with a newly-arrived prison doctor to continue his mad pursuit of a treatment to defeat the concept of death itself.

And here's Dr. Reanimator giving a lecture on the subject of new physiotherapy techniques in patient recovery post-metatarsal fracture.

Let's read more of the lyrics.

This is a pretty loose interpretation of the Re-Animator mythos, given that Herbert West's zombies mostly just shriek incomprehensible nonsense and strike out at the living with a mindless fury like a YouTuber still mad about The Last Jedi. But, and maybe I'm reading too much into this, it seems like this is also about Dr. Reanimator's dick? I'm not crazy, right? The syringe is his dick? The reagent is the cum?

Jeffrey, your thoughts?

The reagent is the cum.

In some movie music videos, the singer plays a fun game where they pretend they're interacting with the stars. This isn't exactly like that. It's more like we're seeing an alternate universe version of Beyond Re-Animator set in sex jail. In the Prime Re-aniverse, Jeffrey Combs and his pal are hauling bodies around and making snarling corpsemonsters.

Meanwhile, in the Mirror Re-aniverse, this:

I'm not sure what the deal with the Panic! at the Disco extras is. I guess maybe they're supposed to be sexy zombies?

I'm not really getting "living dead" from this, though. More like warden in an exploitation movie about a prison for female mimes. In Sex Lady Mime Prison, Warden Kuntbläster's word is law. I mean, not her word, but— you get it. You're picturing it, right? We're all picturing it.

This guy's as close as any of the dancers get to zombie, but mostly he looks like Drew Carey's friend from The Drew Carey Show chewed off his own tongue in a PCP accident.

Following the arc of the film, things inevitably degenerate. But Dr. Reanimator isn't going to let a little thing like an exploding building that he's currently inside get him down.

He's going to dance! It's the only thing he knows how to do! He was plucked from his natural habitat in the basement of Berghain and cruelly forced to perform or possibly lip sync a song about a jailhouse full of the fuckable undead.

Thank you, dance hunk, for reminding us of the title of the film in the middle of the music video about it. We have much to learn from you. Like: what's with your scrubs? They're not just sleeveless, they appear to cover your arms but expose your armpits? They look like something a busty anime girl would wear in a mobile game that people online claim is actually really cool and full of interesting gameplay mechanics but is absolutely just a means of extracting money from well-off cartoon armpit masturbators.

Mostly the events of the film and the video run in parallel. But near the end of the song, the two universes collide. Dr. Reanimator finds his tanned meat strapped into an electric chair.

A reversal of fortunes! The doctor, whose dark experiments created an army of dancing burlesque ghouls, now finds himself at the mercy of the experimenter.

Herbert, no!

With our science hunk frying, let's just take a minute to appreciate how we got here.

In 1922 a guy who was so racist that even his contemporaries wanted him to cool it a little wrote a story about a man who brought people back to life for an amateur horror publication.

63 years later, it was adapted into a Hollywood picture. And then, 18 years after that, they made a music video about the film's second sequel.

What would Lovecraft have thought of this? I mean, he was the kind of old-timey racist who constructed typologies of racial difference so complex that modern /pol/ posters are still catching up, so he would probably consider "Move Your Dead Bones" to be a typical work of the insidious Spaniard who seeks to corrupt the noble Teutonic spirit with his seductive Latin rhythms.

But the video did leave out one crucial part of Beyond Re-Animator. After Herbert escapes the prison and his accomplice is dragged off by the police for his role in their experiments, the credits roll and a rat appears onscreen.

What's that crawling towards it from just out of frame? It can't be…

Yes! Bah gawd, that's Severed Zombie Penis's music! And so, the Re-Animator trilogy ends the only way it ever could: with a shadow puppet boxing match between a rat and a self-propelled human member.

Well, Lovecraft? What do you think, you old bastard? We did it all for you.

He loves and endorses all of it, folks! He says we really brought his vision to life, and that he always imagined that Herbert West's work would eventually lead to pugilism between a rodent and a reanimated phallus. Now he's reading all of the gay fanfiction about his characters and nodding with a big grin on his face. "I like this," he's saying. "And I think it's awesome that there was a black president too." Thanks, Lovecraft!

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