Re-Animator: Millennium Edition (2002)

''This is my mother's favorite movie,'' says starlet Barbara Crampton on one of the commentary tracks here. Since Mrs. Crampton presumably made it through the climactic scene in which a lust-crazed torso holds its own severed head as it kisses down her darling daughter's naked, screaming, trussed-up body -- well, you know this had better be one special gore flick. And it is. In fact, the H.P. Lovecraft-derived story Re-Animator: Millennium Edition about a prissy, quite mad medical student (Jeffrey Combs) and the kill-crazy zombies he strews in his wake is one of the secret best films of the 1980s, not to mention one of the funniest and most disgusting. The brand-new digital transfer and scrubbed-up Dolby soundtrack are the main reasons to invest in this double-disc edition, but if the commentaries and deleted scenes are familiar from earlier laserdisc and DVD releases, new interviews with director Stuart Gordon (shy and cuddly), writer Dennis Paoli (tweedy and professorial), and composer Richard Band (geeky and defensive) provide new blood. The movie itself remains eye-popping in every sense of the phrase.