Now, granted, it can be easily argued that there is no standard for aesthetic assessment in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s presentation of his theory of Deconstruction at Johns Hopkins back in 1966, making it all-too-easy to dismiss anyone’s opinion as, in Henry James’s words, “a matter of taste.” As such, this puts us at an admittedly odd situation with an extra feature on the DVD release of Brian Yuzna’s Beyond Re-Animator. Indeed, I can be found alternating between Gorecki’s Third Symphony, to Geeshie Wiley’s blues ballads, over to early Black Flag any given day of the week. Some would label this as cultured. I like to more humbly attribute it to ready boredom at a drop of a hat. That said, I find myself openly admitting that J. A. Bayona’s music video of “Move Your Dead Bones,” a pop music video promo for Brian Yuzna’s Beyond Re-Animator, is not only fun, but wryly effective in, as irony would have it, the director’s deconstruction of the genre of the music video.
Obviously, the work is intended to be intentionally annoying, yet in its deliberate irritation, “Move Your Dead Bones” not only pulls in its audience by not only masterfully mocking the genre of music videos in the same fashion as Yuzna’s film satirizes horror and cinema in general (how many music promos compliment their source material?), but, in so doing, thereby succeeds in being an effective product placement by severing itself from the rote norm.
Bayona achieves this ends by implementing the trite, formulaic glamour-boy lead singer, dubbed “Doctor Re-Animator,” who lip synchs the Bad Elvis poem-quality lyrics (“If you’re feeling dead I’ll be your Re-Animator / I’ve got a way to bring you to life / A superior existence with no one to control you / Where you can always do what you like” and “Let me give you some green color / And you will ask for more”) over the piecemeal techno beat as a gaggle of choreographed undead backup dancers follow his lead. What’s ingenious is the manner in which Bayona succeeds in grabbing and retaining his audience’s attention with such ordinarily flaccid material.
Never attempting to veil the audacity of what he is presenting, he juxtaposes the morbid clips from the film with the upbeat rhythm and pacing of Doctor Re-Animator, thus bolting his audience awake from their cultural slumber, no doubt induced by the exhaustion created by the cacophony of self-negating, amphetamine-induced barrages of imagery that MTV has used for the past few decades as its alibi for existence. We cut from the blonde highlights of our singer, who’s obliviously never had a pimple in his life, to Jeffery Combs looking skeptically up at Jason Barry before darting back to Doctor Re-Animator, now clad in sleeveless scrubs, replete with cape, before a quartet of backup dancers–rejects from the grossly overlooked British pop band Stiffs Inc. (themselves a parody of Jack the Ripper’s London)–suddenly appear in order to “break it down” as they say three-quarters of the way through the video as they remain oblivious to the numerous, implacable explosions blossoming around them.
What’s left is the implication that, by pummeling us with all of the horrendous aspects of the genre in a little over three minutes, we have been trained to complacently accept such as standardized normalcy. Indeed, in a sense, we might very well be “re-animating our feet” but Bayona is coyly attempting to re-animate our minds as well with “Move Your Dead Bones.” And this, my friends, is yet another example of why horror is grossly overlooked but, of course, let’s keep it under our hats, we wouldn’t want “them” be get in on the fun, would we? If nothing else, I hear that people get cranky if you wake them up before they’re ready . . .
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
