HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR Closed... For Good?

I first heard about HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR – in which Herbert West would be called upon to re-animate a deceased Commander in Chief... with horrific results, I assume – back when I trekked up to Philly to catch the premiere of the fun third installment in the series.

Producer/director Brian Yuzna mentioned it during his Q&A session and even suggested that the ripe-for-satire storyline might lure Stuart Gordon back to the franchise.

Since then good news arrived in fits and spurts about the film... Gordon would return along with original RE-ANIMATOR scripter Dennis Paoli... Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton would all be in the film... recent Gordon star and Curious George narrator William H. Macy would play the President (sorry, I have a ten-month old) while George Wendt was on-board to play the Vice-President... it all seemed so promising.

Which inevitably meant bad news was sure to come... financing was becoming an issue... the flick might be a straight-to-cable episode of 'Masters of Horror'... the proposed Summer 2007 release date came and went without so much as a camera being turned on.

Well, according to a report on Fangoria.com the project is all but dead. And not the good kind of ready-to-be-reanimated dead we've come to know and love. Nope. Dead dead. Seems the political climate which makes the subject matter explode with potential is making investors nervous (or so suggests Gordon) and we'll probably never see Herbert West striding into the Oval Office with syringe full of glowing green goo.

But fear not fellow RE-ANIMATOR fanatics. Feel free to go ahead and make your own version or some other riff on the West tale. Fango also reports that Gordon will be a guest at the Boomtown Film and Music Festival and fans are being enlisted to create 3 minute videos based on the original Lovecraft tale or movie version.