My vote is no.
I feel like my feelings on this film, which Devin will almost certainly think are bullshit reasons for disliking the movie, are wrapped up in my opinions of the original short story and HP Lovecraft himself. I recently watched the movie for the first time while on a bit of a binge of Lovecraft's stories and research into his life for my own interest and I have to say I was very disappointed. I have every faith that Stuart Gordon loved the original story (for instance I am aware that he actually had to seek out an old 1st edition copy at a library because at the time the story hadn't been largely reprinted). Most of this is personal bias on my part. Jeffrey Combs for instance is not who I see in my head as Herbert West, nor does the modern looking hospital the movie is largely set in/around remind me in any way of what Miskatonic University is supposed to look or feel like. It just looked to me that in the process of adapting and updating this story for the screen, it lost a bit of that Lovecraftian feel that I loved so much from the original short story. I didn't find this to be a "fun" movie at all so I disagree with the fundamentals of that argument Devin and Amy devolved into midway through this podcast.
I also take issue with the idea of "Scream Queens" in general. It's a tacky trope at the best of times. And Barbara Crampton's presence in the film is really needless to me. She's only there to make Dan more of a character than he was in the story. Dr. Hill is a strange villain in that I don't see exactly why he is so evil from the outset? And why does he have psychic powers for some reason? I don't know, it seemed like he came from a completely different film. He's a composite of several characters from the short story and I dislike how he is used.
Piggybacking off of Amy's argument, if I were educating an alien about Re-animator, I would sooner show him the story than the movie.
PS, I feel like saying "this was Lovecraft's most hated story" is a bullshit argument for discounting it from the discussion altogether. Lovecraft was notoriously critical of all of his own work. We're talking about a man who had such low self-esteem that his friends setup a publishing house in his honor after his death because the man had handwritten novels socked away in drawers that he had simply never shown anyone. Were it not for Weird Tales he might not have been published in his lifetime either, not that Weird Tales didn't give him trouble too.
Yes, he wrote "Herbert West, Reanimator" in installments with cliffhangers that annoyed him and he got paid a pittance for it, but this was also his first serialized story and he refused to find money any other way. Even deeper, he wrote it as a parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Lovecraft was a privileged white rich kid with lofty ideas of his family's importance, which coupled with his fascination with the olden days, a general ignorance/fear of the rest of the world, and his crippling depression and self esteem issues manifested as spiteful racism and an unwillingness to find work or participate in the world in general. He never wanted to leave Providence and he was barely interested in sex of any kind. Even when he was married and she dragged him to New York, his hatred of the city outweighed any other emotion he felt at the time, leading him to write "The Horror at Red Hook," his worst and most racist story. He wrote largely because it was one of the only things he seemed to enjoy. Even as his inheritance ran out and he starved himself into intestinal cancer, he still found it difficult to even help himself. Were it not for the efforts of people like August Derleth and the rest of Arkham House we wouldnt even remember him.
PPS I also have an extremely hard time watching films where pets are harmed. Take that for what you will, but the scene with the cat was viscerally upsetting to me.
