TapeHead Profiles Jeffrey Combs

He's gained a lot of recognition for his portrayal Weyoun/Brunt on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but Jeffrey Combs has been around for quite some time.

Gaunt and intense, you can always rely on Combs to deliver a truly compelling performance. Be it a great film, a crap film, as a major character, or just doing a cameo, Jeffrey Combs commands the screen whenever he appears.

How could we not love a guy who has played in no less than four H.P. Lovecraft-based films? Jeffrey Combs has shined in great Poe adaptations and God-aweful Full Moon productions alike. Although he had been working as an actor on stage and in film for several years, Jeffrey landed his first major role in Stuart Gordon's cult classic Re-Animator. As the maniacal genius Herbert West, Combs blessed the cinematic world with the prototypical intensity that would mark all of his performances. He would return to the Herbert west once more in the severely underrated sequel, Bride of Re-Animator.

It was at this point that Combs became a staple of low-budget (mostly decent quality) horror films. He revisited the H.P. Lovecraft milieu - once again with director Gordon - with the truly gruesome From Beyond and starred as a neurotic inquisitor who works for Lance Henriksen's Torquemada in The Pit and the Pendulum.

As stated before, Combs can make memorable even the most forgettable character. Dinosaur Bob, Combs' character in the Tarentino-like Love and a .45, is a sleazy loan shark who wields a tattoo gun in a most painful manner.

While Jeffrey has imbibed his every performance with passion, he has yet to hit what they call "the big time." The closest he has come so far was his truly insane performance as a cult expert F.B.I. agent in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners - a film that should have secured fame for both Jackson and Combs but was (for reasons we don't understand) critically panned.

But don't cry for Jeffrey Combs. He has worked well and worked consistently enough to not only pay his bills, but to secure a pretty rabid fan-base (many of whom are HTML literate, so his presence is felt here on the web).

Keep an eye out for Jeffrey's performance in the upcoming teen-kill sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (what a terrible title).