From Beyond.

Review #2610: From Beyond.

Cast: 

Jeffrey Combs (Dr. Crawford Tillinghast), Barbara Crampton (Dr. Katherine McMichaels), Ted Sorel (Dr. Edward Pretorius), Ken Foree (Bubba Brownlee), Carolyn Purdy-Gordon (Dr. Bloch), Bunny Summers (Neighbor Lady), and Bruce McGuire (Jordan Fields) Directed by Stuart Gordon (#2127 - Re-Animator)

Review: 

"The thing that was great about the Organic Theatre was that we did all kinds of plays. I'd like the same thing to be true about my movies. One of the great things about genre movies is that as long as you follow the rules of the genre you can do anything you want and say anything you want. There's a tremendous amount of freedom. I got into a conversation with a friend that the horror films are really the subconscious of the movies."

Sure, there was going to be another H. P. Lovecraft-based movie sometime after how fun Re-Animator (1985) ended up being. Stuart Gordon wanted to make a handful of Lovecraft movies, complete with having select people coming back with the cast and crew here. The script was written by Brian Yuzna (who had produced Re-Animator), Dennis Paoli, and Stuart Gordon, with Paoli writing the screenplay. With the choice to film cheaper, Gordon went with an Italian crew that saw shooting on a Rome soundstage. There were multiple crews heading the effects (John Naulin, Tony Doublin, John Buechler, Mark Shostrom), but even with that in mind, getting an R rating from the MPAA was annoying because of the total effect of the graphic moments rather than specific stuff before he cut select frames to secure it (these trims were eventually recovered and put into a director's cut release in the 2000s). It wasn't a major hit at the time, but so it goes. Gordon would work again with Combs on films such as The Pit and the Pendulum [1991] and also Crampton with the direct-to-video Castle Freak [1995] but didn't get to do a Lovecraft movie again until the 2001 Spanish movie Dagon. 

The original short story (as originally published in 1934) by Lovecraft was a first-person story dealing with one man's experiences with a scientist named Crawford Tillinghast that had a certain type of device that dealt with creatures and the deaths of servants before it gets resolved pretty quickly. Here, Combs plays Tillinghast as the assistant to who else but a man named Pretorius. It's got everything you would hope for in a medium-sized enjoyable movie that isn't quite as well-executed as Re-Animator, but it is a fun one. You've got a giant animatronic puppet, talk about "pineal glands", a truly dynamite trio to go through house-bound mayhem with a bit of brain-eating to go around. It's a delightfully looney type of slow bubbling fun that practically feels like candy for those with the time to let it sift through for 86 minutes. It's a game of trying to deal with the horrors of maybe just letting the machine that goes around delivering horror and pleasure in the alternate dimension go on that goes for the weird and hits for some dark amusement. Combs gets a chance to attempt calm in the face of danger and disturbing monsters that happen to lurk around in a different dimension that is easy to get on his side of apprehension. It probably helps that he is paired with Crampton and her own journey of discovery within the growing world of malformed desire and ideas of what they believe they want in the mind (this is a long-winded way of saying, yes, one can say technobabble and dabble with wearing an S&M outfit for a scene). Of course, the underlying glue up to a certain point is Foree, who really is quite charming in delivering measured humor in being gripped in the growing absurdity. Sorel appears from time to time and delivers a few deliciously sleazy moments fitting for the moment with kinks and slime to go around. The body-count is a considerable few given the amount of cast, but it's still pretty rewarding for those folks too. You've got some slimy flies to go along with the realization of the third eye and brain-eating to criss-cross with the terrors of being gripped in a machine that doesn't even need your consent to turn itself on. Getting through addiction of the senses or brain-eating is one thing, surviving the aftermath of that is another. The danger is that horrible stuff is just all around us and there probably is nothing you can really do about it when it comes to turning into sludge at the end of the road besides not being burnt dead sludge. In that sense, it's depraved in a way that is my kind of horror fun.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!