For the first time this season, I look outside of the current decade for scares. They just don’t make them like this anymore.
When last we visited the trio of Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, it was for the inimitable 1985 shock-fest, Re-Animator. Less than a year later, Gordon directed his two favorite actors in yet another HP Lovecraft adaptation. I’m not a big Lovecraft enthusiast, but Gordon seems to be uniquely qualified to bring the horror icon’s writing to the big screen. Like Lovecraft, his mind is a byzantine tangle of violence and kinky depravity. From Beyond features Combs escaping a creature’s clutches as if he were exiting a birth canal, Crampton as both victim and perpetrator of supernatural molestation, and a giant monster shaped like a phallus with another, smaller phallus protruding from its head. This was the guy they tapped to direct Honey, I Shrunk the Kids?
The plot involves Combs and Ted Sorel as scientists pushing the limits of human understanding, who unwittingly discover a dimension of horrors that overlaps with our own. Sorel falls victim to the realm’s monstrous denizens, and ends up with his consciousness intertwined with one of the eldritch terrors. He becomes the film’s main antagonist, and his scenery-chewing is on an absolutely epic scale. Even when he’s under so much makeup and prosthetics that he can barely move his face, he just radiates maniacal energy. Combs is also great as a stiff wierdo, but he is basically playing a variation on the same character he played in Re-Animator. Crampton is the one who really gets to stretch out, graduating from the girlfriend-in-peril from Re-Animator to this film’s lead role. Just like her peers, she plays a scientist who is perhaps too eager to compromise her moral and ethical boundaries in pursuit of knowledge. The film’s only audience surrogate is the great Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead) as a cool cop who doesn’t understand what the hell is going on any more than the rest of us.
From Beyond is the kind of movie that only existed in the eighties. The puppetry and practical effects recall The Thing and Videodrome, while every other scene feels like the kind of thing that would be sanitized or squashed before hitting the modern day cinema. Gordon directs with a brutal efficiency, as if the external world is of no consequence compared to the specific story he is trying to tell. There are no meandering sideplots or attempts to craft a life outside the frame for his characters. That unwavering focus lends the film an even more surreal bent than the subject matter naturally has already. By the final act, it becomes almost oppressively grotesque and bizarre, in the best way possible. This is a wierd one to recommend because I imagine it has a very limited appeal, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.
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