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Category:    Home > Reviews > Horror > Literature > From Beyond (H.P. Lovecraft/MGM DVD)

From Beyond (H.P. Lovecraft/MGM DVD)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: B     Film: B

 

 

Sex.  Talk about an alien concept!

 

Plainly put, H. P. Lovecraft found sex repulsive.  Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi makes an irrefutable case concerning this in his seminal work, Lovecraft: a Life.  As with many of his great master's traits, Lovecraft took Edgar Poe's proclivity toward the life of the mind to extremes; Poe, at best, might be characterized as a tragic romantic, but Lovecraft and romance did not share the same universe, alien or otherwise.

 

H. P. Lovecraft's From Beyond, brought to the screen by renowned horror director and Lovecraft aficionado, Stuart Gordon, takes his signature over-the-top style into what might best be described as Clive Barker territory.  The irony resonates here: Lovecraft influencing Barker influencing Lovecraft, so to speak.   The story is a simple one.  A brilliant if deranged scientist, Dr. Edward Pretorius (a tip of the hat to Bride of Frankenstein), is killed in an experiment with his invention the Resonator and his assistant, Crawford Tillinghurst, (Jeffrey Coombs), is locked up in an insane asylum charged with murder.  The Resonator opens a portal to another dimension by stimulating the pineal gland, generating visions of otherworldly beings and a hyper stimulated sex drive.

 

Enter Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton of Re-Animator fame or, perhaps, infamy, reviewed elsewhere on this site), a psychologist, who becomes fascinated with Tillinghurst's seemingly insane story of an opening to another dimension.  As with Pretorius before her, this fascination with the Resonator takes a decidedly unhealthy turn and the horror starts all over again.

 

And what is that horror, might you ask?  From Beyond retains the simple Faustian theme of Lovecraft's story; the pursuit for knowledge and power that ultimately consumes the pursuer.  Fair enough.  The Resonator, it seems, stimulates the pineal gland, which is vaguely connected to the Third Eye, the sixth sense, and, in the film, directly jacked into the sex drive.  Pretorius conveniently had a taste for the kinkier side of sex, most specifically s/m, and so we are off to the races.  As well as sharing a few alphabetic characters with its cousin in southern regions, the pineal grows remarkably under the Resonator's influence, with its stalk eventually piercing the sheath-like skull.  Never mind the erroneous anatomy; it is similar enough for horror fans to recall the penile-like protrusion from the otherwise attractive armpit of Marilyn Chambers in David Cronenberg's Rabid.  Gordon knows his genre.

 

Despite (or maybe because of) being the antithesis of Lovecraft's life and oeuvre, the disturbing sexuality intrigues beyond the base puerile intent of appealing to horror's usual demographic.  There is an intellectualization of the sexual in this film that serves as a type of analog to the original story’s' theme, a sort of inverse repression.  In the sophisticated subtext here the brain becomes the ultimate sexual organ, for it is in fact the seat of passion.  As such, to fully possess another brain must be, er, consumed.

 

Cue up the gore.

 

All plays out as expected.  Coombs is very good, as usual, in his twitchy, neurasthenic way.  Ken Foree gives the hyperkinetic doings some nice balance in a supporting role.  Ted Sorel as Pretorius is the definition of Grand Guignol and Barbara Crampton has perhaps the most frightening scene of all in the film; don't hit the button as you sense the closing credits coming but watch closely as her hysterical fear transforms into insane, cackling laughter in a truly chilling final moment.  It is a close-up for the ages, at least in the horror genre.

 

The Director's Featurette bonus is an extra worth the viewing time.  As in his interview accompanying Dreams of the Witch-House (2005, part of "The Masters of Horror" TV anthology series, reviewed often on this site), Gordon comes off as a kindly gentleman or even an unassuming Buddhist practitioner, soft spoken, calm and mannered.  He gives a history of the production and its relation to Re-Animator, speaks a bit of his background in theater and how he ended up behind the camera.  His general take on the horror genre and its relation to current political climates is insightful.

 

A second featurette, Lost and Found, details the cutting of the film to achieve the original R rating, the loss for many years of the removed footage and its recovery.  Most of what is restored is a matter of extended shots and an extra brain or three being sucked out via eye sockets or gnawed on, accomplishing little more than bringing the film closer to its distant Re-Animator cousin.  There is also an interesting interview with music composer Richard Band and the usual photo montages and storyboards are provided.

 

The bar for Lovecraft adaptations has been set with Andrew Leman's The Call of Cthulhu (2005) and Gordon's own Dreams of the Witch-House (2005), previously mentioned.  From Beyond is fairly standard fare, with a twist, certainly superior to producer Brian Yuzma's Spanish productions of recent years.  Both Gordon and Yuzma have been linked to yet another Re-Animator sequel, House of Re-Animator (2008), with the following tagline: "When there's a death in the White House, "re-animator" Herbert West is brought in to bring the corpse back to life."  One wonders if there will ever again be hope for the damned.

 

Then again, with Coombs reprising his role as West, William Macy signed on as the President (can Macy’s zombie president over-the-top Robert Loggia’s Mafia vampire in John Landis’ 1992 film Innocent Blood?) and Barbara Crampton as the First Lady, damn the hope, roll up the carpets, push the furniture to the walls, and bring on the hypos of green goop - it's party time!

 

 

-   Don Wentworth


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