Burl reviews From Beyond! (1986)

Well slap my bucket, it’s Burl! Ha ha, remember how good Re-Animator was? Well, on the basis of that, I recall in the mid-80s becoming very excited at each new Stuart Gordon picture that got mentioned on Fangoria’s Terror Teletype: movies like Dolls and Robo Jox, and the sadly never-to-be made Gris-Gris, and of course the picture under consideration today: another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, and therefore the most direct follow-up to the great Re-Animator, and therefore the most exciting of them all, From Beyond! Ha ha, I had a one-sheet for this one up on the wall of my teenage bedroom, and it was a prized possession indeed!

The picture begins with a long pre-credit sequence that dramatizes the entirety of the Lovecraft story the movie is based on! Ha ha, we meet young and earnest science assistant Crawford Tillinghast, played by the committed Jeffrey Combs from The Man With Two Brains and Cellar Dweller, and his boss, the voluptuary and radical sybarite Dr. Edward Pretorius, impersonated here very well by Ted Sorel of Basket Case 2 fame, and who, a trivia, was the nephew of famed Universal monster makeup man Jack Pierce! Pretorius has invented a machine, the Resonator, which opens up mutually accessible pathways to normally extra-perceptible dimensions that are populated by monsters!

When a flying eel puts a biting on Tillinghast he knows it’s all gone too far, but before he can destroy the machine Pretorius has his head chomped off, and after a neighbour lady’s dog finds the body and licks the head stump, Tillinghast is thought mad and accused of the murder! (The neighbour lady, it should be noted, is essayed by Bunny Summers from The Kid With the 200 I.Q.!) Cue the arrival of a comely psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, played by Barbara Crampton from Fraternity Vacation and Chopping Mall!

The next step, of course, is to have the putative axe-murderer Tillinghast released into the custody of good Dr. McMichaels so they can return to the Pretorious house and figure out what happened! This may seem an unlikely happenstance, but the authorities aren’t fools: for security they send along an ex-football player-turned-cop called Bubba Brownlee, played by Ken Foree, whom we remember so fondly from shopping centre-based pictures like Dawn of the Dead and Phantom of the Mall! The trio set up camp in the house, and as soon as dials are fiddled with and giant tuning forks start glowing purple, the extradimensional creatures show up, accompanied by a now-bestial Pretorius!

Things don’t go well from there – there are locust attacks, an encounter with bondage gear, and a giant lamprey eats off Tillinghast’s hair! Moreover, pineal glands start acting up and an officious doctor played by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon has her brains sucked out through her eye socket! Yuck! This is a scene which was depicted in the pages of Fangoria, but was cut out of all prints of the movie until fairly recently! I was glad to finally see it, but I have to admit the scene is gross!

And what of the movie itself? I like the creatures a lot, Combs is a nervous pleasure as ever, and it’s always terrific to see Foree on screen! Plus I like the pink-and-purple colour scheme (popular hues for Lovecraft apparently – remember The Color Out of Space?), and the craft across the board is very strong for a low-budget horror picture! And yet it doesn’t measure up to its predecessor! The story is fairly limp, the characters not terribly well-developed, and there are a few ropey trick effects! I don’t accuse the picture of being overly ambitious – ha ha, I admire ambition in low-budget pictures! – but they might have bit off a little more than they could chew with some of the dimensional effects!

Still, that’s not a big problem; the trouble really is the “That’s it?” feeling we’re left with at the end of the picture! It gets darker than I remembered – the conclusion has something of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feeling, or maybe more of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 feeling, ha ha! But despite any shortcomings, the pleasures here are many; and if it’s not a revelatory experience like Re-Animator was, it’s nevertheless a fine chunk of 80s horror with some terrific monsters! I give From Beyond two and a half ill-fitting bald caps!

Burl reviews Re-Animator! (1985)

It’s Burl here with a movie review! Today I’m strolling back again to that magical year of 1985 and looking at the fantastic Re-Animator – the zombie movie that isn’t really a zombie movie! Ha ha, and why isn’t it a zombie movie? Well, I have no credible case to make for that assertion – it’s just the way I feel! Ha ha!

The plot is pretty simple: an intense, owlish graduate student comes to study at Miskatonic University, and on the side continues work on some crazy antifreeze that resuscitates dead bodies! He gets an evil credit-grabbing doctor on his case and a clean-cut Igor who helps him out – but soon the dean and the dean’s daughter are making trouble for him too! There’s lots of shouting and sharp dialogue and hyp-mo-tizing, and though the campus seems at times to be populated by about three people plus a break-loving security guard, the acting is so good that you don’t really notice!

Perhaps I shouldn’t say the acting is good when what I mean is the acting is perfect! All the performers seemed to be on the same, correct page, and what that means is clever casting plus a director who knows how to work with actors! And Stuart Gordon, whose first film this was, already had years of theatre experience under his belt! So ha ha, he really did a bang up job with those actors!

Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West is especially good! He’s very funny too – just listen when he lilts “Mal-PRAC-tise!” And David Gale is great in this role as the nasty doctor with hypnotic powers! He would play almost the exact same role a few years later in a movie called The Brain, which I hope to review sometime soon! But then, sadly, he died well before what would seem to be his time – had he hung on, he might today be an old-style horror star in the vein of Angus Scrimm from Phantasm II!

In the last act of the movie, the gore really begins! There’s some pretty gross stuff in this movie, even today, but the gore is so gosh-darn good-natured! It was the same in From Beyond, the movie Stuart Gordon made after this, and which I’ll try to review soon also! Anyway, the university hospital morgue gets a new paint job: blood red! And there’s a jaw-dropping scene involving a severed noggin and a bare naked lady!

All that gore was cut out of the movie in one R-rated videotape release of this movie (which somehow was ten minutes longer than the uncut one!), and for years that was the only version could get my hands on! They really butchered it, no pun intended, ha ha! I was glad to watch it again the other day in all its crimson glory!

I give this great film a hearty ha ha! and four muffled “Of course it’s me”s, even though I felt really sorry for Rufus the cat when I watched it this time around! Did West in fact kill him? Ha ha, I’d say so! I love cats, so that’s pretty hard to forgive! But I still really enjoy this movie!