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dombrewer's avatar

dombrewer

I've been wanting to see this Stuart Gordon/Jeffrey Combs/H.P. Lovecraft horror for many years, as an admirer of their "Re-animator" from the year before, but struggled to find the film anywhere - it's never on television and wasn't released on DVD in the UK until very recently. I finally managed to watch the unrated director's cut online. In a way it's a shame because I have a feeling if I'd seen it as a kid in the 80s on grainy VHS it would have properly blown my mind as intended. Today it seems gloriously OTT, unexpectedly kinky, disjointed, bizarre, gaudy and resolutely and proudly B-grade in every way.
Combs plays Crawford Tillinghast, an altogether more sympathetic sort of insane scientist and different kind of monster to Herbert West, and one you continue to side with even when a blood soaked pineal gland is snaking out of his forehead and he's sucking the brains of a nurse out of her eye socket (a seriously disgusting and magnificently audacious moment). Barbara Crampton has more to do in this one than in "Re-animator", and good job too - she's a feisty leading lady, playing some extremely off-the-wall scenes truthfully while looking ridiculously hot in S&M gear. It really *is* a shame I missed this one as a kid.
The star of the show are the special effects though - the creature designs and makeup are superb, easily standing alongside the great work of that greatest of practical effect eras - the scene where the villainous and increasingly mutating Dr. Pretorious returns from the other dimension and tears his own head in two revealing violently writhing tentacles and a fountain of slime owes a strong debt to John Carpenter's "The Thing" but is just as effectively done. Crawford's comment immediately following: "that... will be quite enough of that" is a classic, and in the similar vein to Palmer's all time great understatement in Carpenter's film.
As great as the effects are, and outrageous as the telling of the story is, the plot is admittedly weak and as a result the film never really reaches the levels of a bona fide horror classic, but it's a mad ride and definitely deserves a place in 80s SFX history. I'm looking forward to completing the Gordon/Lovecraft set with "Castle Freak" and "Dagon".
10 years 11 months ago
armyofshadows's avatar

armyofshadows

Great for the gore. The huge plot holes are also fun to notice. It is very Cronenberg, but of course Cronenberg is much, much better.
9 years 4 months ago
jerthejerjer's avatar

jerthejerjer

I have to be honest, this movie reminds me of a Cronenberg film ah la Videodrome or Naked Lunch. Great movie and a must see for horror fans.
12 years 4 months ago
Siskoid's avatar

Siskoid

A year after Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon reunited with several of his stars for a second Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond, and this one is very much more in the archetypal Lovecraftian mold. Scientists have opened a gateway to another dimension, which they perceive thanks to enlarged pineal glands, and it drives them crazy (losing massive amounts of Sanity points, if this were a game of Call of Cthulhu). The creature effects in this are bizarre and disgusting and totally the kind of indescribable stuff you would find in a proper Lovecraft story, indelible images of squishy, twisted gore heaped upon Gordon's apparently trademark exploitative psycho-sexual sequences. Scream Queen Barbara Crompton here plays an unscrupulous psychologist (and closet dominatrix) who means to "cure" Scream King Jeffrey Combs of his madness by having him face and relive the experiment that cost his partner his head and him his mind. Add Scream Jack Ken Foree to the mix as a fun policeman type overseeing the whole thing. From Beyond is insane, and when you think it's over, there's another full act of terror waiting for you. Like Re-Animator, it's too much weird fun to really be scary, though the asylum stuff does offer a real-world chill beyond the story's supernatural trappings.
3 years 10 months ago
fricken's avatar

fricken

Surreal gore fest deluxe!
8 years 5 months ago
daisyaday's avatar

daisyaday

https://tubitv.com/movies/466379/from-beyond?autoplay=true
5 months ago
ucuruju's avatar

ucuruju

cartoon logic, real horror, lotsa fun
2 years 3 months ago
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