I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #151 – From Beyond (1986, dir. Stuart Gordon)

In the 1980’s Hollywood rediscovered the horror genre. After several decades of murderers, biker gangs, hillbillies and mutually assured nuclear destruction, Hollywood rediscovered monsters. Special effects were back in a big way, and this last pre-C.G.I. period of make-up innovation is, in some ways the most thrilling iteration of the squishiest art. Riding high on the success of his first major film Re-Animator, director Stuart Gordon re-gathered the same stars (Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton) and some tempting source material in a seven-page H.P. Lovecraft story, and headed to a studio in Rome to make a real old-fashioned monster movie. He succeeded in grand fashion.

The basic premise of the film is a scientific experiment gone horribly awry. Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel, and yes, that is the same name as the mad scientist in Bride Of Frankenstein) has invented a machine, the resonator, which, when activated, stimulates the human pineal gland, which grows and becomes a “third eye.” Once engaged, the resonator allows people to see into another dimension - and also allows the inhabitants of that dimension access to ours. Once the veil between the everyday world and “the beyond” is ripped away, things really start to happen. This alternate dimension seems to be the place where the most disturbing aspects of human behavior reside. Not only are there translucent eels with huge teeth floating around in the air, plague-like swarms of flesh-eating bees, gigantic tape worms, and indescribable humanoid slime beasts, but, under the influence of the resonator, people on our side of the dimensional divide experience heightened sexual arousal. Thus the scientists and psychiatrists involved in experiments with the resonator are exposed to the horrors of another dimension as well as their own repressed sexuality: a toxic and highly entertaining combination.

The majority of From Beyond takes place over a couple of nights while psychiatrist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) forces Pretorius’ assistant, Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) to recreate the experiments he and his mentor performed with the resonator. The results predictably get out of control almost immediately…strike that…immediately, and we are exposed to every manner of sliming, oozing, biting, brain-eating (greatest brain-eating scenes ever!), dismembering grotesquerie known to film. The erotic subtext adds an even more enticing/repulsive element to the proceedings as we are treated to some of the best blonde-on-monster sex scenes ever caught on celluloid. The monstrous eroticism of some of the scenes are on a par with those in Alien. Eventually the resonator starts to show signs of sentience, and the opening between “here” and “beyond” is in danger of becoming permanently opened. To save the world, and stop herself from her own basest instincts, Dr. McMichaels destroys the resonator.

From Beyond succeeds so well because it is entirely unflinching in its exploration of the darkest themes. It doesn’t turn away from any of the most disturbing gross-outs. When a film does this it can go one of two ways; either we turn away in disgust and anger, or we hoot in appreciation and wonderment. For me, From Beyond is in the second category. The era of great horror movies that arose in the 80’s is best defined by this very struggle: how far is too far? The deciding factor is, surprisingly, humor. Like Re-Animator, this film also keeps a wink-wink attitude about the horrors unfolding on screen, allowing the viewer to be in on the joke instead of the butt of it. Stuart Gordon helped define where the line was in the modern era, probably to the overall detriment of the craft; however witnessing the cutting edge in its most visceral form is quite a thrill. From Lovecraft’s thought-provoking premise, to Gordon’s unflinching realization, to the over-the-top special effects, to the garish lighting and music, From Beyond is at the top of the heap of extreme(ly) scary movies.

-         Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #76 - Re-Animator (1985, dir. Stuart Gordon)

In the opening scene of this film, set at a hospital in the University of Zurich, two policemen are lead by employees of the hospital to investigate the source of crashing sounds and unearthly screams emanating from Dr. Gruber's locked office. The police break in to find Dr. Gruber seizing on the floor, with Herbert West (played with terrific zeal by Jeffrey Combs) hovering over him with an empty syringe. West is pulled off by the police, shouting that he needs to record the data of Gruber's vital signs and that a vital experiment has been interrupted. Gruber screams, squeezes his head until his eyeballs burst and then collapses on the floor, dead. One of the employees accuses West of killing him, to which he calmly responds "No I did not. I gave him life." Herbert West is a little cracked. Maybe more than a little. But with his calmly clinical attitude he’s also the man you want in your corner when the shit hits the fan, as it most assuredly does later in the film.

Re-Animator is an over the top horror film with tongue planted firmly in cheek, based on a series of stories by H.P. Lovecraft but just as equally indebted to the Grand Guignol theater in its depiction of graphic horrors with very little in the way of any moralizing. Providing the film’s moral center is the couple Dan and Meg – Dan (Bruce Abbott) is a promising medical student at Miskatonic University (an invention of Lovecraft’s), an ivy-league college in New England, and Meg (Barbara Crampton) is the daughter of the dean of the school. This is our normal couple about to enter into the maelstrom and madness unleashed by Herbert West. After the tragic demise of Dr. Gruber, West relocates to Miskatonic, bringing his re-animating solution that can give new life to dead tissue – a scientific research gone awry as he pursues results further and further afield (at one point he’s hovering over a recently deceased corpse yelling at Dan’s qualms about reviving the corpse with a curt "Every moment that we spend talking about it costs us results!"). Rounding out the central characters are Meg’s father, an old-fashioned, out-of-touch fuddy-duddy, and Dr. Hill, the school’s star brain surgeon and “grant machine,” played as a perfectly arrogant, slavering creep by David Gale. Conflicts between Herbert West and Dr. Hill are set up from the get-go as West accuses Hill of stealing Dr. Gruber’s ideas, and Meg has an understandable and immediate dislike of West’s cold and creepy demeanor when he asks to move in with Dan and set up a crude laboratory in the basement of his house.

As West demonstrates the effectiveness of his re-animating serum to Dan, things quickly begin to slide downward for everyone involved and before long we get to witness a re-animated head, several severed limbs, mind control via laser brain surgery, and many other ghastly horrors, all delivered in a spirit of gleeful excess by director Gordon (a founder of the noted Organic Theater Company) and his cast, who do the film a great service by playing it completely straight. It’s to their credit that despite the film’s panoply of grotesque (and funny) horrors they also make sure that its characters read as true – too often horror films populate their casts with clichés just waiting to be bumped off so it’s always nice when one spends the time to make us believe the people we’re watching, even if we know that they’re actually going to play second fiddle to a shambling headless corpse at some point.

Along with other horror films of its time like Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive, Re-Animator marries comedy to the horrific proceedings in a perfect mixture and would certainly be a lesser film if it merely went for scares. And though they pay homage to Lovecraft’s spirit, they take his ideas pretty far out in a way the author himself never did in his preference for horrors insinuated and alluded to rather than displayed. And that’s where it comes back to the Grand Guignol’s displays of excess and gore. And despite being very much of its time in the spirit of what other horror films were doing, there’s just something about its rootedness of Gordon’s work with his actors and his experience on stage that makes even the most outrageous effects and scenes of the film seem like they’re as natural as the characters they’ve made. It’s a spectacularly entertaining film, certainly not for everyone, but if you’ve read this far, it’s most likely a film for you.

- Patrick Brown