FROM BEYOND (1986)

A horrid film 'From Beyond'

San Diego Union, The (CA) - October 29, 1986

Author: David Elliot, Movie Critic
"One day I'd like to make a movie that my kids can see," said director Stuart Gordon. His tongue must be firmly in cheek, assuming he hasn't ripped it out as a prop for one of his films.

Gordon, a leading stage director in Chicago who moved to Los Angeles in 1984, became something of an instant cult figure to horror film addicts with "Re-Animator," which provided such jollies as a man being wrapped and crushed, python-like, in his own squirming entrails. Now Gordon is back on screen with another adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, "From Beyond."

Camp is the spirit on tap here. A character named Dr. Pretorius -- the name famously used by Ernest Thesiger in "The Bride of Frankenstein" -- gazes upon his wonderful new toy, The Resonator, and pronounces fervently, "I want to see more -- more than any man has ever seen!"

Well, a movie that suggests such superlatives is hard put to deliver, in 1986. Years ago you could hang bones in cobwebs, move Halloween lights through the sockets of skulls, and give people the shivers. Now they "want to see more," which really loads the pressure on Gordon and other wizards of ooze.

Right away, we feel Gordon trying to top his first film and satisfy the in-group ghouls. He has Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) turn into a slab of slime as his Resonator sets up vibes that bring forth the monsters from his pineal gland -- the little neighbor of the brain that became briefly famous when Descartes called it the likely seat of the soul. Before long the gland, looking distinctly phallic, is popping out of foreheads.

Jeffrey Combs, boyish hero of "Re-Animator," returns here as a scientist who goes round the bend when Pretorius beckons from the Pineal Beyond. That interests a psychiatrist (Barbara Crampton), who is sexually haunted by the astoundingly gross Pretorius, and before long she is showing a novel interest in leather bondage gear. Inhibitions fall, and guts pile up.

Gordon has masterful makeup specialists to filigree the ick, but as a director he's barely a starter. Long shots look like crudely lighted theater sets, and close-ups like bulging photo booth specials. Some of the shock touches are amazingly sophomoric, such as a cut from a man vomiting to an egg being cracked over a frying pan.

And the tone is cold, compulsive, remotely aloof from story values or characterization. Cheap-shot horror with no intent except comical nausea was pioneered years ago by another Chicagoan, Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose work had titles like "Two Thousand Maniacs!" Stuart Gordon is Lewis' inheritor, slicked up for the '80s and offering the same kind of visceral pornography, but with a new in-on-the-party cachet that comes from 20 years of grinding exploitation. Geekery has graduated to this.

The horror movie, driven to the ghoulie pits by so many obvious effects (including mainstream films such as "The Fly" and "Aliens"), could be going the way of the western. This is how genres die. And nothing in "From Beyond" is as funny as the effect a local theater is causing by preceding the film at intermission with -- just imagine -- Strauss waltzes.

"From Beyond" (Zero stars) An Empire release. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli, from the novel by H.P. Lovecraft. Produced by Brian Yuzna. Photography by Mac Ahlberg. Music by Richard Band. Rated R. In local theaters. The Cast Jeffrey Combs..........Crawford Tillinghast Barbara Crampton.............Dr. McMichaels Ken Foree.............................Bubba Ted Sorel.....................Dr. Pretorius Carolyn Purdy-Gordon...............Dr. Bloch