Post by No Personality on Mar 30, 2010 7:23:54 GMT -5
Following 1985 - year of The Return of the Living Dead (the movie where it was first revealed that what zombies really hungered for were "brains!!") and Re-Animator (a sci-fi/horror epic about the lifespan of the human brain after clinical death) - horror became kinda brain-obsessed. If the sudden (nearly overnight) proliferation of scary movies featuring brain games is any indication. 1986's Deadly Friend (where one friend saves another by transplanting their brain into that of a robot). 88's Brain Damage (which, aside from the title, also featured many scenes of injecting the human brain directly with drugs). Even Nightmare on Elm Street 4 featured a scene of someone bumping their head and... well, that movie didn't feature anything done right to the brain. But it actually does tie-in with this movie a little bit.
Stuart Gordon was understandably a hot property after the huge success of Re-Animator. But after that, he had trouble getting execs at Empire Pictures to go for any of his follow-up movies ideas even though he'd just inked a 3-picture deal with them. Another H.P. Lovecraft project was a no-brainer (excuse the pun). They turned down Dagon; they thought zombies and fish together wouldn't make sense. They turned down Dreams in the Witch House (which Gordon later did as his first entry in 2005's Masters of Horror series), though I don't remember why. Finally, they agreed to From Beyond. And after seeing the finished film, I think it's an incredible shame he wasn't allowed to make Dagon and Dreams during that time. Limp stories about grad students in the morgue of a university hospital? Boring. Wild, sexually-charged fantasy-horror romps through an alternate dimension?
That's where Gordon pulls out all the stops! He had a real flair for the absurd fantasy of this scenario, taking a much shorter story structure than what they had on Re-Animator and getting really creative on dialogue and naive characters not knowing the power of their own minds. This film's dialogue is almost shockingly sophisticated compared to the flat, would-be campy Re-Animator. Allowing Gordon's wife Carolyn to go full-frigid bitch, previously whiny and irritating Barbara Crampton to become manipulating and sexually forceful rather than cutesy and sobby, and Jeffrey Combs to pull out his inner victim. Not to mention, he also is clad in very little throughout most of the film (following the scene where he turns on The Resonator machine a second time) and was quite the budding hunk.
The reversing of roles here with Combs becoming the Dan Cain (mixed of course, with a little of West's over-the-top 'isms, Gordon hasn't totally forgotten his target audience) preyed upon male, and Crampton becoming the token young ambitious 'mad' scientist is a novelty that's merely used as a jumping off point. And thankfully this movie presents a much more fair equal-opportunity field for debasement and moral reservations. To start with, Crampton's character Catherine is also a psychologist and her quest here isn't motivated by self-obsessions, delusions of her own brilliance, or anything wacky. She has a surprisingly grounded reason for kicking this whole insane series of events into motion. She wants to cure schizophrenia. And not just because her own father died in a mental institution, but because she has a drive to help others.
This is eventually perverted by the thrill of the Resonator vibrations, which become like a powerful drug. Leading to one inevitable scene where Catherine is compared to a junkie. That's not as interesting however as the range of sexual fascinations it brings out in the people who are within close proximity to the machine. The movie's not trying to get preachy when Bubba calls Catherine a junkie. That's merely an example of the black man wanting to be the most in-control of this group. A good idea at first of trying to coast black stereotypes in movies to a side more concerned with being safe and cautious. Though the moment he showed up, you knew what was going to happen to him. So, his attempts to try and keep everyone focused on their actual mission (to prove the Crawford character didn't kill his psycho mentor) are the side salad in this meal.
I've never been much interested in other worlds or science fiction. So for the movie to bring the alternate dimension to us is an approach I prefer. There are very few technical terms you need to know before sitting down to watch the movie. It's much more concerned with human sciences. And psychology. Which I've always found fascinating. You won't learn much here but that's no downside. The writing more than adequately guides characters through discussions about the human mind. And doesn't set much up in terms of proving or disproving theories about what makes us think. Suitable to less heavy horror films, the movie starts stringing along plot points and creating a very effective atmosphere of strangeness and the dread necessary for the many freaky scenes of havoc which take place.
The Resonator machine is more a source of mystery than technical marvel. Crawford's almost more a technician than a scientist and thankfully we get ideas of what the machine does more than the gratuitous specifics of how it works (meaning what each and every individual part is and so-forth, better left to the imaginations of tech-wizards). The machine produces vibrations that take the film into fantasy-land, where the insides of ideas come and play. And it certainly feels like this is play, rather than anyone's work. The darker aspects of the film all revolve around the human character, Dr. Edward Pretorius. One of the creatures that lives in the movie's "beyond" comes forth and kills him, which since the Resonator is on, means that he is taken into the other dimension and kept alive there instead of killed. Right in his character is the movie's entire theme of exploration and sexual experimentation. And, in fact, the horror.
Like The Craft's Lirio character says of a witch in that movie, there's a power here and Pretorius "takes it to a dark place." Catherine represents the light side, obviously. And it's something of a delight watching her slide into the dark. It doesn't exactly happen slowly. The movie might never have ascended to another level of liveliness had she remained so full of noble ambitions that she just broken down because she knew the machine was only turning her evil and she had to destroy it, thereby putting an end to any chance she might cure the thing that ruined her father. She actually becomes possessed and her character changes. Now, this is what she was born to do! And I've noticed some actors never fully become uninhibited while being normal, good people. The only true constant is that being 'bad' really sets all actors free (I've noticed this is especially true of Dead Dudes in the House, one of the scariest movies I've ever seen).
Crampton packs a great deal of different things into her possession. The childish glee of turning on the machine by herself while alone even though she's been warned by the father-like Bubba not to mess with it again. The weightlessness of flying when Crawford wakes to discover that the evil machine is on when he's also warned that it will shatter her completely and the passion with which she embraces him. That moment should feel as though she's violating him because we know he really is terrified of the machine and is solely focused on convincing her that it will only kill them. Yet it doesn't. And eventually, she does in fact 'rape' him while he sleeps. Though only by gently touching his genitals under the covers of his bed. The real fire sequence is when she first sees herself in the mirror and whether she's aware of it or not, is becoming lost in what we can only guess is her subconscious wish to be more like the dominatrix she dresses up as.
It's aided tremendously by rather mystic music (a great change of pace score for Re-Animator's same composer, Richard Band), but Crampton's creepy facial expressions are almost unsexy they're so effective at capturing a total self-hypnotism. And it's good to see the theme of hypnotism return after it was sacked from Re-Animator, only to exist in deleted-scene form on DVD and in the R-rated cut of the movie which never aired in theaters (it was only shown uncut). This movie thrives on strange, intriguing moments like these. Almost made to try tickling the psychologies of the viewers. Instead of the gag (and I don't mean puke, I mean like comic device) format of Re-Animator, this movie definitely works more on the mood of a horror movie. And there are many moments that as a mood piece make it almost dance.
There's an almost Vertigo-esque disorienting zoom perspective shot of the "Pretorius house" (in the dialogue, any reference to the house has an ominous tone about it) with a van driving down a pathway with almost-cornfield like patches of bushes on both sides. Gordon wanted this house and the one he used in 1987's Dolls to look like Lovecraft's description of Dreams in the Witch House. It's not that creepy but things like this add to an air of fun spookiness the whole movie has. You don't know exactly what you're signing up for but you know it will bring with it a lot of potency. The best creepy scene is probably a conversation between the Crawford and Bubba characters in which they look over a sleeping Catherine while talking cryptically about nasty Dr. Pretorius's habits of wanting to terrorize women for sexual pleasure. During this moment, they never once look each other in the eye. Instead, Bubba talks over Crawford's shoulder.
And finally, what you may walk into this movie expecting (if by chance you're lucky enough to see the awful trailer, which is only available to watch online) or out of it remembering it for a bevvy of goopy, gloppy transformation scenes. The kind I insisted ruined at least half of John Carpenter's The Thing. Turns out I wasn't against the glop perse. But how it could hurt a movie, depending on its' misuse. This movie never pretends to be serious and yet it achieves some honest creepy moments with a little serious undertone and sticks to its' own rules. At nearly every turn, there's something either disgusting because it's meant to be (and even then, I was impressed that the FX people were able to make the jelly in this alternate dimension form real creatures, mostly things you'd find underwater) or amusing because it seems like this movie wants to break rules. The dominatrix scene alone achieves this. But it also has style and a brilliant atmosphere about to make it perhaps the greatest 80's mad scientist horror movie around.
