Classic Horrors Club

Many of the cast and crew members from Re-Animator (1985) returned a year later to make another adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft: From Beyond. The two films share the same gross excess, but the action in From Beyond is a little more controlled and I prefer it’s consistency to Re-Animator.

This doesn’t mean there’s any less goo and gore. There’s even more. And the special effects are really good. I’d stop short of saying they’re as good as they are in The Thing (1982), but they’re right up there. There are more people in the  effects crew than in the cast, with John Carl Buechler probably being the biggest name.

The roles are reversed for the characters played by Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. Here, his Crawford Tillinghast is the reluctant participant in a bizarre experiment and her Dr. Katherine McMichaels is the obsessed scientist. Neither is as evil as the big bad, though, Ted Sorel’s Dr. Edward Pretorius.

He’s built a “Resonator,” a machine that stimulates the pineal gland to somehow open a doorway into another dimension. It draws him to the other side where he gains more power and begins controlling the Resonator from there. This makes it more difficult for Katherine to conduct legitimate research and for Crawford to destroy the machine.

Along the way, exposure has caused Crawford to lose his hair and grow a lump on his forehead. Eventually, a snake-like “thing” pops from the lump to go on its own little killing spree with Crawford still attached. At the hospital, fluid runs under the door to the pathology lab and he’s found eating human organs.

They’re delicious!

Also along the way, potential for the “Resonator” to lead to a cure for schizophrenia has caused Katherine to go too far and don black leather S&M-wear. Eventually, she’s dragged to electroshock therapy. At the hospital, she capitalizes on Crawford’s organ-eating distraction to escape and return to the lab.

From Beyond is non-stop chaos and 85 minutes of ridiculous fun. If producer Brian Yuzna, director Stuart Gordon, and actors Combs and Crampton really were going to become like a theatrical troupe that made a larger series of Lovecraft films, this is the one with which they’d hit their stride with all cylinders firing. Re-Animator was their warm-up.

Finally, while the entire cast is good in From Beyond, I want to highlight Crampton for her performance. Studio executives supposedly objected to her casting, so put up her hair and gave her big glasses to make her a believable doctor. Her final scene, though, leaves no doubt that she’s a serious scream queen, literally. She keeps the movie chilling, even after it ends.