From Beyond (1986)
Star Jeffrey Combs and director Stuart Gordon, worked together on one of my favourite horror comedies: "Re-Animator". Here they rejoin to work on another HP Lovecraft adaptation. This time the subject is no longer zombies, but rather creatures in another dimension of reality normally beyond our perception and comprehension.
The initial scene of the movie was highly promising, with Combs turning on the machine and seeing a strange floating worm with big teeth which went on to attack him. His fellow scientist working with him on the project insists that they turn the machine up even higher. He is amazed by the results. Things don't go quite like the fantastic short story from Lovecraft, but it's pretty close all the same.
However, that is just the beginning of the film. Combs is in an asylum believed to be suffering from schizophrenia. However, a scientist has decided that she wants him to try to replicate the experiment. They enter the house to establish what happened.
The tone of the film isn't quite so consistent as in "Re-Animator". There's plenty of neat practical effects involved here, but the storyline is a little meandering. Things get pretty boring later on when we leave the house entirely.
To my mind, the biggest problem with this film is that the creatures beyond our perception become tied closely to the human libido, basically making this a poor imitation of David Cronenberg's Videodrome. As great as the practical effects may have been, they didn't have anything like the inventiveness of David Cronenberg's classic body horror film.
The point where the female scientist decides to dress herself in leather bondage gear things really start to get cheesy, particularly since the focus becomes less on the strange unexplored dimension of existence filled with savage monsters and more on the fact that Comb's partner in crime on the experiment had multiple sexual partners and sadistic tendencies.
Less comedy, less horror. This is nowhere near the level of Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator" movie and my advice would be to watch David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" instead. A much better movie. I wish I could say that this was simply cheesy fun, but in the end the good bits are just too few and too sparse.
D+
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
This was a horror film I was recommended, though by the time I got around to checking it out I'd completely forgotten who recommended it. Even calling it "horror" is a bit of a weird one, since it doesn't fit terribly neatly into the genre at all. (You might as well call "Twelve Monkeys" a horror movie. That has more in common with this than most films I've seen.)
So with no memory of what horror fans might have recommended this, the first time I CAN remember being recommended this is during a brief period in university where I became interested in the ideas of Christian gnosticism. I don't think I ever took those ideas terribly seriously, but they were different enough from anything I'd normally heard about religion to peak my interest. And of course there was no shortage of fanatics who took it very seriously indeed, connecting their ideas with Buddhism, the works of Carl Jung, and so on. The idea that the physical world is an illusion was a pretty big element (for some of them at least), so perhaps that's why the movie "Jacob's Ladder" seemed so appealing to them.
Of course, I'm still interested in religious ideas and with a title like Jacob's Ladder I was expecting something pretty awesome. Jacob being the prominent Biblical figure who famously wrestled with God and was honoured with the new name Israel (which means "wrestles with God") as a result. The ladder in question led up to heaven and was seen by Jacob in a dream, once again showing this figure's newfound connection with the deity. So you can imagine my disappointment in finding out that the lead character is called 'Jacob' and that 'the ladder' turns out to be the name of some weird experimental drug. Sure you could argue that the Biblical stuff is still relevant to the film's themes, but to be quite frank the biggest problem with this film is that it is all themes and no substance.
What's the most annoying ending you can think of to a film? There's probably a fair number of answers that could be suggested here, but certainly any long answer to that question would at least need to acknowledge the "it was all a dream" ending. Early on in this film it's made clear that things are not as they seem. Jacob is both married and divorced. He has both a wife and a post-marriage girlfriend. Sometimes his son is dead, sometimes his son is alive. Basically it seems like he's losing his mind and it's a long way before the end of the first half when he suggests that he might actually be dead. He can see people with distorted demon-like faces all over town, so the idea that he might be in hell becomes an option.
There's a brief moment in the film where it seems like there might be a plot after all. The film actually started in Vietnam and a bunch of his Vietnam vet friends decide they might try to sue for what experimentation may have been done to them in Vietnam. There's some suggestion that a conspiracy may be at play. This element of the film is a really irritating tease, not least since the film tries to pretend this element of the film still matters even when it has been rendered irrelevant.
This film has no sensible plot progression, meandering in a dream-like way, and generally involves following a character who is nervous and confused. That is, until Danny Aiello, playing a mysterious chiropractor, randomly tells us exactly what is going on.
This film was a massive waste of time.
E-