While Stuart
Gordon’s From Beyond is known as
an adaptation to H.P. Lovecraft’s short
story of the same name, the movie is nonetheless its own beast, with the
original literature being more like a seed to what Gordon and his team developed in this FX heavy, gory ‘80s shocker. The pre-credits intro is more or less the component that is primarily adapted from Lovecraft’s ultra-short, seven page
story, while the rest of the film continues on as an imagining of what could’ve
happened had the original story not ended so abruptly. Whether or not Gordon got it spot-on is arguable, but Lovecraft’s ideas in From Beyond did have a lot of
unexplored potential, and Gordon took
liberties to explore this potential and, at the same time, do things his way,
by including those far-out sexual elements á la Re-Animator (the Barbara
Crampton escapades), some of the coolest grotesque interdimensional
creatures and transformations since John
Carpenter’s The Thing, and a
face full of the good ol’ nauseating gore; most of which didn’t make it past
the censors at the time of its initial release.
Due to the success of Re-Animator, Gordon wanted to do another Lovecraft
film, and he wanted to reuse the key actors from Re-Animator, Jeffrey Combs
and Barbara Crampton, who all ended up being
extremely successful and welcome returns. However, I remember really wanting to see this when
I found out that Ken Foree was in it,
my favorite zombie killer (Dawn of the
Dead). Here, Foree still has that
likability he had as Peter in Romero’s
film, but his character in From Beyond
just wasn’t as skilled with handling interdimensional creatures, as Peter was
with zombies, to make it all the way through this one.
