#36: From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986)

The summer I turned 11, I scored the then-unbelievable sum of 100 dollars from various relatives. For my first birthday loot spending spree, I rode my bike to the convenience store, bought a can of Frito-Lay jalapeno cheese dip, and rented From Beyond. I was able to rent this R-rated film because my family was gone for the day, 40 miles away in Scottsbluff doing some shopping, running errands, and getting some lunch. My mother was a laid-back, open-minded parent who let me read whatever I wanted by the time I turned nine, but she was unusually strict about movies and music. I never understood the distinction, but movies and song lyrics high in violence, misogny, sexual content, and excessive profanity were off limits until I started high school. My friends' parents were almost the exact opposite, with rules and regulations up the wazoo but a laissez-faire attitude about entertainment choices. I'll never forget my stunned reaction to a friend's father telling him to put the porno videos back in his closet when he was done with them so his six-year-old brother didn't watch them. I was twelve, and my jaw didn't leave the floor for the rest of the afternoon. Of course, as soon as my mom and dad were gone, I rented every off-limits movie and purchased every banned cassette tape. Every decapitation, bared breast, and utterance of the word "fuck" filled my heart with joy. I was rebelling against what I perceived as the world's most unfair edict, especially considering how reasonable my mother was about everything else. That was a good summer day. The cashiers at the convenience store had no qualms about renting a movie high in violence and sexual content to an 11-year-old boy, and I thank them for it. I ate my nachos and watched From Beyond happily. "What in the world is this?" I remember thinking.
I've seen From Beyond three more times since that summer. Each time I prepared to re-watch it, I could never recall what the hell it was about. I think I can finally summarize it. Loosely based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, the film zooms through its source material in the prologue and takes off from there. The physicists Dr. Pretorious and Dr. Tillinghast are conducting experiments on the pineal gland. Dr. Pretorious, an impotent gigolo with a serious S&M kink, believes that the pineal gland is a dormant sixth sense that can be stimulated -- with science! -- to open gateways to heretofore uncharted sensual pleasures. The more traditional Tillinghast is interested in the experiment from a purely scientific perspective. Pretorious has invented a resonator that stimulates the pineal gland. When they reach a breakthrough in their research, a crazy portal to another dimension is opened and flying eel-like creatures appear and attack. Then SOMETHING ELSE comes for a visit and all hell breaks loose. No one believes Tillinghast, and he's locked up in a mental ward for schizophrenics. The famous psychologist Dr. McMichaels checks him out and runs a CAT scan on him. Turns out, his pineal gland is growing! Yowzah! She is awarded custody of him to recreate the experiment, and a law enforcement officer (Dawn of the Dead's Ken Foree) comes along to make sure Tillinghast doesn't try to escape. Crazy, crazy stuff happens after that. None of it makes sense, all of it is awesome.
From Beyond was directed by Stuart Gordon, the man responsible for Re-Animator, Dolls, and Castle Freak, and the first theater director to stage a David Mamet play. He piles on the weirdness, gore, black humor, and sexual kinks, and I salute him for it. The movie reminds me of an EC comics version of an early David Cronenberg film, particularly the weird body evolutions that begin once the pineal gland starts growing -- the vaginal opening in the forehead where a penis-like third eye comes out -- and the freaky sexuality. The film also contains elements of hammy 1930s mad scientist movies. Re-Animator veterans Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton return as well, playing Tillinghast and McMichaels, respectively. See it four times. It's short.
(From Beyond finally came out on DVD recently in an unrated edition that puts back the 60 seconds of gore that the MPAA made Gordon trim to get an R-rating.)

#35: The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

In one of my alternate fantasy lives, I'm a film programmer for a large repertory theater in a major city. For that theater, I program an annual series showing films that are either the only or one of a very small handful of films made by their directors. These directors are usually moonlighting from their day jobs (actors, writers, musicians, photographers, etc.) to realize a pet project no one else will touch. Usually, the film is their sole directorial credit, but sometimes they get to make two or three. I'd show Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, David Byrne's True Stories, Thomas McGuane's 92 in the Shade, Barbara Loden's Wanda, L.Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog, James William Guercio's Electra Glide in Blue, Lewis Jackson's Christmas Evil, Walter Murch's Return to Oz, Peter Newbrook's The Asphyx, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, Tim Roth's The War Zone, James Bond III's Def by Temptation, and Neil Young and Dean Stockwell's Human Highway. (Let's all forget about Perry Farrell's Gift.) Audience participation: If anyone has any others to add, I would love to hear them.
William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist III fits right in with this series. Blatty is a writer of mediocre supermarket novels, including The Exorcist, and only reluctantly stepped into the director's chair twice. In 1980, he filmed his own novel, The Ninth Configuration, and ten years later, he filmed another of his novels, Legion, under the producer-mandated title of The Exorcist III after John Carpenter turned him down. Fortunately, Blatty makes a much more interesting director than a writer, and this second sequel is a weirdly effective mess. Sometimes people who don't really know how to make a movie end up making better, freer, more creative films than the pros. (Speaking of pros, great director John Boorman made the second Exorcist, one of the most notorious flops in film history. Long considered one of the worst films ever made, Boorman's sequel is worth checking out for the absurdity value alone. The film looks fantastic visually, but features possibly the dumbest screenplay ever written. Richard Burton amps his performance up to insane heights, Ennio Morricone provides a fantastic score, and James Earl Jones wears a giant locust costume. The film enraged Blatty and baffled the first film's director William Friedkin. Audiences booed. Both Martin Scorsese and famously contrarian critic Pauline Kael preferred it to the original. Scorsese called it his "favorite guilty pleasure.")
Blatty has assembled a great cast, including George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif, Jason Miller, and Scott Wilson. They keep the exposition-heavy, character-based film from imploding and know exactly when to underplay and when to kick the motherfucker into scenery-chewing overdrive. Scott's monologue about the carp swimming in his bathtub is alone worth the price of a rental. Blatty avoids much gore, but supplies three or four truly creepy shock scenes. Combining two of my favorite horror staples, serial killers and Catholics vs. Satanic demons, this sequel pleasantly surprised me. Jason Miller returns as Father Karras, but otherwise the story veers away from the original, despite a studio-mandated exorcism scene near the film's end. The film's priests aren't stereotypical, and the location-shot Georgetown setting provides a lot of atmosphere. I like it.












By the way, this film has some of the weirdest celebrity cameos I've ever seen. A restaurant scene features Larry King and C. Everett Koop, and a Fellini-esque dream sequence includes Fabio, Patrick Ewing, and Samuel L. Jackson. Huh?