Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'From Beyond' (1986)

This movie is one shameless excuse to see Barbara Crampton with her tits out after the next. Not that I mind. She was and still is super fucking hot and for twelve-year-old Horror Head, little me, any excuse to see tiddie was all I needed. This movie is basically a single X porno. It's practically acted like a single X porno. But it was tentacle porn before tentacle porn came to America. Mind you, the earliest tentacle porn movie was 1985, so it'd be a while before it came to America. So this is the shit weirdos used to spank it too before hentai.

But yeah, SPOILERS!!!

And yeah, spoilers now because this movie is "bad."

The whole plot of the movie is this alien creature trying to fuck Crampton's character Dr. Katherine McMichaels, while Katherine tries to fuck everyone else. Sure they go through the whole harmonic resonator, alternate dimensions, monsters from alternate dimensions, yadda, yadda, yadda... but these are all the horror movie equivalent of a Pizza Delivery Guy having balls-deep anal sex with a lonely housewife.

I mean, when I say the acting is as bad as the acting in a porno, it's because the acting is specifically like the acting in a porno. It is bang-on porno acting. And here's the thing, they knew it! There was zero resistance to the bad acting, they fucking leaned into it. So, TECHNICALLY, the acting is amazing. That's what they wanted to go for and that's what they achieved perfectly. You can even appreciate it the same way you can appreciate Shakespeare in the Park.

You know it's actually pretty good for body horror. It's fucking gorey, but it's also just flat-out weird. And it's not just 'mutated bodies' body horror, it's got bodily fluids in there as well. Jeffry Combs almost gets digested once and then proceeds to immediately get himself actually digested. There's this big blob of undulating body parts spewing fluids everywhere. Then there's every scene with Combs biting eyeballs. And you know what? The practical FX are pretty solid. Not the best I'd seen for the time, but certainly not the worst. What I'm saying is that the gorey shit is grimy as fuck and the monsters are cool looking. That's all we can ever really ask for in horror.

For fuck sake, the FX in Lord of Illusions (1995) are terrible, and that fucking movie was fucking amazing. The practical FX in almost the entire Friday the 13th franchise are garbage but we fucking love them anyway. Practical FX only needs to be so good to work for us.

Hardcore Horror Heads will gobble up shit worse than this and tell you how amazing it is. I'm fucking one of them. I'm going to tell you to watch this absolutely garbage movie. And I am not putting fine enough a point on it when I say garbage movie. This movie is so goddamn bad, but yes, it is good-bad. It's not even "so bad it's good" it's actually bad in a good way. Like, they were trying for this bad. They were trying for single X. That is SO easy to fuck up. So easy, that it was actually a challenge for the actors of X (2022). This is the kinda movies USA Up All Night was all about. When they were making Vamp (1986), movies like From Beyond was what they were going for.

So, yes, this is a 'Must-Watch' for all Hardcore Horror Heads, and for very much the same reason The Leperachuan (1993) is required viewing. In fact, if you came here expecting a thoughtful or true-to-the-source material rendition of H. P. Lovecraft, you're gonna have a bad time. This movie is pure camp. Get ready for riffing because that is what this movie was made for. Just trust me and watch it.