I'd seen the film before. I think Aeron sent it to me a while ago.I can't say I can break down the exact differences between the regular release and the Directors' cut, but I assume it had to do with the overt sexual material and the close-up eyeball sucking type stuff.
It's an amazing movie. I might be sort of biased because I pretty much love everything Stuart Gordon has done , though I tend to focus on his Lovecraft material, which From Beyond is among; I haven't seen Robot Jox or King of the Ants and a couple of others.
I'm not sure that tension is adequately built enough to provide any genuine scares, but I'm not sure that was the major concern. I think the gore/monsterism was seen as providing that effect, but I'm pretty much immune to that at this point. Witness:
The effects, the ultra-lurid color scheme, all of it is a thrill to me.
I'm not going to break down the story cause I'm lazy, but my favorite buts are the hospital sequences where the Jeffrey Combs character goes through a bizarre and genuinely freaky transformation.
He gets hungry.
The visual of the bandaged, completely hairless Combs, with an oddly bulged-out skull, wandering through the hospital in a kind of trance is just fucking awesome. How's that for valuable criticism?
Go see it and tell me what you think.
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I love the special effects in this, the gritty real stuff will always beat out shitty cgi effects any day of the week!
Also, you can watch the movie streaming off this link - http://joox.net/cat/2/id/9332
And this was made at the height of Gordon's film career, he did Re-Animator before this and Dolls after, all in allm, 3 of my favorite horror films of the 80's. And I looked him up on imdb and see he's scheduled to do another Re-Animator flick, should be interesting. Although the 3rd Re-Animator was nowhere near as good as the first two it was still awesome to see the reference to the Hammer Frankenstein film that ook place in the prison. Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed? I think that's the title.
- aeron
I agree. I first saw this film back in the 80s and I although it's not exactly in the spirit of the original HPL story think it remains to be one of the most successful film adaptations.
I was a horror movie obsessed teen during the eighties, and this movie was King, the most perfect VCR fare ever.
Early Cronenberg was GOD of course.
I have a copy of Videodrome on a really old vhs tape that my dad recorded back in the 80's, I think off of HBO. The recording has a lot of cool distortion effects, white noise around the edges of the screen, that sort of thing, which with any other movie would suck but with Videodrome it adds something to it.
Videodrome is indestructible, i have seen it not only dubbed to ratty spanish and with commercials, but Censored! and somehow it still worked.
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