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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