Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to shame you if you don't. Shame isn't really my thing. Besides, I completely understand if you haven't stepped foot in a library in over a decade because you can't afford the fines from the time it took you six months to return Seven Days to Faster Reading by William S. Schaill, but did you know some libraries have become such lonely places they've done away with fines just to get people to come back?
I'm not going to dwell on the point that libraries perform a vital service to your democracy by helping sustain an informed electorate, either, but speaking as the guy who introduced the concept of knowledge to all humanity, I still feel I must urge you to renew your library card because of what's in it for you -- horror movies!
Two streaming services, Kanopy and Hoopla, have emerged that are completely free, and your library card is your membership, and their horror selections don't suck.
For example, Kanopy is the only commercial-fee streaming service presently hosting the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Eraserhead and Scanners. Remember Scanners?
Hoopla boasts such exclusives as Bubba Ho-Tep, Suspiria, and a movie I've been waiting a long time to tell you about.
This week's Thursday Thriller is From Beyond.
Producer Brian Yuzna and director Stuart Gordon, the creative team behind Re-Animator, reunited in 1986 for another dip into the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. They brought actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with them.
Combs plays physicist Crawford Tillinghast, whose mentor Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) invented a water heater with a glass globe and some tuning forks on top. He calls it a resonator. When you turn the water heater on, the tuning forks glow purpledy-pink and the vibrations stimulate your pineal gland so you can see all the day-glo jellyfish and eels that are swimming invisibly in the air around you at all times. The tradeoff is now the jellyfish and eels can see you, too, and they might want to bite your face. Other side effects may include a BDSM fetish.
One night after playing with the machine, Pretorius's head goes missing and Tillinghast is arrested for murder because there's no such thing as habeas caput. (That joke would be funnier if you went to the library more often.)
Psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels (Crampton) is called in to determine whether Tillinghast's alibi that Pretorius was devoured by a head-sucking demon from another dimension means he's way too batshit to stand trial. Under the police escort of Sgt. Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), they return to Pretorius's house so Tillinghast can either destroy the machine or turn it on again so he can show McMichaels exactly what happened or something. He seems ambivalent about which is the best course. He turns it on anyway, and Pretorius appears looking like a low-budget, John Carpenter's The Thing or a high-budget Basket Case.
Once McMichaels sees how the machine works, her own pineal gland engorged, she can't get away from it and develops a taste for leather.
I may have already told you too much, but I at least have to mention Combs's excellent performance as a monster in the third act, in which he runs around in his hospital jammies with his third eye dangling out of his forehead, sucking people's brains out their eyeholes.
This is a good movie. Is it as good as Re-Animator? No, but not many movies are.
From Beyond streams on Hoopla.
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