Waxwork Records' FROM BEYOND OST

As I've said before, I'll take any excuse to talk about Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND, and today's is a better excuse than most (so is Barbara Crampton). Waxwork Records has released a very handsome gatefold LP of Richard Band's score for the 1986 Lovecraft shocker. Sadist Art Designs' Marc Schoenbach is a perfect graphic match for this, with his authentic looking '80s VHS cover aesthetic. Purchase here, listen to few tracks below.

The Mistress of 666 Benevolent Street

Back in 1986 Barbara Crampton stripped off for a Playboy pictorial that was as much a sly bit of promo for Empire Pictures as it was a showcase for the young actress. The shoot is loaded with props, costumes and monsters from the studio's back catalogue, all strewn around Crampton in hilariously haphazard fashion.

The thing that makes this such a deliciously weird bit of '80s horror ephemera is that the whole thing was basically a promo piece for Stuart Gordon's From Beyond. Riding high from his success the previous year with Gordon's Re-Animator, Charles Band was obviously keen to promote his talented new director, as well as the film's sexy 27-year-old ingénue. The pictorial's accompanying text forgoes the mag's usual fluff in favour of a surprising amount of detail on Re-Animator's critical success, as well as the freshly released From Beyond (there's even a mention of Gordon and his roots in the Chicago theatre scene). I imagine that Band swung a deal with Playboy, whereby the magazine scored Crampton's services on the cheap in exchange for the publicity.

If you're into Stuart Gordon and '80s practical creature fx, this is where things get interesting. Among the aforementioned bits and pieces loaned from Band's studio (most obviously some of the titular beasties from 1985's Ghoulies), the pictorial features a number of items rescued from the set of Empire's second Lovecraft shocker. Although a bit the worse for wear (having perhaps been shipped back to the States from the film's Italian shoot, but it seems more likely that these pics were taken in Rome), you can spot some of John Carl Buechler's eldritch creations for From Beyond lurking in the background of a few shots. Having been worked on by some of the industry's greats (Buechler; Henenlotter regular Gabe Bartalos; Mark Shostrom; pre-KNB era Greg Nicotero and Robert Kurtzman), it's kind of sad to see these legendary bits of puppetry and/or animatronics reused in such a tawdry way. On the other hand, given the amount of sex that Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli shoehorned into their Lovecraft flicks, maybe it's completely appropriate that this stuff ended up in the pages of a skin rag.

For those interested in the text, I've included scans of the original pages from the December '86 Playboy (Brooke Shields on the cover, and a bizarre feature on "The Women of 7-Eleven").

Having definitely seen better days, this appears to be the busted up remains of the Dr. Pretorius monster, seen here smoking Hugh Hefner's pipe (probably not really Hugh Hefner's pipe):

Looming over Barbara here is the winged beast (actually Pretorius in his final form) that twists Crawford Tillinghast's head off during the finale:

This is the actual bondage gear that Crampton's Dr. Katherine McMichaels strutted around in whilst in her heightened state of (Resonator-induced) arousal:

The Pretorius Resonator itself, minus its middle forks:

Whose prosthetic head is that? Crampton's from a very brief shot of her being "kissed" by Pretorius? Or Carolyn Purdy-Gordon's from an unused fx shot of her death scene? Re-Animator or another movie entirely? I'd love to know:

And what movies are this scaly demon and frazzled corpse from?

The Ghoulies, just chillin' with their new friend Babs:

The funny thing about this pictorial is that I just can't imagine anyone successfully pleasuring themselves to it. The presence of the monsters is just too distracting and off-putting, and these shots are the oddest of the bunch. Tarantino would be outraged:

Finally, scans of the original pages:

Autopsy: 2009

Looking back at my first post below (from March last year), It's interesting to see how my expectations for 2009 panned out (or didn't).

My most anticipated film - Natali's Splice - has still not seen a release since being picked up by German company Senator International some two years ago. There's been talk of Senator's financial woes and possible studio meddling to tone down some of the films more confronting elements and give it a more "mainstream appeal". Ugh. An example of this short-sighted stupidity is the studio's idea to change the name from the evocative Splice to the utterly generic Hybrid.

There's still hope though! The film debuted at last years Sitges Film Festival to a positive critical reaction and came away with the festival's award for Best Special FX. Since then it's been added to this years Sundance midnight section where it will hopefully generate some buzz and find a new distributor. In the meantime the excellent twitchfilm.net is hosting a diary written by Natali documenting the experience of taking his monstrous labour of love to Sundance. The first entry can be found here.

So, looking back at my first post again, it's interesting to note that Romero's latest zombie film (going under the working title of "... Of The Dead" at the time of that writing) has since received a proper name as Survival Of The Dead, and opened at various festivals to very mixed reviews (it really seemed to polarise people). It's been picked up for distro by the genre-friendly Magnet and I for one can't wait to see it. I'm not a Romero apologist (I'll happily admit that about half his output has been pretty wonky) but I've found a lot to like in both of his "neo-dead" flicks. Yes, even Diary.

My prediction for an '09 release of Stuart Gordon's latest Lovecraft adaptation The Thing On The Doorstep was wildly off the mark as it seems to have all but vanished from his slate of future projects. The burly auteur spent the year working in his original medium - the theatre - on a one-man production called Nevermore... an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe starring who else but Jeffrey Combs. According to bloody disgusting he may now be attached to a horror project called The House On The Borderland which although not an H.P.L. adaptation, seems very Lovecraftian in nature. From bloody disgusting: "the supernatural thriller focuses on a family that relocates to a relative’s rural home only to discover it guards the border between our dimension and another which is inhabited by a race of hostile creatures." Sounds promising.

As far as the rest of the movies mentioned in that first post - Q.T. really silenced the nay-sayers by serving up a satisfying and exciting exploitation epic in Inglourious Basterds. A pretty amazing feat given how rushed the production was. John Hillcoat's The Road is finally getting a theatrical release this month after long delays. Early reviews have been pretty mixed, but at least it seems to have retained the grimness of Cormac McCarthy's book. Finally, Winding Refn's little metaphysical viking pic Valhalla Rising has still only been seen by a few festival goers but his other '09 film Bronson is one of the few last year that really surprised me. This hypnotic Kubrickian homage really blew my mind, in no small part due to Tom Hardy's intense performance. It easily made my top three for the year along with Neill Blomkamp's stunning SF debut District 9 and my biggest surprise of the year - von Trier's Antichrist. Von Trier was a director I had long dismissed as a pretentious art-wanker of the most annoying kind, but this sublimely beautiful and deliciously disturbing horror movie has had me completely re-evaluating my opinion of him (I've since watched Breaking The Waves for the first time and loved it). So in the end, not one of my top-three movies for last year was a film I was looking forward to - they all took me by surprise. A lot of the fun of being a film geek is the anticipation and speculation that comes with looking forward to movies, but the weird thing is that the end result is so rarely what you expected.

So, in the words of last year's real fantastic fox: CHAOS REIGNS!