Friday, November 9, 2012

Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2004)

I knew I was in trouble when the quote on the cover stated, "Opens the porthole... into Lovecraft's mind."  Ummm, I hope you mean portal.  Because a porthole is just going to give him some fresh air.

In 1908 an inbred hillbilly is institutionalized for killing his entire family.  He has a deformity on his back that appears to house a second mind.  Intern Edward (played by the interestingly named Fountain Yount), is a resident at the asylum who becomes obsessed with the strange hillbilly.  And by resident, I mean not yet a doctor rather than a patient who lives there.

He is experimenting on patients by placing electrodes in their brains while he's wearing a horribly, bad, freakin' distracting wig!  Seriously, this is one of the worst wigs you'll ever find perched upon someones cranium.

No one enunciates clearly, the film is shot in black and white in a faux artsy style, the editing is annoying, and there is that horrible laughable wig. The film is so bad it's hard to get through and is often unbelievably tedious.

There is a huge continuity error involving a disappearing hat.  First they're wearing the hat as they run through the woods, then it's gone. They run into a house and the hat is back - no wait, it's gone again. Then hat comes back and.. yup, gone again.

At one point a gurney hits a dwarf and tips over.  Yup, that's as ridiculous as it sounds, folks.  If I could, I would have a tape loop of the gurney hitting the dwarf, the scenes of the disappearing hat, and then lots of laughable shots of Edward's horrible wig.

No comments: