Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006)

My buddy picked this out when we were hanging out one night, because he's a big Lovecraft fan. It's probably not something I would've scooped on my own, but from the cover it looked sufficiently entertaining enough.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep is an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft short story about a dude from the sticks with a bunch of growths on his back that turn into a monster or something. I never read the story, but in the movie they have that aspect, with the hick played by Larry of Larry, Daryl and Daryl fame of the old Newhart show. He goes to an asylum, where a young intern takes a fancy to him when he's not experimenting on a chick he has in the basement with her skull open and wires attached to her exposed brain. While the two main doctors at the asylum fight over what to do with the hick, the intern experiments on him with his electrode things. People die horrible deaths, and then this monster, named Amducious, comes out of the guy's back, and dies ten seconds later. End scene.



The people making this movie padded the film with these dream sequences of kids playing games and what not. It's the same scene over and over, and it didn't make any sense. On top of that, the film makers used these trendy jump cuts and edits that looked more dumb than cool. This isn't Miami Vice, in fact, it's not even Fastlane, and so these film FX look like an attempt to put a bow on gift box with a McDonald's manager tie in it.

One really great highlight was the cameo by Sex Machine from From Dusk Till Dawn. supposedly this guy has a name and people know it, but he'll always just be Sex machine to me. Unfortunately he didn't get a chance to use his crotch pistol in his few scenes. I can't even imagine what he was paid for this role.

You'll notice the picture of the box at the top. This is identical to the one we saw on the shelves at the rental place. There is nothing in the film that has anything to do with that picture. It's like Chad and Trevor in Cave Dwellers, and I'm curious to find out what the scene actually came from. This kind of "who gives a shit as long as it sells more" attitude toward the marketing of these direct to video films is one of the reasons I love DTV so much. You just never know what you're going to get.



I didn't get the whole Amducious thing. The whole movie, Larry of Larry, Darryl and Darryl fame kept talking about this Amducious, and when we finally see him, he's only there for like ten seconds. Why? That doesn't make for a good movie. I want to see M Docheous kill some people before he dies.

That was just part of a whole convoluted ending that left more questions than answers. Yet this movie was so bad and thought unprovoking, I don't remember what any of the questions were, I just remember thinking "what?" Maybe the studio tried to re-cut it, or the guys who made it had trouble wrapping it up, but it was just stupid.

Again, this may not have been my cup of tea, but my friends who do like this kind of thing hated it too. So I'm not alone. I'd avoid this, especially if you're renting it and it costs new release money.