Ah the joys! Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond is a great little film. Very low budget, very odd, based on a seven page HP Lovecraft story and filled with some great old school latex FX and the cult actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (Barbara is one for the Dads).
This film was made amongst a pile of mostly direct to video releases by the famed Empire Studios. Empire didn’t always make product this good, or this clever. A lot of it was terrible dross. But years later some of the films made by Empire now look a lot better than they seemed at the time.
In fact, some of the films coming out of Hollywood over the last ten years sound almost like the stuff Empire used to make on very low budgets (Pacific Rim sounds very much like something Empire would have done back in the day – the Empire film would have been made for less than the cost of a pack of biscuits though – see Robot Jox).
Dave Jay and Torsten Dewi wrote a great book on Empire pictures called – Empire of the ‘B’s: The Mad Movie World of Charles Band. The book is so good I’m tempted to buy another copy as mine is becoming so well read!
Anyway, the rather bad trailer is below. The film is much better than the promo suggests…
So, 60 films to go…
Matthew Cooper has written for Emmerdale, Eastenders, Hollyoaks and Family Affairs. He was winner of the first ever Lloyds Bank Channel Four Film Challenge and the Oscar Moore Screenplay Prize. His first short film starred a then unknown Ewan McGregor and was picked up by Channel Four when Matthew was 19 years old. He’s been a script writer for hire and filmmaker for hire for over 20 years.