Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006)

I first watched this movie a few years ago, when the cover art on the film caught my eye. I found it to be confusing the first time through, but nonetheless a really good film. It kept me on my toes and I constantly asked myself, "whats next?" The climax of the story was very surprising, and it's something I did not expect. I ended up watching the film a few times during my rental time, every time seeing something I missed the time before. The girl with her brain exposed sent chills down my spine, and the black and white filming really brought on a sense of old antique horror. Having said that, the acting is so-so, and some parts seemed very comedic when they should not have been, but overall I found it to be a very interesting film, and recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good psychological horror film. I became obsessed with the film, and the name "amdouchous" will stick with me forever, as the name of my pet turtle! (RIP Amdouchous)

This movie is the single greatest convergence of atrocious acting I've ever seen. I've watched individual actors give bad performances. I've seen entire casts that weren't really any good. But H. P. Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep is like a career guide to aspiring actors – if your work resembles any of the performances in this film in any way, stop taking acting classes and go learn to be a plumber.The story involves a backwoods insane asylum and one of Lovecraft's patented crawling horrors trying to break into our reality. But you'll barely even notice the story after being physically stunned at the variety of titanically terrible thespianism on display. It's not just that the performances are bad. It's that they're awful in such distinctly different ways. Fountain Yount portrays young intern Edward Eischel and he looks like he stepped right off of a porno set. You could take every single scene of this guy, splice them into actual porno films, and no one would notice anything wrong. Kurt Hargan plays Dr. Wardlow, the person investigating the violent murders that take place in the story, and he turns the role into an insane version of the uptight Niedermeyer character from a thousand lame Animal House rip offs. Marco St. John plays Dr. Fenton, head of the asylum, and appears to think he's in a Mel Brooks movie but his exaggerated accent and goofy facial expressions wouldn't make Mel Brooks laugh even if he had lapsed into senility. Perry Poston plays Eward Eischel's Uncle Irving like he's Jon Lovitz' Saturday Night Live Master Thespian on Prozac. It's not just that they suck, it's that each actor seems to have thought they were acting in a different film and they each suck in markedly different fashions. In the entire film, the only guy who gives a legitimate performance is William Sanderson as inbred nut job Joe Slaader. You might recognize him as Larry from Newhart, acting here without his brother Darryl and his other brother Darryl. The fact that he's able to do a decent job proves it's not the script that deserves to be burned up and buried in a shallow grave.Don't think the acting is the only thing you have to worry about though. If you took out all the music video-style quick edit montages, this 84 minute film would be about 57 minutes long. It also has two scenes that would be high in the running for "World's Worst". One is a candidate for "World's Worst Slow Zoom" where halfway through the scene you begin to suspect the director is actually playing a practical joke on the actor. The other would be "World's Worse Exploitation of a Topless Actress". This poor girl has to lie on a table, naked from the waist up, and writhe around while Crazy Niedermeyer Doctor and Lovitz on Prozac Guy have an interminably long conversation which appears to be an "I can act worse than you" contest. Watching the scene, you'll be caught between pitying the actress for having to listen to such abominable dialog and pitying her for having bad breast implants. Since the movie was set in 1911, I guess we're supposed to think they were made out of sorghum or something.Sometimes a movie based on a novel or short story can be so good it will motivate you to seek out the original work. Beyond the Wall of Sleep achieves the same affect with an opposite motivation. I've got to get a copy of the original Lovecraft story just to verify that it can't possibly be this pointless and awful.If you watch H. P. Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep, you will come to doubt the existence of an afterlife. Because if it did exist, H. P. Lovecraft would have come back from there to beat the people who made this film like red headed stepchildren.

I hate a DVD box that has a cool looking scary creature on it and then you rent it and the movie turns out to be a piece of crap.This was one of those movies.I hated this movie.It was one of the worst pieces of garbage I've ever watched.I'm not really sure what the movie was about.As near as I can tell it took place in the early 1900's in an insane asylum.A patient is brought in that has a weird deformity on his back and a young intern who is doing weird experiments on patients in the basement starts experimenting on the deformed patient and that leads to chaos and havoc and death at the asylum.And also there was something about evil things happening when the patient slept and maybe a demon was living in the hump on his back.I dunno.This movie was terrible.It had bad acting,really really bad acting.And horrible writing and all during the movie there were the same pictures of dark woods and bloody meat and little kids running around flashing on the screen over and over.I don't know what it meant nor do I care.Rarely have I seen a movie that was so completely worthless and plot less and pointless as this mess.I hate everyone who had anything to do with this movie.May not a single one of them ever work in the entertainment industry again.I gave this movie a 1 only because the rating system doesn't go any lower.

One thing I've learned: most horror films with sounds of giggling children aren't anywhere near as scary as aspiring horror-film makers would believe. Also, repetitive images in montage, which abound in this film, can get extremely enervating, rather than being frightening.IMHO, a film with the basic story might have made a good 30-minute show, but dragging it out to feature length did it no help.Interestingly, the film introduces no sympathetic or likable characters.I sat through this film with my wife, and she disliked it so much that I had to apologize abjectly, so if you rent or buy it, take care whom you show it to.That being said, one can see touches of earlier HPL films in this one. An intern conducts unorthodox experiments in a medical facility (recall Re-Animastor?). He develops a device that can break down the barrier with a conterminous universe (recall From Beyond?). A breeding plan has been set up to enable a Being to enter our cosmos (recall The Dunwich Horror?) But these Lovecraftian touches are subordinated to tiring imagery and silly dialog.See it if you wish, but you've been warned. It's not worth the effort.