I grew up with Charles Band movies; It's safe to say that the various films put out under his various studios (Trancers, Ghoulies, Parasite Puppet Masters, Subspecies, The Dungeon Master and many, many others) have informed my taste to this day. And there's no denying that, whatever the reason*, the level of quality of their output has dived off a cliff for at least a couple of decades; Speaking as someone who has a lot of affection for their older material, I haven't been able to finish a single film from Full Moon pictures for a very long time now.
It's within this context that Full Moon Features has chosen to create a modern-day mashup of two of my favourite movies from their golden period: From Beyond and Re-Animator. This was released as a web series, apparently, and later collected into two feature films - this one, which collects the first two episodes, and a latter three-hour monstrosity that edits the whole series into a single movie.
It begins with a dedication to the late, great Stuart Gordon, effectively setting the tone, before embarking on a near-recreation of the prologue for From Beyond**: Crawford Tillinghast, with the help of an assistant, activates The Resonator, a device meant to pierce the veil between this and other dimensions. The machine works, and the room is filled with weird floating beasties. The assistant ends up dead, and a disturbed Tillinghast shuts down the machine.
The problem is that it's a deeply shit recreation. The digital cinematography is extremely flat, it's got the dynamism of a week-old flap of roadkill, and the effects are entirely composed of shitty CGI - right down to a butt-ugly shot of a decapitated body spurting blood, which you'd think would be probably easier to rig with practical effects.
From there we jump to a few scenes that establish the actual take these movies have on From Beyond and ReAnimator... which is to cross them with something similar to a high-school CW show. OK, technically, the cast are students at an university (Miskatonic University, of course) and not high-school, but there are bells between periods, students wear uniforms, and everyone behaves like high-school types. Tillinghast has a cute girlfriend (Christina Braa) and a group of hot young friends, which are introduced in by far the cleverest scene in the whole film when a bunch of young ladies are discussing paranormal phenomena as if they were talking about boys.
There's also a couple of dastardly professors led by Mr. Wallace (Michael Paré). The man's got designs on Tillinghast's machine, and later confesses to have killed his father for... reasons.
The 'plot' of the movie, such as it is, involves the students fooling around with the Resonator, some relationship troubles between Tillinghast and his girlfriend, and Mr. Wallace showing up at one point trying to take control of the device. There are some boobs and some sub-skinemax 'sexy' scenes, including one with a fairly funny-looking octopus lady. There's no forward momentum, nothing interesting happens, not a single good character moment, nothing; Seriously, one of the main things that gets resolved in the movie is that Crawford learns to act less standoffish with his girl.
The only decent scene is a fun (grading on a curve here) little action sequence where our intrepid protagonist runs around stabbing a couple of very shoddy practical effects. Other than that, the film's problems are compounded by the fact that it looks like shit and it's peppered with establishing shots which often don't really gel with the action. If it were a fan project up on the web from writer/director William Butler (which, from the little information I can find might well be how this got started) I could forgive the amateurish filmmaking, effects and writing; But not when they're this devoid of charm - and not when it's backed by the same people who distributed From Beyond back in the eighties.
The acting is about the only thing that's sometimes not terrible (for a low-budget horror movie - again, grading on a curve). Dr. Herbert West is introduced at the end, promising some more incompetently made, mildly sexy/mildly bloody adventures, but fuck that. Even at little more than an hour, this was a complete waste of time.
*: It's easy to blame digital video and CGI, but I'm sure the realities of producing low, low budget cinema in the post-home video age have gotten a lot harsher. They're still cranking out movies, so clearly they're doing something right.
**: You know, the only part in that movie that had anything in common with Lovecraft's story.
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