Review: Beyond Dream’s Door (1989)
Directed by: Jay Woelfel
Starring: Nick Baldasare, Rick Kesler, Susan Pinsky
Written by: Jay Woelfel
Music by: Jay Woelfel
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb
Writer, director, and composer Jay Woelfel’s phantasmagorical flick, Beyond Dream’s Door, may be the best-made indie regional horror film shot on 16 mm during the VHS boom. On the surface, things seem quite professional: there are multiple angles, coverage, effectively lit sets, decent sound and post-production syncing, acting that isn’t entirely atrocious, and a score that’s quite good if maybe a little reminiscent of stuff like Richard Band’s work on Puppet Master (1989) and Christopher Young’s music for Hellraiser (1987). The sheen on this movie makes sense considering Mr. Woelfel was a graduate of The Ohio State University’s film school, and most of the crew who worked on this were students in the same program, assisting in exchange for school credit. So these folks had some idea of how an actual horror film is created beyond the requisite monsters, boobs, guts, and passion.
Beyond Dream’s Door is focused on Ben, who’s been having lots of nightmares lately laced with topless, lusty women; savage, gloopy creatures with myriad teeth; light bulbs that burst violently; sadistic hook-handed janitors; and zombies. He’s desperate to find out what it all means, and enlists the help of his college professor and some other randos. Eventually, the people he’s tangled into his nightmare web start dying in grotesquely horrific ways.
On one hand, the professionalism that Woefel and his band of Columbus-based misfits bring to this movie definitely makes things more palatable for a casual horror fan. There are no obvious indicators that you’re about to enter the warped cinematic hell of many of its straight-to-video contemporaries. But once you start descending into the grisly effects set pieces that frequently intersperse the nonsensical narrative, you realize things are gonna get wild. But only kinda. The patina of competence here ultimately means most of the rougher (i.e., more charming) edges you typically find in the lowest-budget corners of the VHS horror world have been sanded down, and you can’t shake the feeling that this film would have benefited from a few more absurd choices by people who had less idea of what the hell they were doing. The movie settles into an unnatural purgatory of being much too weird and gory to be anything but a video store nasty produced in the late ‘80s but not demented enough to achieve the gutter infamy you’re hoping for.
Let me ease up a bit, though: Beyond Dream’s Door is plenty deranged, and engrossing for the duration. It sustains a suitably delirious atmosphere that’s augmented by some super impressive and surreal on-screen viscera and Woelfel’s delightful music, which, like many things in this flick, seems much too proficient for the pedigree. The focus of the carnage is a rubber monster with Deadly Spawn vibes that’s just effective enough to withstand the screen time it’s granted. Though I found myself wishing the film had a slightly higher ratio of insanity to capability, it’s gratifyingly warped.
Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10
