Tuesday, June 20, 2006

movie review: Behind the Wall of Sleep

There's a reason you don't see many Lovecraft movies. When one of the central characters in each story is madness it's hard to make a movie that makes sense. This movie takes a good crack at it.
The film looks like it was a low budget film because it was. It looks like you'd expect to see at any number of local film festivals. And that look adds to the movie. The actors in the bad wigs because the story requires them to be people wearing bad wigs.

The story takes place ~100 years ago in an insane asylum in the appalacians. Larry (as in "this is my other brother Darryl") plays a guy from a local village of people who have been inbreeding since they got over here along with early colonists. Larry killed a guy, or at least was covered in a LOT of the dead guy's blood, so he's put in the asylum. In the asylum we have the director and the county ... what? psychiatric surgeon? struggling for power. In the basement in an intern getting his jollies by performing electrical experiments on the pleasure centers of some woman's brain.
Once Larry gets admitted everyone wants to cut him open and study the undeveloped fetus he has growing out of his back. Particularly the intern who realizes that the fetus is more intelligent than the hillbilly. There's a few spontaneous bloody messes and then we learn what's really going on with Larry.

It's a good rental. I probably shouldn't have bought it. It's all Lovecraft all the way.

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