Even when judging by more lenient indie horror standards, Back to the Beyond is pretty rough to watch. It's greatest quality is that it is really short (about 66 minutes without credits), which was a great help for me today, as I was awfully tired. But "short" is not necessarily what you're looking for in a film.
The main plot/story isn't all that bad. It just fails in every other possible category. Bad sound, bad acting, bad music, bad effects... and again, you take these regional indies with a grain of salt... but Back to the Beyond is still borderline unacceptable. And while the idea of the story isn't too bad, it's not well executed and doesn't make up for the bad stuff.
It's about a group of paranormal investigators (and one skeptic) who need to "save a marriage." Apparently, one of them knows of a couple who lives in a supposedly haunted house on some village island. Legend has it that over a hundred years ago an angry sea captain killed his wife there (or something). Since then, residents of the house have reported mysterious goings on - and in one notable case from the 50's, a guy was possessed by the captain's ghost and killed his own wife. Oh Snap! This specific incident was featured on the 1959 show One Step Beyond - which was a For Real show that dramatized actual paranormal events. ANYWAYS, the couple currently living there is constantly fighting - she swears she can hear footsteps and eerie piano music at night, and he insists she's going crazy. Our "intrepid" ghost hunters must investigate and see if they can prove once and for all that there are spirits living in the house.
A few things stick out about Back to the Beyond, other than the fact that the title makes no sense given the occurrences of the film. "Back from the Beyond" would have at least had a little something going for it. First off is the wicked accents - it was filmed in Maine, and being a Minnesota guy I know nothing about the variety of regional accents in that part of the country. But you rarely hear accents this thick in movies. For comparison, take the Minnesota accents in Fargo - the accents are just as strong here, except I don't think it's part of the joke. I don't know if it's exacerbated by the terrible acting, but it's still a lot to handle. And the acting is really, really bad across the board. But at least it's uniform - everybody in the film is pretty terrible and delivers their lines extremely woodenly. So no one sticks out as being bad... they all are. The sound is bad news too - the dialogue is usually audible, but the way the ambient background noise fluctuates (or often just totally disappears leaving total silence in its wake) is just awkward. And the music is all over the place. It's almost like they wanted to cram every possible genre of music into a 66-minute film - you get Very Serious orchestral pieces, sexy R&B, bad metal, weird mariner folk... tonally it's just jarring.
The film is amateurish, and it actually would have benefitted from being a found-footager. Despite being about ghost hunters, Back to the Beyond is a traditionally (and poorly) shot film. If you went the FF route, you may have been lost amongst a sea of other ghost hunting films, but at least you could pass of the *numerous* flaws in production as "realism." And you'd lose the bad music too.
The script at least tries to make you care about the characters. There is a little bit of attempted character development, but it all feels so heavy-handed and so poorly implemented by the actors that you have no chance of caring about it. Or the character is so damned grating that you just spend the whole time hoping they die. (I'm looking at you, Rico.)
But therein lies one of the biggest problems with Back to the Beyond - it's not scary (at all), and (spoiler) no one dies. At least no one noteworthy. There is startlingly little effort put in to make anything seem tense or frightening. Just because your story is about ghosts doesn't mean it's inherently scary. You still have to do something.
So yeah, I was not a big fan of Back to the Beyond. Just a pretty boring, unenjoyable film from start to finish. Usually, you get at least an amusing line or snippet from these sorts of things, but nothing here. The most interesting part? You know how sometimes you'll see a scene at the beginning of a movie, and then later in the movie you'll see the events that led up to it? Back from Beyond opens with a scene like that - an then replays it just 10 minutes later (including a lengthy opening credit sequence). I know it's a stretch for "funny," but it's all I've got. It's better than Rise of the Scarecrows, at least.
I would not recommend this film.
No comments:
Post a Comment