I love the works of Lovecraft and really enjoy it when directors adapt his stories for movies. Gordon, Yuzna, and O'Bannon, have made some fine films based on his writings, they were not always 100% faithful, but that is to be expected. Their films had gore, good acting, and humor. Beyond the Wall of Sleep, had none of this. I could not tell if it was faithful to Lovecraft's story for the quick cuts, lighting, and odd sound recording made it really difficult to watch. Now I appreciate what the director was trying to do, show the insanity as Lovecraft intends, but it made it truly unenjoyable which is sad for I was looking forward to it.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep was written and directed by Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer, based on the short story by H.P. Lovecraft. The title for this movie is pretty suitable since it won't take long before the viewer is behind the wall of sleep themselves. The story is remarkably bad and for anyone who usually loves Lovecraft adaptations this will be nothing but a huge let down.William Sanderson stars as Joe Slaader, and it is clear here that the character actor must not be receiving a large enough lunch check from the popular HBO series. Slaader is a madman living in the Catskill Mountains in 1908. After being apprehended holding the severed head of a family member, he is committed to a local mental asylum. It is there that Slaader is poked and prodded by the unprofessional staff of doctors and scientists. However, young intern Edward (Fountain Yount) sees more than a household loon in Slaader. He sees an evildoer with the power to cause certain anarchy. Before long, Slaader will have the power to unleash all hell on the institution.The film jumps back and forth between B&W and color and flashes disconnected images at the viewer at a pace that makes a strobe light look like a lava lamp. While the sudden glimpses of extreme gore and mysterious juxtapositions create an immediate sense of nightmare, the technique becomes rather tiring over the long run. The visual sense remains the film strong point, though, as the performances are amateurish, pitched far too far over the top, with the dialogue shouted rather than delivered, said dialogue careening wildly between modern vernacular and pseudo-Lovecraftian verbosity. Deliberate camp in the vein of Re-Animator perhaps? I'm not sure. It didn't work for me (nor for anyone else), there is no talent birthing here. Individual moments of the film would have made superbly nightmarish short features, but thats about it.

Oh my god, I just watched this movie, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and it must be a joke. It has to be. This movie was so shitty that my testicles blew up. The acting is worse than a high school play. The way it was shot makes you stand up and scream "what the f*ck" at the T.V. I read the damn short story and it was shitty too. Don't MAKE A SHITTY MOVIE OUT OF A SHITTY STORY. SCREW YOU WHO EVER WASTED MY TIME! OK, Now I'll actually explain why i feel this way. 1. The main characters wig keeps changing places. 2. No one on the box is actually in the movie. 3. Apparently anybody from the Catskills...is a retard? 4. No one says "im gonna crush your balls and throw you into the gutter.

"Every man, and every woman is a star." ---Aleister Crowley"Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?" --Edgar Allan PoeBeyond the Wall of Sleep isn't going to be some timeless-classic, but it's a very solid piece of Lovecraftian cinema. A good-portion of the original 1919 short is present here, with some of the usual liberties taken. The bulk of the story is here: Joe Slater, a Catskills inbred is found in his home screaming indescribable-utterances, and begins attacking his neighbors who have come to see what the commotion is all-about. With super-human strength, he attacks one of his neighbors, ..."leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before." In short-order, Joe is taken in-chains to an asylum by the State Police. It appears he has a growth on his back that resembles a face, and two-hands...as though someone was trying to escape his body. Things get-stranger from there. At times, the inbred seems to be inhabited by a superior-intelligence, babbling strange-utterances of no-known language.In the film, Joe (played with skill by the great William Sanderson who is now seen as the Mayor in the Deadwood series) flees and is eventually caught by a sheriff's posse (changed to State police, led by Tom Savini), followed by a party of local inbreds. Things get-darker at this point. This is all fine-and-well, so I don't want to seem like some Lovecraft-fanatic splitting-hairs. Some alterations work, some don't. The face on the back is still there in the film, and while you might believe it is an undeveloped-aspect, Lovecraft didn't do much with it either. One major-change works well: changing the narrator. In Lovecraft's tale, it is the intern who tells the story after it has happened--with the characteristic lack-of-context of how-much later it's happening, or even the name of the narrator himself. Nobody who knows Lovecraft well would say his writing was always good, but there were things that the filmmakers left-out that I found confusing. Namely, the nature of the being inhabiting Joe Slater. In the original-short, the being is not necessarily evil or malefic, though sometimes destructive and unpredictable. It's as though it struggles to merely exist in Slater's body, seemingly trapped in him. Evil? Maybe, though not on a cosmic-scale, that seems evident in Lovecraft's original short-story. Quite the contrary, the being is attempting to destroy another being known as "the adversary" out of revenge. It struck me that the adversary is supposed to be like the devil, or some truly malefic-being, while the being inhabiting Joe Slater is of a lower-order in the cosmos. "Good" and "evil" become meaningless in the Lovecraftian cosmology, so I found this too-simple. The original short has the being leave Slater's body, becoming a star that attempts to eclipse and destroy the adversary-star in another realm of the cosmos. The tale ends with the "good" being losing, the event being viewed by astronomers as a nova, then dying.Ironically, I believe this could have been done more-economically than the Cthuloid-being that was created with CGI. The tales becomes one of a summoning, when the original is really about the escape of an entity that has been trapped in the body of an imbecile. This, then, is probably my main-problem with the film, but the theme of dreams being more-real than our own reality is still present and well-expressed in the editing and imagery. The images of the children are very-interesting, because it reflects H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic-horror so well. The children are subdeities toying-with humanity, much like the Archons of the Gnostic-cosmology.It should also be noted that early-Christianity held that all people had a star for themselves in the cosmos--it was what we became after death. The ancient Gnostics felt that a select-few people in the world were part of a "starry race", or "knowers" of the divine. They were supposed to hold a "divine-spark" within-themselves, and Gnostics (especially Sethians) believed they were not of this world, but of this race. How Lovecraft embedded similar-concepts in his shorts is a mystery, since most all Gnostic-texts have only come-to-light since 1945--eight-years after his death. I also have to wonder how Crowley had-access to these Gnostic and Hermetic-concepts, it is puzzling as many of the Gnostic-ones simply weren't considered even to exist. It's a shame, but this wonderful mystical-aspect is almost absent in the adaptation, and it bothers me. However, the film is still very good for Lovecraftian cinema. It accurately reflects how brutal turn-of-the-century America was, too.I especially enjoyed the opening-prologue with the time-date slate, showing us when the recounting of the tale happens (1979). American Mental Institutions were notorious 100-years-ago, so the context of the tale is solid. Maybe some of the production-design could have been better, but this is micro-budget cinema and the film is a great achievement, nonetheless. The subplot with the trepanned-girl (lifted from "Hannibal"?) was good, but I thought could have been pared-back to the very-end, this might have been more-effective in making it unsettling. We should remember that the short is a little over four-pages, so its addition is understandable and sets-the-stage for the intern's and Joe Slater's fusion with an electronic-apparatus. The gore is stupendous, and I really enjoyed the mixing of black & white photography with color (color denoting that Joe's dream-reality has intruded into our own). The super-fast editing was also very good, and there are some truly unforgettable-images in this film. But remember: this is low-budget cinema, it was probably made for a couple-million dollars, possibly less. But it works, it's respectable horror. Lovecraft is about imagination, unfortunately the makers of this movie forgot that this is the key to his horror.