From Beyond the Grave

Looking for some classic 70's horror for Halloween week? Check out the Hammer Films spirit of 1974's star studded FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

It's a classic Amicus British horror anthology with four separate tales of terror, tied to an evil antique shop run by Peter Cushing (The Horror of Dracula, Star Wars).

The style of the Amicus horror film series, always tied to a central theme, is that each of the four stories is about a half hour in duration, offering old fashioned chills and thrills.

The first story, "The Gate Crasher", revolves around David Warner (The Omen, Tron) buying an antique mirror that holds a very nasty and blood thirsty spirit within. After his party turns into a seance, he opens a portal in the mirror to a nasty demon. Demanding more and more blood like Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors", the demon dude in the mirror looks better with each victim, while Warner starts to look downright cadaverous. I don't think Warner is getting his deposit back on his flat, with every wall and piece of furniture covered in blood by the end of the tale.

Our second episode, "An Act of Kindness" introduces us to a businessman, Mr. Lowe (Ian Bannen) married to a nasty, demeaning shrew named Mabel, who's played to the hilt by Diana Dors (Hannie Caulder, Theatre of Blood). Our business man offers a kindness to a beggar named Underwood on a street outside the shop, played by Donald Pleasance (Halloween, You Only Live Twice, Fantastic Voyage). The man invites Lowe to his flat to repay his kindness, where he meets Underwood's daughter, who is.....well you'll find out. Pleasence's real life daughter plays his daughter in the film and the resemblance is remarkable. I laughed more than once at Dors pulling out all the stops as a wife who's had enough. Their son is also pretty damn funny, snickering at all the barbs the couple throw at each other.

The third chapter, "The Elemental" was played up to capitalize on "The Exorcist" craze gripping theaters in 1974. A man finds out that he's got an "elemental" perched on his shoulder. It's a demon that only the daffy Madam Orloff can remove. Margaret Leighton, an Old Vic trained performer who starred in Hitchcock's "Under Capricorn" is having the time of her life as Orloff. The exorcism scenes might have been scary fifty years ago, but they are funnier than hell now.

The last chapter, "The Door" features a young couple, William (Ian Ogilvy from "Wuthering Heights") and Rosemary, played by the gorgeous Lesley-Anne Down in one of her first big screen roles. They buy a massive door from Cushing's shop with a scary face on the front while remodeling their London flat. That door, predictably opens into another dimension and a curse from the past. The room is basically a lot of blue light and spider webs, so it's not very scary, but I'd watch Down read the phone book and be quite content, thank you. She is stunning and at the time, was coming off her role on the massive PBS hit series, 'Upstairs, Downstairs".

The concept, with Cushing offering up your hearts desire with a nasty twist thrown into every item, surely inspried one of Stephen King's best novels, "Needful Things", the film adaption of which is pretty great and underrated.

In all four chapters, the budget is a joke, the blood looks very fake, but the cast is first rate, selling the spirit of the whole damn thing with so much fun, it's impossible to resist.

In the same vein as its predecessors from the same studio, like "Asylum" and "The House that Dripped Blood", it conjures up my Saturday afternoons of the distant past watching Hammer horror films for hours as Frankenstein and Dracula popped up in every iteration possible.

If you're looking for a bloody fun throwback, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, digs up a lot of nostalgic, albeit tiny thrills and enjoyable Halloween horror, scaring up a solid B-.