BEYOND DREAM'S DOOR - An awkward mixture of standard eighties B movie horror and something more surreal. A college student has bad dreams and discovers he's the latest victim of some kind of entity that lives in nightmares (or something, as exposition isn't particualrly clear in this case). I hate it when a movie feels like it has what it takes to be more than it is but ends up hamstrung by mediocre choices which could've been avoided. 'Beyond Dream's Door' was a low budget 80s indie so in a sense fell victim to its circumstances - wooden acting, bad effects, some cliched imagery, style too linear, music too obvious all follow from budgetary constraints and aherence to prevailing modes of low budget filmmaking of the time as much as a lack of vision. But there are some great moments which make me wish it had taken a full throttle experimental approach... the weirdness of a menacing red balloon... the Lynchian caretaker with the mechanical hands who asks people to shake his stump... blurry collages of nightmare imagery... shame the film as a whole didn't rise to meet the challenge of its frequent passages of bizarreness. As it stands, 'Beyond Dream's Door' is enjoyable as a sometimes confusing, satisfyingly gory monster flick which fades out into a mise-en-abyme "dream within a dream... or is it?" scenario by the end, and is at least briskly paced and wastes no time getting to the weirdness.
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