I have not been writing about films lately because other than the odd thing here and there, I haven't been very impressed by much of what I have been seeing. Netflix has been my only real source of TV entertainment for the past 8 months or so since the theaters here in DaNang rarely have any films in them that are not in Vietnamese, and if they do have it in English it is something like a blockbuster super-hero film and man oh man am I tired of those.
Lately I have returned to torrenting and going through lists of classic movies. Some of them are a bit too "classic" for me but others really stand out in the crowd. For me, because I am a fan of horror films, From Beyond the Grave really stood out and if you are a fan of the genre I think youll like it as well.
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I chose this image because I don't even know what language that is
Everyone's definition of "classic films" is probably different and my personal definition is probably wrong. I consider basically anything made before 1990 to be a classic film or maybe I consider a film to be a classic film if it was before the days of everything being a CGI-fest. I don't have anything against CGI, it does a lot of things for films that otherwise wouldn't be possible, I just think that it is over-used and is the entire story rather than films actually having a story. This is part of the reason why I am kinda "over" super-hero movies for now as well.
From Beyond the Grave is one of those horror films that likely didn't have a huge budget to begin with, and since it was made in 1974 the notion of CGI wasn't even something that existed yet since computers barely existed then and they were the size of your house if they did.
The acting is great in this film and the stories have special effects in it although none of these are computer generated because of well, you know. Instead, we rely on tricky camera angles, people acting creepy and scared, and a pretty great story that I didn't even realize was the story until after I felt compelled to read up a bit on what is going on in there since I enjoyed it so much.
There are 4 stories in the film and they are not related to one another outside of the fact that it involves people visiting this curiosity shop that has a rather creepy looking proprietor. He is a friendly man, but most of the customers end up cheating him in one way or another and doing so results in a very bad outcome for them. This is the part of the film that I didn't realize until I read into the film after watching.
I enjoy this sort of anthology film-making because sometimes films are just too damn long and they could be good films if they had been about 1/4 the length. Because each of the stories are only about 20 minutes long, the stories progress very quickly and we are left with no filler or useless dialogue. This is an aspect of a lot of films and series these days that really irritates me and since I, like most people in the world in the day of the internet, have a very low threshold for attention-span boredom, I tend to turn films off if this happens.
In From Beyond the Grave you never have an opportunity to lose interest because things keep moving out of necessity.
The lighting and camera work are just astounding when you consider the time-period when this film was made, and the great lengths they went to in order to produce the special effects that would have almost been a completely computer generated something or other in today's times are executed very well, as is the music.
I don't even remember how it is that I came across this film: It was likely on some sort of "best of" list out there in internetland that I found when I was bored.
This movie wont be for everyone and if you are the kind of person that required the rediculosity that CGI brings to many modern films I'd say there is a better than average chance that you won't like this, but if you are a fan of horror and you haven't seen this, you should add it to your collective horror memory by downloading it here