Beyond and Back gives turkeys a bad name. It exists on about the same cinematic level as an army training film or one of those junior high chemistry movies in which the experiments never quite worked. To be sure, the narrator is presented as a genuine authentic intellectual; we can tell because he’s got a beard and glasses and stands in front of bookshelves and learnedly caresses bound volumes of the Journal of the American Psychical Society. But what does he tell us, really?
Well, he tells us for one thing that there is strong scientific evidence that human beings have souls, but that dogs do not. We see a nineteenth-century scientist making this discovery. He measures people and dogs at the time of their deaths to see if their bodies lose weight at the moment their souls depart. The people lose weight but the dogs do not. (The scientist had “delicate scales” attached to the deathbeds—scales so delicate, the narrator intones, they could measure to within two-tenths of an ounce! That is not a very small weight, as anyone who has observed the gradual shrinkage over the years of Hershey bars will have noticed.)
But never mind: The scientist discovered that his patients did lose weight when they died, and deduced that the human soul weighs “between half and three-quarters of an ounce.” Given the factor for error in the experiment, which was a fifth of an ounce, you will see that this was not exactly the most precise experiment since Franklin flew his kite. (I cannot resist recalling that in Catholic school, we were told about a similar experiment; the only difference was that the experiment revealed no difference in weight—because the soul, of course, is not physical, and so scientists were stupid to even try to weigh it.)
There are other tiny flaws in the picture, as in the episode depicting the death of an army private during World War II. He was dead, all right: The doctor and the nurse agreed. But he still had consciousness, and his astral body, he tells us, rose from his physical body and walked around the room, saw strange bright glows coming from the sky, witnessed a display of lights, walked down a strange street in a strange city, talked to God, and was back in bed. All in nine minutes.
The flaw here is that although the man’s spiritual body could not touch anything (his hands passed right through telephone poles with a whoosh), he is clearly seen opening the closet door in his hospital room. Fair’s fair: They can’t have it both ways.
But perhaps I’m being too hard to please. This is a film, after all, which permits certain inconsistencies, as when we share with Louisa May Alcott the experience of seeing her sister’s soul rise from the body, looking like a small puff of steam from a teakettle and obviously weighing nothing like half an ounce—give or take a fifth of an ounce, of course.
Beyond the Door
(Directed by Oliver Hellman; starring Juliet Mills, Richard Johnson; 1975)
“Where’s Jessica?” asks her worried husband, when she disappears during a birthday party for the children. He finds her in the bathroom, regurgitating pints, maybe gallons, of blood. “Honey, are you all right?” he asks, in the understatement, or underquestion, of the year. She allows that she feels a little weak. They agree she ought to get more rest. The whole movie is this way: maddeningly inappropriate in the face of its horrors.
And yet Beyond the Door is one of the top-grossing movies in the country right now. Why? Maybe because at some dumb, fundamental level, it really does live it up to, or down to, its promise. It’s not well acted, its “Possessound” audio sounds routed through the ventilation system, and the print looks like it was left too long in demonic possession.
But it’s got one hell of an ad campaign. The TV spots and the trailer on the viewer in front of the theater show all sorts of delightful horrors, a menacing voice dares you to see it and, inside the theater, there’s a party atmosphere. Parts of the movie play almost as comedy. I’m usually disturbed when people laugh at violence, but in a movie like Beyond the Door, the laughs seem almost appropriate.
That’s during the earlier parts of the movie, when mysterious hands reach out to touch shoulders in darkened rooms, and it turns out it’s just the husband patting his wife. In the later stages, though, when Jessica (Juliet Mills—yes, Juliet Mills) begins to turn green and talk like the Big Bopper, the movie’s just conventionally disgusting. We get green vomit, brown vomit, blood, levitations, and other manifestations of the devil.
He is, by the way, in Jessica’s womb. She has this short-order pregnancy that proceeds so rapidly she’s three months’ pregnant within a week (if that’s the way to describe it). The mysterious stranger seems to have the answer, and after saving her husband from being run over by a truck, he offers several enigmatic epigrams such as, “Some people attract . . . misfortune.”
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
(Directed by Irwin Allen; starring Michael Caine, Sally Field, Karl Malden, Shirley Jones; 1979)
The original Poseidon Adventure began, of course, with the giant ocean liner Poseidon being flip-flopped by a massive tidal wave. What happened then has become legend. In the midst of a New Year’s Eve celebration, the movie’s cast was trapped in the upside-down ballroom, which is what New Year’s Eve feels like anyway, and, in one of the greatest coincidences in the history of casting, all of the stars were saved and all of the extras were drowned.
The stars then had to struggle up the down staircase to the bottom of the boat, which, if you are following me closely, was by then above the water. And, to save their lives, they had to attempt to cut through the thick steel bottom and thus to daylight and so on. So far so good. But what do you do for a sequel?
I posed this question to Irwin Allen, creator of the Poseidon movies and The Swarm and The Towering Inferno, during one sunny afternoon in southern California when disasters were the last thing on his mind. He said he had an idea. It was, in all candor, he said, a great idea. The survivors of the Poseidon would be rescued and taken to land in Italy and be placed on a train which would go through a tunnel in the Alps, and the tunnel would collapse and everyone would be trapped under the mountain.
Irwin Allen cleared his throat modestly. What, he asked, did I think about his idea? It was, I said, a great idea, terrific if not actually stupendous. But I had a better idea. Allen didn’t seem too enthralled, but I told it to him anyway. (There is, by the way, nothing quite so glazed as the eyes of a movie producer who has just seen his interviewer put his Pentel Rolling Marker away and start to speak, but I persisted.)
Here’s what happens, I said. After everybody fights his or her way to the top and/or bottom of the boat, surviving fires and floods and explosions, another big tidal wave comes along and turns the great ship over again! And so the hapless survivors have to retrace their steps!
It makes no sense, said Allen, because (a) he probably wouldn’t be able to reassemble the original cast, and (b) lots of the original cast members, like Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman, were killed in the original movie—so who you gonna top-line?
Hackman’s gone for sure, I conceded. He lost his grip and fell into the flaming oil. But in the case of Winters—well, she says in the movie that she won the underwater swimming competition at the Young Womens’ Hebrew Association, and so maybe at the beginning of the sequel she comes up gasping, and you go on from there. Irwin Allen mulled over that for a fraction of a second, and then, almost inevitably, our interview was over.
Therefore it was with a great deal of curiosity that I went to see Beyond the Poseidon Adventure in order to see how he’d finally worked out the sequel, without my help. And I know you think at this point that I’m going to give away the ending, but don’t stop reading now. I wouldn’t dream of giving away the ending. What I will give away is the beginning.