Scream Factory’s new Blu-ray release of two Italian films from 1990, the mad scientist creature feature Metamorphosis and the haunted house movie Beyond Darkness, may very well be the first time many horror fans have ever heard of either movie. The major common factor between the two is the presence of actor Gene Lebrock as the lead in both. In fact, these movies represent two of his seven credited acting roles, which means that by picking up Scream Factory’s double feature Blu-ray disc, you will effectively own more than 20% of Gene Lebrock’s filmography. It’s important to set goals.
In 1990’s Metamorphosis, he plays Dr. Peter Houseman, a brilliant scientist trying to perfect a serum that will stop the aging process. In order to test his experiment, Houseman administers the serum to himself and before you can say “Brundlefly,” begins undergoing a… what’s the word?… not “change”… not “transformation”… at any rate, he starts turning into a monster.
Written and directed by former actor and regular Joe D’Amato collaborator George Eastman (aka Luigi Montefiori), Metamorphosis—aka Regenerator, aka DNA Formula Lethal—is mostly a drag. It’s a humorless slog, too silly to be taken seriously but too boring to be much fun. By the time the movie cuts loose by upping the gore and introducing one of the least-convincing rubber monsters ever committed to film, it’s too little, too late. The horror of Houseman’s transformation is neither scary nor tragic, but rather just a thing that happens over the course of about 90 minutes.
The second feature on the disc, 1990’s Beyond Darkness, aka La Casa 5, is another of the unofficial Evil Dead sequels released in Italy (the two previous La Casa films, Ghosthouse and Witchery, are also available as a double feature Blu-ray from Scream Factory). It is co-written and directed by Claudio Fragasso, the auteur who in the same year also released Troll 2. While one might think that means Beyond Darkness achieves the same kind of absurd heights (or is it depths?), one would be wrong. The direction is again clumsy, the performances amateurish, the storytelling nonsensical, yet the alchemy that makes Troll 2 such a strange and special movie is nowhere to be found.
In this one, Lebrock plays a priest who moves his family (among them Michael Stephenson, the little kid from Troll 2 who would go on to direct Best Worst Movie and The American Scream) into a house that’s been built over the site where a bunch of witches were burned years earlier. Naturally, bad things start happening.
Like so much of Italy’s output in the ’80s, Beyond Darkness feels heavily “inspired” by previous films that were far more successful—in this case, both The Beyond (all of Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, really) and Poltergeist. It’s a typical “bad place” horror movie, in which regular people are randomly terrorized by things appearing in the home. The problem here is that the things appearing are neither interesting nor scary. Many Italian horrors—even the bad ones—manage an image or two that unsettles in an abstract, nightmarish kind of way. The scares in Beyond Darkness don’t conjure up the feeling of a bad dream, only memories of seeing other movies.
Scream Factory’s double feature Blu-ray of Metamorphosis and Beyond Darkness marks the first time both films have been on home video since their original VHS releases. They arrive with 1080p HD transfers in their original 1.66:1 aspect ratio and both look fairly soft, in part because of the original elements available for the high-def transfer and in part because that was the shooting style of many of these Italian imports, which favored lots of soft focus and smoke. Metamorphosis gets a lossless mono audio track, while Beyond Darkness receives a stereo mix. The only bonus features included are trailers for each movie, presented in HD.
Neither Metamorphosis nor Beyond Darkness are good films, but they also fail to be bad in crazy ways like some other Italian horror films of the period. They feel derivative and lifeless, never achieving a spark of madness or delivering what horror fans want out of a genre film with the kind of straightforward purity that marks more successful efforts. They both end up being two things no horror movie should be: boring and forgettable.
Metamorphosis Score: 2/5
Beyond Darkness Score: 2/5
Disc Score: 2.5/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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