With Prison, the question is not “Remember when director Renny Harlin was good?,” but “Remember a world before we even knew who Renny Harlin was?” Produced and conceived by Halloween shepherd Irwin Yablans, the film marks a calling card of sorts for the then-no-name Harlin, who earned A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master from there and turned it into that franchise’s biggest entry at the time, which then vaulted him onto the A list with Die Hard 2.

As history has told us, ego kept him from staying there, but we’ll focus on the positive: Prison is a pretty decent, fairly ingenious flick for its meager budget.

Being abandoned since 1968, Wyoming State Penitentiary is something of an inhumane shithole, but 300 transferred prisoners are on their way over, squalid conditions and all. Lording over the grim castle of concrete is Warden Sharpe (Lane Smith, Dark Night of the Scarecrow), an unhappy bully of a man who believes in punishment, not rehabilitation.

Under Sharpe’s orders, inmate Burke (a baby-faced Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence) breaks through a wall to reach the old execution chamber. In doing so, Burke inadvertently unleashes a malevolent spirit. Although represented on film as baby-blue light, this supernatural force is one mean sumbitch. It fatally roasts one prisoner confined to solitary, thwarts a would-be escapee in a tangle of wires and pipes, and wraps a guard in a tight hug of barbed wire.

Frightening is hardly the word for it, but the effects are impressive, especially in this pre-CGI era. There’s more to admire beyond that, including the novelty of seeing the reliable character actor Smith in a rare lead role. Mortensen shows quiet glimpses of the greatness to come; the underrated Chelsea Field (The Last Boy Scout) provides some much-needed estrogen for balance; and a few of the inmates stand out for their weird quirks, from harboring a Rambo fetish to drinking Lysol as if it were lemonade. Hey, when life gives you life behind bars … —Rod Lott

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Where would horror movies be without slime? It’s the perfect go-to method for disguising effect flaws while making the audience squirm with disgust. Enter From Beyond, the movie that puts the “goo” in “goopy.” Its chief monster, the dimensionally disfigured Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel, Basket Case 2), almost puts John Carpenter’s Thing alien to shame with its overall shape-shifting malleability and gallons of ooze.

As if that weren’t enough, the movie as a whole is an excellent exercise in mad science, sadomasochistic inventiveness and squirrelly Jeffrey Combs-ian insanity. Combs is Crawford Tillinghast, lab assistant to Pretorius, inventor of the resonator, a device that allows all within its psychic field to perceive the myriad transdimensional beasts that surround us all the time. After Pretorius’ head is removed by something from beyond (“It bit off his head like a gingerbread man!”), Tillinghast is persuaded to restart the experiment by psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) and cop Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead), because science.

True to form, the resonator shows them the world lying just beyond our eyesight. It also stimulates the pineal gland, which leads to increased libido (good), a third eye protruding from a stalk on the forehead (bad), and a taste for human brains (um … good?). This leads to the classic scene where the sexually repressed Dr. McMichaels unleashes her inner goddess, dresses up in leather, and gropes an unconscious Tillinghast. Crampton never quite sells the “psychiatrist” aspect of her character — when will people learn that glasses do not a scientist make? — but she absolutely nails the sex-maniac part.

Making the most of a meager budget, director Stuart Gordon bathes his horror in a gorgeous giallo lighting scheme and buckets of ectoplasm. Famed for his previous H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, Re-Animator (which also starred both Combs and Crampton), From Beyond is the stronger film, completely unafraid to delve into utterly depraved areas. Combs is reliably strange and wonderful; Foree plays the Ken Foree role to the hilt; Crampton goes places few actors would let themselves go; and the makeup artists, working with practically no money, rose to the challenge with inventive prosthetics and copious gore.

And, of course, slime. By the end, as Tillinghast and Pretorious wage a mucus-bathed battle that literally turns each of them inside out, From Beyond makes a compelling case for itself as the slimiest movie ever. —Corey Redekop

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