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A loopy follow-up to director Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, with most of the same cast and crew, in which Lovecraft's short-short story is stretched from four pages to an hour and a half. What has been used to pad this out? Kinky sex and a gratuitous mad house sequence, that's what, but also the grisly set pieces which made Gordon's name in the first place.

Evil Dr. Pretorius has built a resonator which stimulates the pineal gland and enables one to see beyond the curtain of reality. Something comes "from beyond" and bites off his head, leaving his assistant, Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) to take the blame. Enter psychologist Crampton, who, in an effort to get to the bottom of things, wants Combs to restage the experiment. The pineal gland, which enables one to see beyond, also controls the sex drive--hence Crampton's transformation from repressed psychologist into an S&M sex kitten. Pretorius returns, by the way, augmented by his experiences on the other side, but he wants to be loose in our reality.

This has way to much plot for its own good and trips itself up in ways that Re-Animator avoided (the use of sex in this film seems both more and less gratuitous here than in the previous film, for instance, to the film's detriment in both cases), but it still has a charge (possibly stemming from the high kink content). And despite the fact that the elements of the story itself are far afield of Lovecraft indeed, this still manages to preserve the heart of Lovecraft's story--in itself quite an accomplishment. Not bad at all, but best if approached with diminished expecations.