Now Available: Beyond the Black Rainbow

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Directed by Panos Cosmatos   

Starring Michael Rogers and Eva Allen   

Rated R (some strong violence, disturbing images, drug use, some language)

    Beyond the Black Rainbow is the latest sci-fi films released by Magnet Releasing, one of the best releasers of genre films in the U.S. today. They’ve acquired and released such hits as The Host, [REC], Monsters, Let the Right One In, 13 Assassins, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Red Cliff, and so many more awesome films.

     The film follows a young girl named Elena, who is trapped in a mysterious laboratory ran by the devious Dr. Nyle. The laboratory is all kinds of crazy, as it runs psychological, drug-induced experiments that have rendered the young teen with psychic powers and has caused Nyle to go increasingly insane. As her powers are kept at bay with a perplexing giant glowing pyramid, Elena must deal with the psychological torment inflicted on her until she can find away to escape.

     This movie is a 100 percent throwback, attempting to accomplish the trippy, early 70s feel of Kubrick's masterworks 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange as well as taking inspiration from the surrealist works of Alejandro Jodorowsky from the same time period. It’s a film focused purely on mood, theme, and visuals, with little to no emphasis on acting or story structure. There is no story here, just an increasingly intense series of likely acid-induced craziness. If you were on pot or acid, you’d probably think this movie changed your life. I wasn’t when I saw it, so…yeah, the effect was lessened.

     It’s just not a structurally sound movie, and though it has some interesting themes, it’s just too slow and cumbersome, and it doesn’t have any real-world inspiration or driving motivational force. It doesn’t tackle any real societal fears and instead focuses on just throwing trippy scene after trippy scene at you. It’s tiresome. It’s an assault on the sense but without any kind of substance behind it.

     I don’t think it’s awful, however. It does an admirable job evoking the feel that early 70s experimental sci-fi put forth, but it still feel like a pure copy, so intent on homaging other movies that it fails to forge an identity of its own. All the red hues and strobe lighting and occasional bouts of ridiculous blood spatter might appease the base genre film fix, but it fades from memory almost immediately.

     Cosmatos has some skill, even considerable skill, behind the director’s chair. I feel he could end up with guys like Michael Haneke, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Gaspar Noe if he gives his films more substance.But in the end it feels like a student film on occasion due to the deliberate pacing and style. It’s not a movie that offended me or made me regret seeing it- it’s a harmless exercise in gleeful pastiche. But it’s just that, a pastiche, an imitation of an entire subgenre, time, and place, without a solid story or characters.

C