Beyond Death's Door

Very campy, very middle-American, and toxically beige - even the disco scene - this Sunn Classics presentation attempts a sledgehammer argument that there IS life after death. They provide us with a Nice Woman to insist on this at every opportunity, and for good measure deniers are shown to be self-deluding fools. Heaven is a foggy day on a sound stage, hell is like mud wrestling with flames, but the only person who comes near the latter is this jilted wife who took too many downers. Maybe they let the pimp go to heaven as a kind of apology for the jive-turkey dialogue the poor guy is shovelled - before his conversion, that is, when he's obliged to smile beatifically at everyone. Shave a full half hour off this one and...well it would still be insufferable, but it would be a half hour shorter.

I am a very happy man because I recently found a site on the web that allowed me to order Sunn Classics Beyond And Back. I have been waiting for almost twenty years to see this film again. This Sunn Classic film was made a year later and even uses some of the footage from BAB. It dramatizes the stories of various people who have near death experiences, both heavenly and hellish. The doctors who treat them are left to deal with this puzzling question. Is there really life after death? What happens when we die? Is death something to be feared? Its like the greatest mystery of all and this film does a great job exploring it, even if some of the special effects are laughable today.