The World Beyond

With about an hour's worth of movie time, this TV horror does give you some chills and thrills, with the mud creature menacing a small group of people on a remote Maine Island after they were called there to look for a missing person. The creature's cries and shrieks are scary enough to frighten a whole town and its hideous appearance might give you nightmares.

It's a fast-paced movie from start to finish - just one main plot to follow and no room for filler subplots. The acting was good and the atmosphere was chilly. Though the suspense and thrills might be a little tame nowadays, it's still an entertaining movie.

Grade B

I too saw this as a youth of about ten and remember being very frightened. I love the internet because I searched mud man and found this. Amazing, as I have been looking for this for maybe two decades. Most interesting though is I remembered yet another film from my youth about a giant turtle. I found the made for TV movie THE BERMUDA DEPTHS to satiate that search. Now heres the kicker. Somebody did enough research to find the TV Guide listing for our beloved THE WORLD BEYOND, lo and behold what movie do you think played right after world beyond? You got it THE BERMUDA DEPTHS. Quite a fine evening of television as you see that one night of programming has haunted me for more than 20 years. Brilliant! http://home.earthlink.net/~usondermann/mud.html

Holy **** I think this was the show I saw when I was a kid that scared the beejeezuz out of me. My parent's were out and I was just old enough to be left alone, but young enough to be freaked out by this moody swamp monster. It was around this time that "In Search Of" hosted by Leonard Nimoy was on every Saturday Night. If there was anything about ghosts on it I didn't sleep. I remember my mother calling to check in when I saw this movie. I told her I was watching something that was scaring me on TV. Her advice "Don't watch it then." I had forgotten about this until I stumbled on this in the weird way that can only happen on the internet. In brief the 70's was a prime time for weird programming (After all this was they hey-day of Love Boat and Fantasy Island). I'd be curious to see this little treasure again as an adult. I suspect it would come across as rather cheezy, but as a ten year old in the basement late at night it wasn't hard to get freaked out.

I'm not really sure exactly when or under what circumstances I saw this movie, but it has haunted me ever since. There is a mud "golem" or "elemental" (basically, a creature made entirely out of mud but given human form) that is really terrifying. I never forgot the scene in which the golem's hand gets chopped off in the doorframe of a house, but the hand comes back to life. I was very lucky to track down a copy of this on DVD, because it's out of print (I don't think even the director has a copy). I would also love to see the TV movie that preceded this one (THE WORLD OF DARKNESS, I think), since this is actually the second "episode" of a two part supernatural pilot.

What appears to be a pilot for a non-existent TV series turns out to be a pretty good monster movie. A man who communicates with the dead is directed to a location where he is to save the life of a woman he has never met. They journey to an island where her brother lives, only to find his home in disarray and no sign of him. Soon enough, they and the captain of the boat that brought them to the island are being pursued by a mud monster -- a golem that her brother built, as it turns out. The TV movie is genuinely scary, and the monster is only glimpsed until the very end, which keeps up the suspense. Some scenes would look right at home in "Evil Dead," whose director may in fact have been influenced by this modest thriller. Worth a watch.