And if there was one bone I’d pick with Neutron vs. The Death Robots, it would be that one: That the predictability of Neutron showing up — completely without explanation — whenever peril arises ends up robbing the film to some extent of drama and suspense. In a couple of cases, Neutron arrives so swiftly on the heels of the Death Robots that we don’t even have time to register the threat. On the other hand, though, I think that this is in part a result of the film’s approach to action being more about velocity than build-up, and scenes such as those certainly do contribute to an air of breathless excitement — almost as if we are watching a story projected directly from the brain of a sugar-addled eight-year-old boy who’s caught up in the excitement of recounting the action of the cartoon he’s just watched.

Instead of Lovecraft, Beyond Re-Animator looks to Hammer horror films for inspiration. In particular, it’s mining the territory previously explored by Frankenstein Created Woman and, even more so, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, which finds Frankenstein in an insane asylum, where he continues to perform admittedly degraded versions of his original experiments.

Out of the possibilities that were offered as backups, Band picked “From Beyond.” It’s an interesting choice. Special effects in the 1980s were hardly up to the bizarre and immersive visuals described in the story; on the other hand, the basic premise was pretty simple, and it was short enough that the transmutation to a feature-length film more or less involved a minimal backbone of starting material and a lot of blank canvas upon which one could impose his own visions. That canvas was further maximized when the writers decided to use the short story as the prologue; by the time the film actually starts, the events in the short story have already taken place and we’re moving into what happens next.

I was at a bit of a loss as to what film I would cover for a Lovecraft month. Keith helpfully reeled off a list of yet-to-be-claimed titles (I won’t call them the dregs, exactly), one of which, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, I had never heard of. I darted over to the IMDB and perused the user reviews for Sleep, of which subject lines like “Quite possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen”, “Avoid at all costs”, and (emphasis mine) “The single worst movie I’ve ever seen” were fairly representative. “Yes,” I thought to myself. “That just might be the one.”