I don’t know about you all, but I’ve read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft in my day, most of it as a brooding teenager prone to gravitate toward the darker things in life. So, when I see Lovecraft’s name splattered across coverbox after coverbox, I can almost immediately recognize the source material with nary a misstep. But when I set my sights on Beyond the Wall of Sleep, I could not place it. My mind had frozen. I struggled for the better part of a day trying to place the title. Finally, I gave up and did what every self-respecting dweeb does in 2006. I hit the Internet. Within minutes I had stumbled upon a site that contained transcriptions of all Lovecraft’s work. So I set about acquainting myself with the source material. Like most Lovecraft prose, the story is only a few short pages, told in voice over by a witness to the truth. A master of the first person, Lovecraft’s stories retain a great modern flair that would not look misplaced along side the more contemporary authors of our day.

You may be asking why I would take the time to research the original basis before watching the equivalent of a b-movie, and you would be well within your rights to do so. Given the circumstance of horror cinema, I would rarely, if ever, be bothered with researching a short story solely for the purpose of comparing and contrasting the work in question. But in this case, the filmmakers and the marketing department have taken such extreme concern with exploiting the film as a work from the mind of one of the preeminent purveyors of horror text, that it would be difficult if not impossible for me to discount how the film actually measures up to the classic composition.

Ignoring, for a moment the original account, Beyond the Wall of Sleep is the murky saga of Edward Eischel (Fountain Yount), a medical resident of the Ulster County Asylum. Eischel is secretly conducting experiments on electrical impulses and the outside stimulus of brain cells with regards to psychic telepathy. When a new inmate - Joe Slaader (Deadwood’s William Sanderson), arrives, the inbred mountain man and what appears to be a wholly separate life force coursing though his subconscious endlessly fascinates Eischel, pushing him further and further into his maddening research.

To state claim that this film is based on Lovecraftian lore is both slyly accurate and overtly misleading. While Lovecraft did invent the character of Slaader, virtually everything else in the tale is exclusively the invention of writer and co-director Barrett J. Leigh. Leigh along with fellow director Thom Maurer have taken the most base of character traits and plot device from Lovecraft’s relation and built a feature length film around them by incorporating a straightforward mad scientist device. Given the source materials clear lack of backstory, the filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to create a past, present and future for the populace of Lovecraft’s mind. But, the issue at hand is not respect to the original material, which in my opinion would be difficult if not impossible to film. It is the fact that the amateurish filmmaking is so overwrought with mindless imagery that it threatens at every passing frame before conclusively succeeding in destroying what might have been a fairly interesting movie.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep is Lovecraft for the ADD generation, with more jump cuts, and non-sequiturs than 20 Oliver Stone films. Add that to the ridiculously campish performances of the cast and what remains is a jumbled mess of first-year film school rubbish. The flaws are so pervasive that it is impossible to pinpoint any areas for improvement. From the inane dialogue to the migraine inducing editing, the only thing the film has going for it is the plotline, which regrettably is completely lost in the brain sucking ineffectuality of the final picture.

Over the years, many critics have pointed to the futility of attempting faithful adaptations of Lovecraft’s cerebral stories for the cinema. But try as they may, countless filmmakers have stepped up over the past 30 years and given that challenge a go. Some have succeeded and many have failed, but almost all miss the underlying mythology that makes Lovecraft’s work so epic in scope. Leigh and Maurer, seem to understand that mythos and even try to incorporate a piece or two into the films climatic scenes, but with far too much “Look at what I can do” filmmaking mucking up the storyline, Beyond the Wall of Sleep is ultimately a failure of epic proportions.