After finding Suspiria on Tubi, I started to wonder what else was on there. The ads are a bit obnoxious at times, but it’s a free service and you get what you pay for. However, as I try to finish off that Fill-In Filmography poster, Tubi seems to be the place to find some of the more, let’s just say, unusual entries. Sure, there are a few movies on there I recognize, but so many of the movies on Tubi are these odd things that I’d never heard of and don’t know what to make of.
I mean, what sort of movie is Beyond the Black Rainbow? That’s gotta be the weirdest title I’ve seen in a while. I mean, a black rainbow? Can the movie live up to a title that bizarre?
Well, it certainly lives up to its title. Normally here I’d put a quick plot summary, and there is a fairly simple plot at play here. But this movie opened with some sort of psychedelically-influenced looking guy, a man saying his name is Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands), who says his Arboria Institute is looking to find a scientific key to absolute happiness. It’s the sort of New Age silliness that would make me scoff if I heard it in the real world. But it really does establish what sort of movie this is. It’s sci-fi with a touch of horror, and the movie doesn’t seem to have much of a budget. But what it does have will be achieved through lighting, basic camera tricks, and maybe some make-up here and there. The electronic score helps there too. It gives the movie a dated look. Sure, it came out in 2010, but it looks like a cheap movie from the 80s, about the same time the movie is set in.
As for the plot, Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), the head researcher for the Arboria Institute, years after the opening statement was made, is conducting some sort of research on a young woman named Elena (Ava Allan). She mostly sits there silently, and Nyle seems mostly inclined to get an emotional response out of her. He just doesn’t seem to care how, and his favorite way is to see if he can provoke some tears through upsetting her.
There’s a reason for that: Elena seems to have some psychic powers. Nyle does manage to get somewhere when he gets a nurse with all the empathy of a damp sponge to destroy one of the few personal possessions Elena has, a move that prompts Elena to do something that kills the nurse through some sort of brain hemorrhage. And that just makes Elena upset again because, really, she doesn’t want to hurt anybody. It’s Nyle who wants to hurt people. That could be a very bad thing for a lot of people, especially Elena.
This is the sort of movie where a viewer will either like it or he won’t. It’s full of odd imagery, like walls melting behind Nyle as he seems to be losing what little mind he has. The electronic score and the color scheme are both, well, distinctive. Did I like it? There’s a part of me that, if I were making movies instead of writing about them, would say I might want to actually make something this weird. It’s the sort of movie that stands out from the rest, making the most of whatever budget it had to make an impression, show the face of evil, and let a girl who never seemed to know love find a way out. And yes, the black rainbow even gets explained somewhat. I don’t know that I would recommend this to everyone, but if you want something weird, this is the way to go.
Grade: A
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