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.
4 Reviews
Too unremarkable for a 1/10
jonathan-5778 December 2007
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.
Getting' into Heaven
Mr_cyteles27 September 2004
Warning: Spoilers
::MINUTE SPOILERS AHEAD::
After viewing Beyond Death's Door, I now have a pretty good idea that ANYONE can get into heaven.
It really doesn't matter what you do with your life. Prostitutes, Pimps, politicians, construction workers, anyone! You could be the most horrible person on the planet and they got a set of wings for you. Even the atheist, which really makes no sense whatsoever.
But be warned, if you're an adulterer or a pill-popper, you're going strait to hell. There really isn't much else to this film at all except for a few life after death theories, which doesn't further the plot along. One of those movies you wish would end but drags on forever.
After viewing Beyond Death's Door, I now have a pretty good idea that ANYONE can get into heaven.
It really doesn't matter what you do with your life. Prostitutes, Pimps, politicians, construction workers, anyone! You could be the most horrible person on the planet and they got a set of wings for you. Even the atheist, which really makes no sense whatsoever.
But be warned, if you're an adulterer or a pill-popper, you're going strait to hell. There really isn't much else to this film at all except for a few life after death theories, which doesn't further the plot along. One of those movies you wish would end but drags on forever.
Oh man, Sunn...
BandSAboutMovies9 March 2021
Warning: Spoilers
The follow-up to Beyond and Back, Beyond Death's Door has our friends at Sunn Classics - or Sunn or Schick Sunn or whatever you choose to call them - taking the book by Maurice Rawlings, the parts about reincarnation and Duncan MacDougall's 21 grams experiment from that movie and then going their own way with a narrative tale about death and redemption.
As written by Fenton Hobart Jr. and directed by perennial Sunn director Henning Scellerup, the man who is also known as adult director Hans Christian, this is a moralizing portmanteau about exactly what happens when death takes people. For some, like the stabbing victim that starts the story, they wake up, tell you what heaven looks like and dies again. And for others, like the pimp (Taurean Blacque from Hill Street Blues) it means becoming a ghost and floating over the operator table to yell, "I'm up here lookin' down at all you cats!" There's a skiier, a construction worker - whose ghost makes it to a disco - and one wonders if the rest of the Village People could have been in this as well.
It's pretty amazing to watch these movies, knowing that the Utah-based Sunn was way ahead of their time. The shows that litter basic cable now all owe them so much.
As written by Fenton Hobart Jr. and directed by perennial Sunn director Henning Scellerup, the man who is also known as adult director Hans Christian, this is a moralizing portmanteau about exactly what happens when death takes people. For some, like the stabbing victim that starts the story, they wake up, tell you what heaven looks like and dies again. And for others, like the pimp (Taurean Blacque from Hill Street Blues) it means becoming a ghost and floating over the operator table to yell, "I'm up here lookin' down at all you cats!" There's a skiier, a construction worker - whose ghost makes it to a disco - and one wonders if the rest of the Village People could have been in this as well.
It's pretty amazing to watch these movies, knowing that the Utah-based Sunn was way ahead of their time. The shows that litter basic cable now all owe them so much.
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