Beyond the Black Rainbow

In the Arboria Institute's promo film, dated MCMLXVII (1967), the Arboria logo is set in the Avant Garde font.

This font was based on the logo of Avant Garde magazine, created in 1968, and wasn't available as a full typeface until 1970.

Nyle drives through the Fraser River Tunnel in Richmond, British Columbia in 1983, but the glowing yellow LED lane markers were only installed in the tunnel in the early 2000s.

Not going to call it a masterpiece and not for casual observer. Long, creepy and very difficult to grasp story.

I wouldn't have even watched it had I known Panos Cosmatos wrote and directed it. I didn't know this when I started to watch the film but I suspected this after 20+ minutes and I had too look the film up as I was sure at this point it was another one of his ridiculously terrible movies.

Panos Cosmatos has crafted a highly disturbing, visually dazzling, and deeply emotional 80s- style art-house ick film here. Set within the creepy Arboria Institute where a chilling new set of experiments for human perfection is being conducted, a young girl named Elena is the test subject of the brutally predatory Dr.

You sit through an hour and half of art house bullshit to finally reach the confrontation at the end. Instead of a confrontation, the bad guy trips and hits his head on a rock and dies.

The marriage between director of photography Andreas Winding and Henri-Georges Clouzot created a beautiful new child called "Inferno". Although this child was only partially formed until Serg Bromberg cinematic surgery in 2009, this showed what a perfect marriage could create and present to the world of avant garde cinema.

When you intentionally set out to do a "cult" movie, a trippy-dippy "weird cinema" flick (usually just to impress critics and film students), there is this unfortunate unwritten rule that you don't have to explain much, or in some cases anything. Well, this happens to be a very foolish rule.

The story is... Never mind the story, because this film is all about visuals, mainly noticeable when the "villain" (I'm not even sure he was the villain, maybe he was just trying to save the universe in the worst way possible) reads the book with the stupid Voynich Manuscript-like crappy drawings ("The Human Centipede" series, 2009-2015, comes to mind, like, yes, THAT level of crappy), a scene that lasts about 5 seconds and I'm pretty sure EVERYONE frame-stepped to try to figure out anything out of it (I guess some wasted more time rewatching those 5 seconds than on the entire film).

This is not a film for everybody, and not easily understood. This is a film for fans of experimental films, low budget horror or science fiction (not big-budget PG-13 horror, sci-fi/action or sci-fi/fantasy), psychedelia, or hypnotic slow-moving narratives.

Panos Cosmatos's Beyond The Black Rainbow. Surreal.