Beyond Bedlam * (1994, Craig Fairbrass, Elizabeth Hurley, Keith Allen) – Classic Movie Review 3792

‘Psychological Terror Beyond Your Wildest Nightmares.’ Co-writer/director Vadim Jean’s 1994 British psychological murder thriller is an unappealing, far-fetched and slackly handled movie.

In the story, based on the novel Bedlam by John Brosnan (writing as Harry Adam Knight), a new, seemingly safe, personality-altering drug that is supposed to curb a serial killer’s homicidal impulses is not safe at all and actually drives him on to new horrors.

Craig Fairbrass stars and leads a series of over-the-top performances as Terry Hamilton, the detective inspector who investigates the death of a tenant who apparently set himself on fire and fell to his death through a high window.

Meanwhile co-star Elizabeth Hurley hasn’t enough meaty screen time to work on as Dr Stephanie Lyell, a forensic scientist for Neurological Research, who is testing the personality-altering drug on Marc Gilmour, aka the notorious serial killer Bone Man (Keith Allen).

It doesn’t take Hamilton too long to connect the pair of bizarre suicides that occur at Dr Lyell’s block of flats to the drug’s side effects on Gilmour.

It became the first film to fall foul of Britain’s 1994’s new tighter video laws, when the Board of Certification withdrew its already issued video certificate. It now has a UK 18 certificate.

Though unpleasant and unedifying, it is not particularly violent as horror films go. However it is rated R for strong horror violence and gore, sexuality and language in America.

Also in the good cast are Anita Dobson, Jesse Birdsall, Craig Kelly, Faith Kent, Steven Brand, Zoe Heyes, Annette Badland and Georgina Hale.

Jesse Birdsall stars with Lynn Redgrave in the late-coming-ofage comedy Getting It Right (1989).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3792

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Jesse Birdsall stars with Lynn Redgrave in Getting It Right (1989).