Mondo movies are known — and in some circles, beloved — for their aggressive exaggeration of (and/or full disregard for) the truth. Journey into the Beyond, however, is dead-on in one instance: when narrator John Carradine promises in the preface that the following “journey will test your sanity.” Amen.
Its negligible thesis is this: Science and technology, phooey; the paranormal, groovy. Before the film jets around the globe to (attempt to) prove it, Carradine warns the squeamish to listen for an alarm before the gory parts, if they wish to hide their eyes. The contrasting sound is pleasant and near-identical to the Tinkerbell notes on the Walt Disney “Read-Along” records of my childhood, prompting tots when it was time to turn the page.
Beyond features footage of gum surgery (under hypnosis instead of anesthetia), an exorcism (kinda), a tribal fertility ritual (with Nat Geo boobs a-floppin’), psychic surgery (memorably debunked in Arthur Penn’s Penn & Teller Get Killed), telekinesis (magnets, how do they work?) and spiritual healers (Ernest Angley-type bullshit). It says a lot about our changing world that the grossest segment — pus emerging from a cyst like an endless piece of slightly liquified linguini — is now the rationale for the long-running cable show Dr. Pimple Popper.
Six years later, German director Rolf Olsen would make a bigger splash in mondo’s mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world with Shocking Asia. I haven’t seen it, but Journey into the Beyond is such a trying bore, I don’t feel the need to take another trip with Olsen at the helm. —Rod Lott