Drive-in director Al Adamson's last great film, this delirious possession picture circulated under a plethora of names, but stinks just as sweetly, regardless of moniker. Adamson was a canny repackager of his films, editing and re-editing them to ship out as brand new titles with new advertising campaigns. For Beyond the Living, that meant amplifying the horror elements to play out as the title Killer's Curse, adding extra softcore sex to create Nurse Sherri, and then accentuating a few African-American characters and calling it Black Voodoo, et cetera, et cetera. As a result of the constant scene jumbling, every version suffers from a choppy, confusing narrative flow and an impaired sense of logic. Early in the film, the surgeon reaches out to touch his financée -- his hand still wet with the gore of a failed heart operation. Later, Sherri is found unconscious in the ladies' room with blood dripping from her mouth, leading her boyfriend to wonder if she's being faithful. Don't even try to figure out the timeline the film is following, as time seems to be a flexible element in the Adamson universe; it's hard to say whether hours, days, or weeks have passed between scenes. All these things help to rank the film among Adamson's best work, as Beyond the Living is crude but energetic, a nonstop barrage of outrageous moments designed to hold an audience's attention, even with all the distractions of a drive-in theater. The viewer is treated to such ridiculous elements as a psychotic cult leader's ghost, a magical silver talisman, a bit of corpse burning, a blind football star with the power of voodoo, pitchfork-through-the-chest gore, a quick poltergeist episode, plus the requisite horny nurse and comic-relief patient. Everyone overacts their hearts out (except for robotically stoic leading man Geoffrey Land), often to comic effect, but the cast can maintain intensity when it counts and keeps the picture firmly in terror mode. Adamson's prolific output slowed in the years to follow, and he began exploring more family-friendly territory in films like Lost and Carnival Magic. Unfortunately, Al Adamson's career was cut short when he was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1995.