The story of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin and how their message for their generation made them targets of a US government plot.
Directed by schlock cinema auteur Larry Buchanan (Zontar the Thing from Venus, Mars Needs Women, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald) seven years before Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Buchanan’s film mixes generational war and conspiracy theory in a dead-end mise en scene in which political and pop history compete for attention in anonymous hotel rooms linked by TV sets nobody is watching.
Buchanan, an Austin, Texas-based no-budget filmmaker, could not afford the rights to any Hendrix, Joplin, or The Doors hits, so instead commissioned unconvincing sound-alike songs for his cast of local actors to perform. Beyond the Doors/Down on US, which never played in any theater outside of Austin, presents a posthumous history of classic rock from before the point it was fully commodified, when it was still open to peculiar interpretation and awkward deification.