The Beyond
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Beyond bad — but so bad it's good — is Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, aka, Seven Doors of Death (1981). I recently caught a scratchy print on the big screen, and it was fun to see all the blood-n-guts 20-feet tall.
Known as the Godfather of Gore, Italian filmmaker Fulci doesn't have the stylish polish of a Dario Argento or the suspenseful creepiness of a Mario Bava, but he holds his own and is certainly deserving of a place in, at least, the cult-classic chronicles.
In The Beyond, the "eyes" have it: glassy eyeballs stare blindly, eyes are melted, eyes are extracted, and even a seeing-eye dog goes bad. The story opens in 1927 (which is, incidentally, the year of the director's birth) Louisiana, where a painter of fine arts is murdered in the room of a boarding house for being an "ungodly warlock" — we get the full period effect thanks to black and white, faux-1920s style filming, then the story flash-forwards into colorful present day when a young woman, Liza (Catriona MacColl), has just inherited the old boarding house and is turning it into a working hotel. The restoration process, however, proves deadly when one of the seven gateways to Hell is opened in the brackish basement. And the undead plumber isn't even licensed or bonded.
Some reviews of The Beyond cite that the film's plot, such as it is, is confusing. Actually, if you pay attention, it isn't. That's not to say that some scenes seem to have been edited with a hatchet, and it's not to say that the characters do puzzling things, but the story itself is not difficult to follow: A bad thing happens in the house in the 20s; A woman moves in in the 80s and disturbs the sealed-off gateway to Hell; Zombies and ghosts come into our world; A grand-gugnal time is had by all.
The over-the-top, zombie-soap opera musical cues are hilarious. The pained expressions on the actors' faces, even when nothing actually painful is happening to their characters, are terrific. When a woman sees a jar of acid fall from a shelf, she travels across the room and (I presume "accidentally") places her face directly under the flow. And when Dickie the Dog finally decides he can't bear hearing his mistress play the piano one more time, I guarantee you'll get all choked-up.
The special makeup effects are often quite fake-looking but Fulci does a good job of milking them for all they're worth, going for the gory, lingering close-up (the tarantula death sequence and the throat-tearing scene are good examples of his talent for being able to successfully place shock over substance).
I have not seen a version in Italian, but it's got to be better than the poorly-dubbed (though admittedly entertaining) version floating around in revival theaters these days. Still, if I could only have one or the other, I do appreciate Rolling Thunder's efforts in restoring all the missing pieces and keeping every phantasmagoric, gory bit entirely intact. There is also a DVD version (put out by
Look for a cameo by the director (he's the librarian who goes out to lunch right before the architect is attacked by a team of tarantulas).
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson