The Beyond (1981)
By: Michael
Helms on March 8, 2005.
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| Kaleidoscope (Australia). All Regions, PAL. 2.35:1 (16:9 enhanced). English 2.0. 84 minutes |
| The Movie |
| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Katherine
MacColl, Cinzia Monreale, David Warbeck, Antoine
Saint Jean, Veronic Lazar, Anthony Flees, Giovanni
De Nava, Al Cliver, Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Dardano
Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, & Lucio Fulci
Country:Italy
AKA: Seven Doors of
Death |
A fever dream of a film, Lucio
Fulci's The Beyond is both beserk
and beautiful and is sure to stain your mind way
beyond the first viewing.
The journey begins with a sepia
toned prologue set in1927 as a girl reads from
the book of Eibon and a lynch mob prepares to
chainwhip the artist inhabitant of an isolated
old Louisiana hotel known as the Seven Gateways.
The man is accused of being a practising warlock
before being hastily staked out in the basement
and having quicklime poured into him. Flames,
opening credits, cut to 1981 and a woman (Katherine
MacColl) arrives outside the hotel to claim it
as her inheritance. Immediately, mysteries confront
and disaster befalls. A painter falls off a scaffold.
A plumber can find no source for the flooding
in the cellar and the buzzer from the unoccupied
room 36 keeps going off. Breaking into a bricked
up area the plumber has his eyes removed by a
hand from the other side. The female assistant
who came with the hotel (Martha) remains zombie-like
at most times. Meanwhile, in the outside world
MacColl is stopped by a blind woman with an Alsatian
who tells her, "I've been looking for you".
In the local hospital corpses are re-animating
themselves. A visitor has acid poured on her face.
Another encounter with the blind girl explains
some of the mystery of the house and sends MacColl
rushing to room 36 only to remove herself even
faster upon the discovery of a corpse nailed to
the wall.
McColl eventually hooks up with
Dr. McCabe (David Warbeck) but not before a man
has his face ripped apart in a library by spiders,
some of which are obviously mechanical. A corpse
is found at the bottom of a filthy bath only for
the finder to have her right eye speared. The
dead attack the blind woman which are fended off
by her dog until the animal turns on her ripping
out her throat and an an ear. More zombie trauma
leads MacColl into Warbeck's arms and a greater
understanding of the cause of the mayhem. Another
living dead attack occurs in the hospital with
the dead ripping themselves out of their clear
palstic body bags. Warbeck is forced to shoot
the top off a young girl's head. On the run in
the hospital suddenly they're in the hotel basement.
Crying, moaning voices strangle the soundtrack
as our protagonists walk into a desolate landscape
of corpses and nothingness. |
| Video |
| Print source not without minor speckling but hardly
enough to detract from any image. The technical
standard of work originally put into this film is
so high only your own myopia caused from watching
too many tenth generation video copies of this film
over many years could cause problems. |
| Audio |
| Stereo Dolby mix of Fabio Frizzi's amazing score
that mixes in massed moaning, shouting, and screaming
voices with an electronic, descending acoustic piano,
more standard choir work and orchestral score is
kept as rich and menacing as it was always meant
to be. |
| Extra Features |
| None. There isn't even a listing of the ten chapters
on the slick. |
| The Verdict |
| Even with a complete lack of extras this film
is a special feature in itself and the undeniable
flagship ahead of the massive fleet that is Italian
exploitation cinema. A classic. |
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