The Beyond (1981)

Plot Outline: In 1927 a man is accused of being a warlock and is brutally tortured to death (in various graphic form). Cut forward to 1981 where a woman has inherited the hotel where those events took place. The hotel was built on one of the 7 gateways to Hell and a series of weird events start to happen which set about opening the gateway- unleashing the dead to take the souls of the world.

The Review: After the hype of this being Fulci's best film, I was very disappointed. It's just like a slightly better remake of City of the Living Dead - but it still has all of that films problems, namely the patchy "plot" and the constantly meandering story. If you can piece it together, it's virtually the same film. Someone stumbles upon one of the 7 doors to Hell and loads of weird things begin to happen and people die horribly. It moves from one scene to another with little coherence, almost like trying to assemble a model ship without glue. Most of the scenes involving the people are unnecessary and it just adds to the confusion. What was the point in that blind girl in the film? Or the little girl who visits the morgue - was that purely an excuse to include a child in a horror film to try and shock the audience even more? Dialogue is atrocious to but none of Fulci's films have really had good dubbing - I'd rather see this in Italian with subtitles because it'd probably make more sense. However gore hounds will still be happy though - Fulci is at one of his creative best here. We have the usual decaying zombies (you can almost smell them!), eyes getting gouged out in graphic detail, chain whippings (nasty stuff), heads getting smashed onto sharp objects and one of the best head shots of all time (the little girl's head is practically obliterated with 1 gun shot). There is also a lot of dissolving as people are literally melted into puddles of goo and blood. It's all very nasty stuff but for Fulci, it's what we've come to expect. 

Final Verdict: The Beyond was disappointing. Perhaps I was expecting too much in the way of a coherent story to piece together all of the weird happenings - although some of Fulci's films are quite straightforward (Zombie springs to mind). But visually the film is excellent, the gore is there in bucket loads and the finale inside the hospital is pretty good, even if the rest of the film isn't.

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