aka Seven Doors of Death
D: Lucio Fulci (1981); with Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Sarah Keller, Antoine Saint-John. (87 minutes)
When a moldering New Orleans hotel is inherited by a young woman, it turns out that there’s a nasty surprise in the cellar, in the form of a doorway to hell. Oops. Soon there are zombies, tarantulas, a man being doused with quicklime, a faceful of battery acid, and various other horrors to follow. It all turns out to be the vengeance of a painter who was murdered years ago for his blasphemous paintings. The Beyond borrows familiar themes from other films in the Italian horror canon then executes them in gaudy Fulci fashion. The film’s Sunday punch, though, is Fulci’s vision of Hades: a nightmarish, surreal landscape that would have made Bosch proud. The characters are moronic, the storyline somewhat bewildering, but who the hell cares? It’s all done in garishly cheapjack Fulci style, throwing restraint to the winds and washing any narrative integrity away in a river of bright-red gore. There’s not really much in the way of scares, but plenty of spectacularly disgusting scenes are hurled at the audience. “Less is more” is a concept Lucio Fulci never could grasp, and if you like your horror movies done in overwrought style, this ought to be your cup of grue.
This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.