In my seemingly never-ending quest to fill in my cinematic gaps, it seems to be a good time to fill in a bit of Italian horror. As near as I can make out, classic Italian horror movies of the 70s and 80s dealt largely with lots of blood and gore, and they weren’t afraid to kill a kid off once in a while. They also weren’t afraid to make movies that were really similar in terms of plot and story to popular movies from other countries. And…that’s about the extent of my knowledge aside from knowing director Lucio Fulci is one of the big names of the genre.
So, why not start with Fulci’s The Beyond, one of his “Gates of Hell” trilogy? I mean, I found it on a streaming service I had, so why not?
After a brief prologue set in 1927 when a mob murders an artist suspected of demonic activity, we cut to the present (or 1981 around when the movie was made) where young Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) has inherited the building where all that violence took place, a hotel in New Orleans. She’s looking to renovate and open the place up again. Unfortunately, the actions from the prologue accidentally opened up a gate to Hell on the premises, and people keep dying gruesome deaths in and around the building. She has a doctor friend, Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck), who figures he can explain everything scientifically, and a blind friend, Emily (Cinzia Monreale), who seems to know more than she lets on, and…that’s about it. This is a Fulci movie which means, as near as I can make out, these people are all doomed.
And…that’s about it. The plot is not much to go on. Most of it seems to exist to provide very gory deaths to as many characters as possible. A handyman has his eyes clawed out by a demonic hand. His wife, in the morgue, passes out and a bottle of acid spills onto her face until her head melts off or something. Their young daughter, witnessing her mother’s death, goes evil and has her head shot off in the climactic scene at the end when Liza and John try to escape the endless stream of undead ghouls wandering the hospital they’re all stuck in. And Emily the blind woman has her throat and an ear ripped off by her own guide dog. The gore effects are actually for the time impressive, but that does seem to be all the movie has going for it.
This really is a movie that seems mostly there to show shocking gore and violence followed by a downer ending. No one really gets out of this one in good shape, and that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, but I still like characters I can care about and a plot that isn’t just a continuing set-up for more messy death scenes involving prosthetics and a bright red geyser of liquids that looks like more blood than the human body actually holds. I may try another of Fulci’s movies at some point, but this first one didn’t do much for me as it is. It just isn’t my thing.
Grade: C
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