The Beyond (1981)

If you think Dario Argento doesn't give a damn about coherent plots, check out Lucio Fulci! 'The Beyond' does have a (Lovecraftian) plot as such - a woman inherits a hotel in Louisiana that contains one of the doorways to Hell - but that is basically an excuse for Fulci to string together a series of fantastic and frequently gory images. These include zombie attacks, eye gougings, a better dog attack scene than 'Suspiria', the crucifixion of a Satanist, and a sequence involving tarantulas which has to be one of the high points of horror, anywhere, anytime.

'The Beyond' is sensational and a bona fide modern horror classic. Absolutely essential viewing!

Fmovies: I can't get my head around all the people giving this film 10 stars and claiming it's one of the best horrors ever made. I like early 80's horror films and as cheesy as some of them are, you have to appreciate that they were made near on 30 years ago. This however, was one painful watch.

The Good: The gore and effects were very well done for the time and still hold their own now. Credit where it's due but that's about it.

The Bad: The cheesy god-awful music just bellows out at the most inappropriate times and then cuts off without warning. How a horrific scene is supposed to have any effect when cheesy 70's pop music blurts out of nowhere is beyond me.

The acting is atrocious, most of actors are Italian and are dubbed over in English, this is all fine and dandy but the shock horror expressions that they pull are hilarious. Their over the top facial expressions and body movements totally distract you from everything else that's going on.

The plot, there isn't one. Seriously, woman inherits old hotel, said hotel is built over the gateway to hell, lots of random people die for no real reason, the end.

The deaths, people just lie there and get eaten or covered in acid or torn apart by zombies without even bothering to move or trying to escape.

Common sense, there isn't any. In one scene the 2 leads are being chased by extremely slow zombies and the male lead shoots about 10 zombies in the chest and gut to no avail. Then he shoots a couple in the head and they drop to the floor. Seems simple enough right? Hit them in the head and you kill them, hit them anywhere else and it's a wasted bullet. So why oh why does this bumbling idiot waste the next 20 or so bullets shooting the zombies in the chest and shoulder?

The blind woman, she has to be the most annoying actress ever. In one scene she thinks someone is in her living room and she backs into a corner and she screams and shouts...And screams and shouts...And shouts and screams...And so on and so forth for a good 5 minutes, "no, no go away leave me alone" she wails constantly, over and over for 5 solid minutes, it completely did my head in and was totally unnecessary.

The scares, there aren't any, there is nothing scary about this film at all, sure, there's a decent amount of gore in the film but none of it is scary or even unnerving. The music, acting and shoddy camera work see to that.

As I said, I love early 80's horror films, The deadly spawn, Phenomena, Demons, I spit on your grave, The burning to name but a few, but The Beyond is a big pile of steaming crap. One reviewer on here wrote "If you haven't seen The Beyond you are not a real horror buff" Well my friend, I have seen The Beyond and if you can call this "Horror" then you have my sympathies. Quite simply put, it is rubbish, even for an early 80's film.

My vote is 3 for the gore effects alone.

First of all, I like horror films and have nothing against blood, gore & violence if it has any meaning to the film. But most of the gore in this film has no meaning at all, it just seems that Fulci was obsessed with overexaggerated scenes of blood & guts. For example the scene where a man falls from a ladder in the library. If it was some other director the man would have simply fallen and died when he hit the floor. But thats not enough for Fulci! After the fall the man is attacked by spiders who shred his face into a bloody mess! Really, what does that have to do with the rest of the film? Overall I think Fulci is way overrated. The reason i hunted down some of his movies (they are not too easy to get hold of in Sweden. Especially uncut) was that I had seen on the Internet that many horror-fans consider him one of the greatest horror-directors. I now have seen New York Ripper, Zombie, House By The Cemetary and this one and I find all of them to be plain garbage. It seems to me that Fulci was without any talent whatsoever. This movie is not scary, not funny, it is just ludicrous. The only way you can get something out of watching this is if you like to watch bad films like Plan 9 From Outer Space or if think it is fun to watch lots of fake-looking gore.

The Beyond fmovies. For years, I had heard so many good things about Lucio Fulci's "THE BEYOND" that I was simply ecstatic and overjoyed when I found an uncut copy on DVD during a recent visit to NYC.

After rushing back home to watch it, I was tortured (literally) with an hour of half of bad acting, bad special effects and an extremely confusing plot-line involving a stupid woman who unknowingly opens a gateway to Hell under the house she has just inherited. So far, this sounds like a comedy, but I assure you, you will be laughing for all of the wrong reasons!

While I don't exactly tune into a Lucio Fulci film for the 'acting', the work displayed in "THE BEYOND" is simply phenomenal. The movie starts off in the 1920s with some sort of angry town lynch mob who storm the house (pitchforks and torches in hand!) and bludgeon an artist to death, accusing him of cursing the town. They crucify him to the wall of the basement and throw lye on his face where we get to witness extremely bad scenes of a man throwing a bowl of porridge onto a man's face as it bubbles and melts.

Flash forward to the 'current day' where a woman has inherited the house, along with two inept house servants and a lot of bad luck. To start the day off on the wrong foot, a carpenter on scaffolding sees a blind girl through a window and 'falls off' before spitting up gallons of blood in slow-motion. We now meet a Doctor who I guess is supposed to be the 'hero' of the movie who examines the carpenter. He strikes up a friendship with the woman and together, the two begin to explore the mystery and history of the house.

Along the way, we have some truly ridiculous scenes and moments that are never fully-explained (and this is the UNCUT version!). For example, as always, Lucio Fulci delivers his gore and the first victim gets his face pulled off and one of his eyeballs popped out of its socket in the basement by a 'zombie hand' that thrusts out of a wall. The dead guy is discovered by the female house servant who also discovers another dead body that has apparently been there for many years.

Somehow, both bodies happen to get transported to a hospital in a matter of minutes so we can witness our first laughable mystery. The wife of the man that was killed pays a visit to the morgue. After dressing him up in his funeral suit, she suddenly starts screaming for no reason. We see a shot of a beaker full of acid toppling off a table on the other side of the room, and the next thing you know, the woman happens to be lying flat on her back, directly underneath the acid so we can capture the gratuitous shot of her face 'melting' away beneath it. Uh, right.

Next, the daughter comes into the room, only to be scared off by an extremely large volume of 'frothy' blood that edges across the floor, backing her into a room where she is greeted by a zombie.

We cut away again to the woman driving down a highway where a blind woman and her dog appears out of nowhere. The blind woman tells her to leave the house immediately. Further confusion ensues when the guy who was killed in the beginning of the movie starts to show up at various different locations to kill off the remainder of the cast. The female house servant gets her head impaled on a nail, where we get to see yet another infamous eyeball popping scene. A man, whose connection with the main characters are never fully explained, goes to the town library to seek out the original construction plans for the ho

This is a creepy horror film plenty of brutal images and gory events . A New Yorker heir ( Katriona MacColl, Fulci's ordinary ) moves an old mansion-hotel in Louisiana and she wishes restore it . She investigates the weird deeds happened in a room and by basement of the old motel that is built on top of the door to the beyond. Bloody and purulent specters roam there. She is confronted with rare happenings as a worker has a lethal fall, the plumber is cruelly murdered and her blind friend is bitten by a dog that breaks his neck. When she escapes to the hospital along with friendly doctor McCabe ( David Wabeck ) she doesn't know what a new horror is waiting there . Early rare deeds begin to happen to them, as they start hearing noises, rare characters and tragic killings. Quote from the book of Eibon: "And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein may be explored¨.

Chilling Italian terror flick full of screams, chills, thrills and lots of blood and guts. Gory, gruesome , pretty repellent , and ghastly gore feast in which the stumbling stiff dead are reanimated and committing astonishing murders . This is a classic excruciatingly splatter film in which the intrigue,tension, suspense appears threatening and lurking in every room, corridors , cellar , hospital , morgue and many other places . This unrelenting shock-feast packs good make-up and special effects make-up by the maestro Gianetto De Rossi. Produced on a tight budget by Fabrizio De Angelis , Fulci's usual producer and occasionally director. Eerie musical score composed and conducted by Fabio Frizzi . Usual secondary actors as Veronica Lazar , Al Cliver and of course special appearance of Lucio Fulci as librarian clerk . This genuinely frightening story with correct utilization of images-shock is well photographed by Sergio Salvati on location in Louisiana and Italy . The motion picture is realized by one of the most controversial filmmakers of terror movies ,Lucio Fulci in his usual style with flaws and gaps but is professionally made because he is a skilled craftsman . He creates a strange horror thriller that manages to be both scary and skilfully made, deserving its cult status . Reviewers are divided over booth the morals and talents of Fulci (1927-1996) who sometimes directed under the alias ¨Louis Fuller¨. For some critics many of his movies are cruel and shockingly violent, yet their gory surface often conceals religious, social commentaries or intelligent issues. Whether he should be viewed as a cheap sensationalist or just a genius Fulci has a loyal fan base and undeniably has an important and unique influence on the terror genre , creating great works on a low budget such as proved in ¨ The black cat ¨, ¨Manhattan baby¨, ¨Gates of Hell¨, ¨Island of the living dead¨, ¨New York ripper¨ , among them. this is one more imaginative horror pictures in which the camera stalks in sinister style . It's just one long unrelenting guts-feast and passable budget horror movie that still packs a punch for those who like to be terrorized out their wits . This gore-feast that tried to disguised itself under many other titles will appeal to Lucio Fulci aficionados.

If someone uses as reference the IMDb rating of L'aldilá he is going to notice something particular. L'aldilá unlike many B-Euro-horror movies of the 80s has almost a 7 points rating with less than 2000 votes. The reason: Many people worship this cult movie. If someone ranks this movie with a 1 on the other side there will be a 10 to compensate. We are speaking about a true cult movie. Acclaimed by a small number of fans worldwide, a movie scorned by critics and the regular viewer. One strange case indeed.

The story is a disturbing mix of elements. In the first minutes during the execution of Schweick , it is clear what kind of tale is L'aldilá. Vengeance beyond the grave, an apocalypse that is unavoidable. Common people trapped in the middle. One of the merits of Sarchetti's script is the character of Katriona Maccoll a real down to earth human being, his partner is a curious but good man. Both of them tried to do things right, but in the end that won't help . The brutality of violence is another great detail, is unexpected, extreme and very, very graphic. And as the final touch, the climatic ending. The assonant music has its logic, this is disturbing terror, it wouldn't be the same with new-age, reggae, or a ballad.

Lucio Fulci was an unique director. With L'aldilá he tried to create an 'artaudian' study of horror. He achieved that. He used less than 90 minutes to mix ominous menaces that are beyond this world waiting their time for return and extremely gory horror. The unavoidable tragedy strikes in the form of hungry zombies. He was a demanding director, he never let that their actors underestimate their roles. His use of zoom-effects are a trademark, the zoom in used in a completely original way. Let's say the zoom is the hand of someone that keep your eyes open in an awful or transcendental sequence, Fulci forces you to pay attention when he wants your attention. Delightful. Nowadays audiences are very comfortable watching horror movies. They expect to see some scares and then laugh with the jokes of some stupid teens avid of rave music and easy sex. Fulci in that aspect was an author beyond his time. He tried to shock people, scare them, revolve their stomachs, those were his methods to gain the public but he NEVER underestimated the audiences, he gave his 100% and made cult classics.

Note for Fulci newcomers: The more interesting works of this director are in the period of middle 70's to 1985. If you see two or three of his movies in this period and you dislike them then don't bother anymore because you will never like his style.