A young woman, Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl), inherits a broken-down hotel in New Orleans that has a troubled past. It is built over a gateway to hell, and when the gate is opened, the dead will walk the Earth. With people dying in mysterious ways, Emily (Cinzia Monreale), a blind woman with her own secrets, warns Lisa she must leave. Of course, she rejects this suggestion, and finds herself and Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck) confronting the forces of evil.
The strangest thing about The Beyond isn’t the hellscape, or the eye gouging, or the man who hooks up a brainwave machine to a long-dead corpse only to have it measure a heartbeat (I guess it wasn’t a very good brainwave machine). No, the oddest thing is that someone is listed in the credits as being in charge of continuity. In a movie that randomly moves a crucifixion from a basement (in New Orleans where they don’t have basements) to a bathroom, there was someone paid for continuity? What did this person do? I suppose the film might have been a random series of images without her.
Continuity aside, the film is pretty incoherent. Things happen with no rhyme nor reason. People die, sometimes in gory bloodbaths—one falls, several are attacked, one is startled by lightning—and there is seldom anything choosing these specific people or the times when they die. Scenes cut to other scenes with little concern for the passage of time. Individuals will disappear at crucial moments, and return later without comment. For such a slight plot, it should have been easy to keep everything straight. Maybe I missed some important dialog that explained everything when the overly loud and inappropriately boppy music was blaring.
Major questions are ignored. What opens the “gate to the beyond”? Dramatically, it should have been something connected to Liza, but she doesn’t do anything. Instead, it is implied that the plumber did it by picking at the wall. If that is it, erosion would have broken it open in another week. I guess they just don’t make gates to hell like they used to. Then there is the exposition-heavy character, a blind girl with rather startling but easy to see contacts. Where did she come from? Why is she there? Most likely she escaped from hell, but she is still working for the dark side. Why? How? And what was her plan? She knows about the walking dead, but stupidly strides into places where she’s bound to get caught. There is hardly a scene in the film where “why?” isn’t a reasonable question. It isn’t that the film is complicated. Rather, the director didn’t care about what happen and when. He just shot scenes that he liked and then stuck them together.
That director is Lucio “The Other Zombie Guy” Fulci. Plot was never a strong point in his work. Rather, he focuses on nightmares and gore. He is particularly famous for stabbing eyes. The Beyond may set a record for direct damage to eyeballs. Unfortunately, except for a near movie-saving ending, there is little of nightmares about The Beyond. However, blood and innards spewing across the floor are here in abundance. A zombie shoves its thumb into a guy’s eye. A woman has her head forced onto a nail, that conveniently (though not for her) penetrates her eye. Tarantulas devour parts of a man’s face, including ripping out his tongue, and, of course, chewing on his eye. Two people have their faces dissolved by acid. Sounds pretty disgusting? Nope. It would be if any of it looked real. There’s plenty of plastic and rubber, and red-tinted water is sprayed about, but nothing that could be confused for actual blood and guts appears. The tarantula scene is particularly silly as rubber spiders tug on latex makeup. For shocking splatter scenes to work, they need to have a passing resemblance to the real thing, or they are just a joke. I don’t mind jokes, but not in a film that pretends to be so very serious.
Once we get zombies shuffling after our heroes, things pick up, but even this is marred by having Dr. John act like an idiot. He retrieves a trusty pistol from a desk drawer (because all doctors keep a gun or two handy at the hospital) and plugs away at zombies: one in the gut—nothing; two in the gut—nothing; one in the head—zombie drops. OK. But then we get: one in the gut—nothing; two in the gut—nothing; one in the head—zombie drops. So, he’s a slow learner. He had to see it twice before he realized that zombies only go down if you hit the brain. So next comes: one in the gut—nothing; two in the gut—nothing; one in the head—zombie drops. AH!! Over and over this happens. We know they can only be stopped by hitting them in the head. Why doesn’t the doc figure it out?
I was amused by an Italian’s view of the United States. There’s the “Do Not Entry” sign, but that’s just a mistake of language. Better is what I leaned about U.S. health care. Doctors make house calls, which is handy as there are no ambulances. A painter falls off a scaffolding and for reasons unknown to the biological sciences, blood pours from his mouth. For this bizarre injury, he is moved inside, but otherwise, nothing is done for him till the doc shows up. The doc cleverly decides this man needs to go to a hospital. Do they call for an ambulance? No. The doc grabs one end and tells the second painter to grab the other, and out they walk. Now, were they going to stuff him in the back of the doctor’s car, or were they planning to carry him all the way to the hospital?
At least while watching this Italian film, you don’t have to concern yourself with reading subtitles. The stars are from England and New Zealand. It is the Italian that is dubbed.
It is part of Fulci’s Death Trilogy, along with The House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead. Fulci previously directed the faux-Dawn of the Dead sequel, Zombi 2.