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 house, only to be 'surprised' by a flash of lightning that appears out of nowhere (and for no real reason) that sends him crashing to the floor where he gets parts of his face bitten off by spiders.
Some laughable special effects take place in this very scene. The face all of a sudden turns into a 'wax-like' head, and only one of the spiders look real. The ones used in the background all look like one of those cheap plastic ones with pipe-cleaner legs that you once made in kindergarten. One of the spiders 'pull' one of the eyeballs out its socket and another stings the man's tongue. But the biggest bizarre moment does not involve the spiders, but instead we get to see the floor plans of the house 'disappear' like magic ink. What was the purpose of all of that? You're probably thinking that it will be explained at the end of the film. Wrong.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the male house servant is killed (although I don't recall this ever happening). He appears in a strange seance appearance involving all the dead cast members to date where they surround the blind girl who gets her throat and ear ripped off by her pooch! Ouch! Another unintentionally funny scene shows the woman who got her face 'melted' off by the jar of acid. The make-up effects are hideous. She has enough red and blue make-up on her face to resemble that of a baboon.
More confusion ensues when the town suddenly 'empties' of all of its residents so that the woman and the Doctor are both running around with no one else in sight. They take refuge in the hospital (where else would there be any more freshly dead bodies?) where they encounter slow-moving zombies that the Doctor must insist on shooting a hundred times in the stomach. Even after he successfully slays a few by shooting them in the head, he still proceeds to cluelessly shoot them in the stomach. And all of these endless bullets are coming out of a six-chamber barrel that he never refills! LOL!
There is of course, one surviving man who is hiding in one of the rooms. He is only there to show us why the Doctor would shoot at a glass door for no reason so a mysterious gust of wind would blow shards of glass into the room and pierce a 'wax-like' head, killing the man instantly.
With a mob of zombies (actually, upon closer examination, it looks like it's the same group of six zombies who reappear continuously to make it look like that there are 'legions' of them) shuffling after the Doctor and the woman, they run down a stairwell and find themselves back in the basement of the house. Making their way through a hole in the wall, they find themselves wandering Hell for eternity. If you ever thought Hell would look like a dark wasteland with five bodies lying around, then you'll be pleased with this ending.
So all of the missing plot points that you thought would be finally answered in a clever finale, are never explained. We never find out why the woman could see the blind girl and where she lived, but the Doctor couldn't. We never find out how the creepy male house servant dies, or why he and the female servant 'came with the house'. We never find out why the missing floor plans 'disappeared' and for what reasons. That and many other unanswered plot holes left me feeling very angry for wasting my time, hope and money.
The gore was laughable if anything and there wasn't one scene that made me 'jump', even if it was the old scare tactic involving a hand on a shoulder during a tense moment. There was only one good scene and that was when the little girl got her head blown off. But other than that, this movie was very disappointing.
My Rating - 2 out of 10.
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 house, only to be 'surprised' by a flash of lightning that appears out of nowhere (and for no real reason) that sends him crashing to the floor where he gets parts of his face bitten off by spiders.
Some laughable special effects take place in this very scene. The face all of a sudden turns into a 'wax-like' head, and only one of the spiders look real. The ones used in the background all look like one of those cheap plastic ones with pipe-cleaner legs that you once made in kindergarten. One of the spiders 'pull' one of the eyeballs out its socket and another stings the man's tongue. But the biggest bizarre moment does not involve the spiders, but instead we get to see the floor plans of the house 'disappear' like magic ink. What was the purpose of all of that? You're probably thinking that it will be explained at the end of the film. Wrong.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the male house servant is killed (although I don't recall this ever happening). He appears in a strange seance appearance involving all the dead cast members to date where they surround the blind girl who gets her throat and ear ripped off by her pooch! Ouch! Another unintentionally funny scene shows the woman who got her face 'melted' off by the jar of acid. The make-up effects are hideous. She has enough red and blue make-up on her face to resemble that of a baboon.
More confusion ensues when the town suddenly 'empties' of all of its residents so that the woman and the Doctor are both running around with no one else in sight. They take refuge in the hospital (where else would there be any more freshly dead bodies?) where they encounter slow-moving zombies that the Doctor must insist on shooting a hundred times in the stomach. Even after he successfully slays a few by shooting them in the head, he still proceeds to cluelessly shoot them in the stomach. And all of these endless bullets are coming out of a six-chamber barrel that he never refills! LOL!
There is of course, one surviving man who is hiding in one of the rooms. He is only there to show us why the Doctor would shoot at a glass door for no reason so a mysterious gust of wind would blow shards of glass into the room and pierce a 'wax-like' head, killing the man instantly.
With a mob of zombies (actually, upon closer examination, it looks like it's the same group of six zombies who reappear continuously to make it look like that there are 'legions' of them) shuffling after the Doctor and the woman, they run down a stairwell and find themselves back in the basement of the house. Making their way through a hole in the wall, they find themselves wandering Hell for eternity. If you ever thought Hell would look like a dark wasteland with five bodies lying around, then you'll be pleased with this ending.
So all of the missing plot points that you thought would be finally answered in a clever finale, are never explained. We never find out why the woman could see the blind girl and where she lived, but the Doctor couldn't. We never find out how the creepy male house servant dies, or why he and the female servant 'came with the house'. We never find out why the missing floor plans 'disappeared' and for what reasons. That and many other unanswered plot holes left me feeling very angry for wasting my time, hope and money.
The gore was laughable if anything and there wasn't one scene that made me 'jump', even if it was the old scare tactic involving a hand on a shoulder during a tense moment. There was only one good scene and that was when the little girl got her head blown off. But other than that, this movie was very disappointing.
My Rating - 2 out of 10.