Horrorfest 2010: The Beyond

Here's another Italian horror flick -- THE BEYOND. This time directed by Lucio Fulci. Back when I was obsessed with George Romero in high school I made sure to watch ZOMBIE, probably Fulci's most famous movie. I haven't seen it since, but at the time I was less than impressed. It had good makeup and a couple of memorable scenes but was lacking in almost every other aspect of good storytelling.

THE BEYOND is kind of the same way, unfortunately. Apparently a lot of horror buffs say this is Fulci's best flick. Well, if this is his best one, then I guess I'm just not a Fulci fan.

To be honest, it was difficult to even make heads or tails of the story. Fans of the movie will probably tell you that's because this movie is super deep and meaningful with lots of symbolism that outweighs such trivial things as plot, story, character development, dialogue. Hell, there are movies among my favorites I'd tell you that about. I'm NOT one of those guys who always needs a solid story, for instance. Sometimes it's cool to just sit back and let the images wash over you. In this case, I'm afraid there's just no "there" there. There's nothing to get. I'll tell you why in a minute.

Let me try to summarize: the story, what little there is, involves a hotel in Louisiana that sits on one of the seven doors of death (or gates to hell, they seem to be interchangeable). It has been abandoned for decades, but a woman Catriona MacColl) inherits the place and begins renovations, hoping to open it for business again. Unfortunately the renovations awaken the various ghosts and demons that lurk around the hotel, and pretty much everyone who goes in there to work on it ends up dead. Then, they rise from the dead. So, the undead tally keeps going up. My favorite was Joe the Plumber. Yes, there's a guy named Joe the Plumber. The movie was ahead of its time.

Other key characters include a blind woman (Cinzia Monreale) who says she has extra sensory abilities and seemingly knows a little bit of the backstory of the place, which we see in a pre-credits flashback. This chick may or may not be a ghost. Which, I guess, means her seeing eye dog may or may not be a ghost dog. There's also a square jawed, be-stubbled doctor (David Warbeck) who, aside from being a love interest, spends his time doubting all the supernatural goings on.

Okay, so I said most of the key elements that make a good movie are lacking in this one. What's good about it? Well, the gore. From what I've read, I'm pretty sure the amount of gore in the movie is its only claim to fame. There's a lot of it. Some of it is better than others, but it's at least always creative. The film spends so much time lovingly examining every single second of every single murder scene that it would actually be interesting to time them out and see just what percentage of the film actually involves what I'll call "story scenes" and what percentage involves "gore scenes." Unfortunately I'm too lazy to actually do that.

To give you an idea -- people get nailed to walls and melted with quicklime. One guy has his face eaten by tarantulas. Someone else is mauled by a dog. Almost every death involves eyes popping out of their sockets in one way or another. What with all the blind characters in the movie and all the eye balls flying around, you might think Fulci is trying to make some kind of point. Or, maybe he's just capitalizing on his most famous scare from ZOMBIE which involved a girl getting a splinter in her eye.

The sound design is also a strength, but it is so overdone it borders on being a weakness. One of the most fun things about the DVD I watched was the overactive Dolby 5.1 mix. It gave my stereo a workout the likes of which it rarely sees, which I appreciate quite a bit. But, since 5.1 didn't exist back when the film came out, this is kind of an "after the fact" change to the film. Still, the sound effects themselves are interesting, although sometimes so imaginative as to be totally incongruous. For instance, shots of tarantulas walking across the floor are accompanied with what sounds like vigorously cracking knuckles and mouse squeaks. Similarly, a scene where the doctor pats the leading lady on the head is accompanied by an overly exaggerated "thud."

Towards the end of the film, Fulci goes for kind of a last minute grasp at some kind of transcendental, or maybe existentialist, meaning. The dream-like, stream of consciousness energy of the editing and the visuals has hinted at something like this all along, but when we get to the big philosophical payoff, it's too little too late. You get the feeling Fulci is trying to rise above the material and make this the zombie equivelant of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or APOCALYPSE NOW. Those flicks might leave viewers scratching their heads, but it's a good kind of head scratching. This one. . . I guess it's just kind of a cynical and empty head scratching.

Here's the reason this movie can't work the way it wants to. It's ABOUT gore. It's not a film that just happens to have gore in it. That's what the movie wants you to believe, and that's what the movie's devoted fans probably want you to believe as well. But unfortunately, that's simply not true. Everything in this movie is in service of just making sure there is one prolonged gore scene after another. Are the scenes good in and of themselves? Yeah, I guess they're about as good as you can make a gore scene. Does that forgive the rest of the movie's weaknesses? No.

While I was watching the movie I kept thinking about porn. No, not because gore is hot. Because the movie is similar to a pornographic movie. In a porn movie, everything is secondary to the actual sex. The sex takes center stage. If the movie has a story, or characters, or even special effects, the sex comes first. As soon as a sex scene starts, you drop everything and don't expect the plot to resume for another 20 minutes or so. When it does, it's more than ready to totally drop everything again for yet another sex scene. At a certain point you think, if all this story is getting in the way, why bother at all? Why not just wall to wall sex? I mean, the movie is ABOUT sex, right?

Even if the movie has ambitions (or pretensions) beyond just being another run of the mill porn movie, it still has to stop and be a slave to the sex. That's why whenever you hear people say stuff about how DEEP THROAT or THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES, or whatever, were actually good movies, you know they're full of shit -- most audiences, even fans of sex films, won't stop to watch these movies in their entirety, so they can go down in history as better than they actually were without opposition, simply because they were better RELATIVE to all the other crap out there.

Same here. Few filmgoers outside of horror buffs will sit through all this gore in the first place and the ambitions (or pretensions) of the movie are slightly more impressive than what you might find in a similar gorefest, so the movie goes down in history as being greater than it actually is when in reality it's just more interesting RELATIVE to all the other crap out there.

But, as long as the movie is a slave to its gore scenes and everything else comes second, it's only a matter of time before you say to yourself, "Why even bother with story?" And the second you ask yourself that, you know the movie's not working.