Revenge of the Revenant Review 18: The one where the characters literally go to Hell

 

Title: The Beyond aka 7 Doors of Death

What Year?: 1981 (Italian release)/ 1983 (North American release)

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

In the course of this feature, one thing I haven’t really had to deal with is what movies “have” to be there regardless of my own feelings. To begin with, I never made a consideration of importance to the genre, and in most cases, relative obscurity has been preferable to fame or infamy. I also got a good number of entries out of the way before starting this feature, including the titles included in the original Revenant Review, which I have increasingly regarded as a separate entity. Finally, between the relatively small number of reviews and the eclectic nature of my own collections , I have remained free to pick and choose. This time around, I have the first exception to the rule, a movie I knew I was going to end up reviewing well before I started this feature but still pushed out of mind right up till I had to start considering where this feature might end. Here is The Beyond, the movie that managed to cross the zombie genre with pretentious art flick.

Our story begins in the 1920s, when vigilantes kill an artist they accuse of being a warlock. Skip forward to the early ‘80s, and we meet Liza, who is trying to renovate and reopen the same building as a hotel. She is absorbed enough in her newfound friendships with a doctor and a mysterious blind woman named Emily that she doesn’t seem to notice when several workmen are maimed or killed on her property. She does become concerned when Emily warns her that the house is built on one of the seven doors of Hell (where the other 6 are is one of many things not explained). Soon, strange mishaps and unexplained assaults claim more victims, including Emily. It becomes clear that the perpetrators are not ordinary undead, but agents of a supernatural force ready to invade the Earthly plane. It’s up to Liza and the doctor to close the gate, but it may mean a one-way trip to Hell!

The Beyond was the third of an informal trilogy of zombie movies from Italian Lucio Fulci, following Zombie and the explicitly supernatural City of the Living Dead (not to be confused with City of the Walking Dead). The cast was led by Catriona MacColl as Liza and New Zealander David Warbeck as Dr. McCabe, both of whom had previously appeared in other Fulci films. Italian Cinzia Monreale, a veteran of Italian horror movies, appeared as Emily. The movie was filmed in Louisiana in 1980 on an estimated budget of $400,000. It was released in Italy the following year, but did not see North American release until 1983, when a somewhat shortened cut was distributed under the title The Seven Doors of Death. The film was modestly profitable in Italy and elsewhere, but received unfavorable reviews from many critics including horror movie scholars. Peter Dendle’s Zombie Movie Encyclopedia notably remarked that the film “suffocates under the weight of its own grandeur”. In 1998, an uncut version of the film was released in the US, 2 years after Fulci’s death.

For my own track record, I have been acquainted with this movie so long it’s like the ex you keep giving another chance. Even more than Zombie (which I covered for my Italian knockoff week in Space 1979), I have come back to this one every few years for longer than I can readily remember, no matter how many times it has disappointed me. The difference between the two is that the earlier movie is straightforward and simple enough to have a comprehensible appeal, ultimately the chief reason I would not have considered it for inclusion here. Here, the allure is that it’s convoluted enough to make you wonder long after whether there was something you misunderstood, some deeper quality you missed. So you give it another try, and another, and still you can’t quite accept that all the puzzles are those of the posturer and the charlatan, that in the end , there’s simply nothing here. And nobody can say better than me, there isn’t.

With all that out of the way, there’s still plenty to be said about the movie, including its better points. As usual for Fulci and indeed the Italians in general, the camerawork is very good, with an embarrassment of riches of provocative visuals. There’s also an intriguing variety in the undead, ranging from apparitions that come and go at will to very corporeal revenants that lumber through a hospital in the finale. The most impressive are a group that eventually arrive for Emily, all the more unnerving as they stand and stare without attacking. Most importantly, it’s clear that Fulci is really trying to get a deeper theme out of the collection of jarring images. He comes closest to succeeding with recurring depictions of blindness, further aided by a very strong performance from Monreale (ironically the cast member who seems most “American”). It would be tempting to conclude that the intended message is that we should envy the blind, if not for Emily’s fate, driven frantic by the revenants even as they do literally nothing.

The downside is simply that none of this makes the slightest bit of sense. In that respect, it is not unique or even that egregious for Fulci or others; his own House By The Cemetery (apparently sometimes included in the “trilogy”) is if anything worse. But this is somehow more irritating than a recounting in cold blood would indicate. On top of that, almost everything is overdone, especially when it means more gore. At several points, this ramps up to the point of literal impossibility; poor Emily in particular is screaming long after her windpipe should be gone. What bothers me the most is that by now, it’s quite clear that Fulci is capable of disciplined and even subdued filmmaking, as evidenced especially by the bleakly somber final shots. He just chooses to focus on disjointed and shocking imagery over real storytelling. This leads to one last near-insulting turn in the finale, as Liza and the doctor find themselves back at the hotel with no obvious threat behind them, and still move ahead to literal damnation.

That leaves the “one scene”, and one might think I would be struggling. In fact, there was one sequence that came to mind almost immediately as embodying Fulci’s style, and apart from Emily’s demise, there was nothing to challenge it. Around the middle of the film, a bookworm is trying to find out more about the history of the hotel. Of course, he promptly has an accident, falling from a ladder in a genuinely effective moment. It would have been just fine to follow that with a bookcase falling on him or something equally ironic. Instead, we see a group of large tarantulas emerge and crawl leisurely toward the incapacitated man. And what do they do, bite him to death with their potentially deadly venomous mouthparts? No, they start literally tearing off his face, something about as far beyond a spider’s actual capabilities as the man taking a bite out of a dining room table. What’s absolutely surreal is that the cameras alternate between convincing shots of real tarantulas crawling on the real guy, which to southwest natives like me will be about as threatening as being swarmed by hamsters, and obviously fake spider puppets ripping up an equally obviously fake face. It’s the “perfect” example of Fulci and Italian filmmaking in general, random, over the top and ludicrous, yet still somehow impressive in sheer audacity.

In closing, I am truly struggling to add to what I have already said. This is a movie that could have been custom-made to annoy me, and that is very much reflected in its rating compared to certainly far less competent films already featured here. Still, I can’t say I hate it, or it simply wouldn’t be here. Even when it does everything wrong, which is more often than not, this movie still manages to do it in fascinating ways. I will admit that this is probably what has kept me coming back, and probably will keep me doing so. If you’re a fan of Fulci, you can consider that a compliment.