In Beyond the Darkness, Frank is a young dude with feathered hair who drives around in his red serial killer van while the familiar sounds of Goblin pump out on his bitching speaker rack as he heads off to pick up that baboon he ordered a few weeks before. Unfortunately this baboon doesn’t really play much more of a part in this film and is mainly used to introduce us to Frank’s hobby, taxidermy.
In movies where Goblin provides the aneurysm-inducing synth music and the main character is a taxidermist, how long is it before our hero decides that what would look really sweet next to his stuffed baboon and squirrel is his girlfriend?
It is this rather uninteresting premise that is the jumping off point for Joe D’Amato’s dark fairy tale (I call it a fairy tale because it takes someplace in Europe where there are mountains) about love, death, and the value of a housekeeper that doesn’t mind hacking up wayward hitchhikers for you.
While Frank is carting around baboon carcasses, his girlfriend Anna is laying in a hospital bed gravely ill. I’m guessing that a stuffed baboon is going to make a pretty rad get-well present.
Frank is a rich boy (that explains the feathered hair and way too tight dress slacks) whose parents died and now he lives with his crazy housekeeper Iris and pines away for his dead mother.
Iris is one of those housekeepers who keeps her hair in a bun and is very stern looking. We know immediately from this that she is a sicko who is hung up on Frankie.
Like any obsessed housekeeper whose boss actually has a life and a girlfriend, Iris employs some old skank to sit around the kitchen table jabbing big needles into a voodoo doll, presumably of Anna.
Anna has a bad reaction to all this bad voodoo and once Frankie gets home Iris finally gets around to telling him that if he can be bothered to put his big smelly baboon down that the hospital called and that they need him to get down there right away for a touching death scene.
Anne dies and during the visitation Frank starts surreptitiously injecting his dead girlfriend with some kind of fluid from a handy-dandy syringe he has in his coat pocket. Later that night, Frank loads up the van with shovels, a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches because it’s graverobbing time!
Frankie digs her up and puts her in the van, then promptly gets a flat tire. Of all the luck! Once the flat is fixed, he sees that a chubby girl has climbed into the van and made her fat ass right at home.
When I’m hauling around the freshly dug up corpses of loved ones, I generally don’t pick up hitchhikers or allow them to stay in my van if they’ve climbed in on their own, but Frankie is merely a necrophilic-taxidermist, not a genius, so he just kind of frowns and lets this fugly girl ride back to his place with him.
Problems ensue once this fat toad wakes up from her pot-induced nap and sees that Frankie is busy playing “home embalmer” and tries to escape. There’s a struggle and he ends up pulling her fingernails out with a pair of pliers. I think he also takes a bite out of her. It’s a cruel world to be a fugly hitchhiker in.
Frankie gets his girlfriend all fixed up and keeps her in a bed next to another bed where he pumps other chicks before they’re killed. Iris doesn’t seem to mind this fixation on Anna and actually helps him dispose of the body of the hitchhiker. (Iris is just as demented as Frankie as she tackles the dismemberment of a human body with the same sort of efficiency as mopping the kitchen floor.)
There is a funny scene where she comes in from dumping all the human remains in a hole and she fixes some lunch for herself and Frankie. They were eating that mush that all those Europeans seem to enjoy and she has no table manners and is spilling her food, chewing with her mouth open and shoving that crap in her mouth like it was Chex Mix or something good like that. This, combined with all his hacking and slashing of the hitchhiker earlier causes Frankie to barf in the kitchen while Iris looks on and continues to eat. That’s what you get for trying to run with the big dogs, Frankie!
Eventually, Frankie tells Iris that he’ll marry her, but that he’s not getting rid of Anna. That should make for an interesting honeymoon. I see another sequel to Weekend at Bernies!
Things unravel when Anna’s sister shows up and for some reason Iris loses control and goes after her with a knife.
The film isn’t terribly involving because we aren’t given much in the way of motivation for anyone or their actions. Iris is obviously a freak, but she shows up on screen that way. Frankie immediately decides to keep his girlfriend’s body like it was the final step in the natural course of grieving. There’s no reason why Frankie goes wacko like that, except for a brief allusion to his fixation on his dead mommy. Why didn’t he dig her up, too?
This whole concoction kind of sat on my TV screen like the pork chops I refused to eat as a youth – ugly looking, smelly, dry, and gristly. The gore scenes are spaced out with lots of boring crap in between where the housekeeper is doing her best to look and act strange (trying on dresses, offering her boob to Frankie) so that the type of audience the film is aimed at will walk away disappointed except for a couple of memorable dissection scenes.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
