According to the Internet Movie Database, in less than thirty years, Joe D’Amato managed to get credit for directing some 198 movies. Beyond The Darkness is probably his most famous one. If you’ve never heard of D’Amato or this movie, you may be more familiar with Jurassic Pork, Robin Hood: Thief of Wives, or The Erotic Adventures of Aladdin X. He also lent his directing talents in some capacity to Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Contamination .7 if your tastes run towards something other than obscure Italian adult knock-offs of major Hollywood films. He’s probably the only director who could make a movie called Endgame and you wouldn’t be able to guess if it was a porno or a post-apocalyptic adventure without actually watching it.

In Beyond the Darkness, Frank is a young dude with feathered hair that drives around in his red serial killer van while the familiar sounds of Goblin pump out on his bitchin” 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? I always thought that the government should regulate these weirdos that go around sticking their hands up dead animals’ butts and spend hours agonizing over which fake eye would give that perfect “just dead” look they’re looking for.

It is this rather uninteresting premise that is the jumping off point for Joe’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 bought the farm so that he could live with his crazy housekeeper Iris and pine away for his dead mother. Iris is one of those housekeepers that 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. If the broad looks familiar to you, do not admit it to anyone because her other big roles usually involved nunsploitation epics (The Other Hell, The True Story of the Nun of Monza) or women in prison flicks (Women’s Prison Massacre, Violence In A Women’s Prison).

Like any obsessed housekeepers whose employers actually have 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.

Frankie hops in his red van of death, cranks up Goblin and steps into it, no doubt blowing several of his cams and seriously stressing out his tranny. At the hospital Anna tells Frank that she wants to make love to him once before she dies. Turned on by the prospect that Anna may be cashing her last paycheck and is finally ready to give it up to him, Frankie plants a big passionate kiss on her and the next thing you know she’s flatlining! That must have been some Clark Gable-sized dogbreath, my friend!

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! You know, you get to a point in your movie-going life where you would like to see someone go to the cemetery and do anything but dig up a grave. Now that would be shocking!

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.

In addition to all of Frankie’s other bad habits, he seems to have developed a bit of a taste for human flesh, too! He doesn’t do it much throughout the course of the movie, but it’s there. Like that time when he’s gutting his dead girlfriend and takes a big chunk out of what I assume was her heart. This is during one of the movie’s big gross out scenes where we get to watch Frankie take out all Anna’s vital organs. If it grosses you out to watch a guy play around in pig guts or whatever gooey crap they were using here, then you’ll probably be grossed out by it. If you watch any half-assed zombie or cannibal movie, you’ll probably shrug and wonder why the movie had been holding back for so long.

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 seems to tackle 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 (kidney pie or escargot or something) 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 kind of unravel when Anna’s sister shows up and for some reason Iris loses control and goes after her with a knife. Frankie gets involved and wouldn’t you know it, but Iris stabs him right in his junk! He retaliates by taking a bite out of her neck and she claws out his eye!

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 most will walk away disappointed except for a couple of memorable dissection scenes.

It’s not terribly involving because we aren’t given much in the way of motivation for anyone in this stupid villa. 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 whacko like that, except for a brief allusion to his fixation on his dead mommy. Why not dig her up, too? And if this did have to do with his dead mother, what was it about Anna that allowed him to date her and to become that attached to her? And how attached was he was to her anyway since he was playing with a baboon while she was in the hospital?

© 2008 MonsterHunter