The Beyond (1981)
Everything starts innocently enough when a mob of angry townspeople in the bayous of Louisiana way back in 1927 get wind that there is some kind of weird stuff going on at one of the local hotels. It's called The Seven Doors Hotel or something that anyone with half a brain could tell was code for The Seven Doors of Hell Hotel. Down in room thirty-six (thirty six minus seven is twenty-three. Add the two and three together and you get five which is just two less than seven which equals the doors to hell! Creepy, huh?) there's a dude who's painting these really ugly paintings, the likes of which the art world hasn't seen since Track Of The Vampire .
These people bust in on this guy and start whipping him with chains. Two things struck me about this scene. First was that Cajuns sure are tough art critics and second that Lucio managed to steal scenes from his own movies. We all remember the very brutal and effective chain-whipping scene in Don't Torture A Duckling . In both films we get good and close up to the really nasty wounds that these chains open up and both films feature an angry mob of locals whipping an outsider suspected of supernatural activity. I'm assuming that Lucio was just showing us his belief that he was an outsider and was beat up unfairly by the critics or something. Either that or he figured we all loved a good and gory chain whipping scene.
They beat this guy down, nail him up to a wall in the basement and dump this white slop on him that burns his skin real good. There's also a book involved with the title "Eiobon" which is one of those books that some off screen voice always reads from promising gloom and doom for dopes foolish enough to buy the old Seven Doors Hotel and to try and renovate it so that it can be on the bed and breakfast circuit.
Somewhere along the way there is also this blind girl with green eyes that tells us that the hotel is one of those joints that doesn't get a good rating in Fodor's. Her name is Emily and her chief task is to put ideas into Liza's head that Room 36 would make a good location for the "Gates of Hell" theme room. Liza is played by Catriona MacColl, and she appeared in some of Lucio's other splatter epics of the time period (House By The Cemetery and City Of The Living Dead ). She's a New York City gal that has inherited the old place from her rich uncle and is determined to reopen it.
And if that whole "gateway to hell" problem that the hotel comes with wasn't bad enough, the basement is flooded and construction guy just took a header off a scaffold. OSHA should probably just set up a field office in the driveway.
The doctor that shows up to check on the guy that got splattered on the ground is Dr. John McCabe, a guy who has this perpetual five o'clock shadow and runs around battling zombies while determined to find a scientific reason to it all. Meanwhile, Joe the plumber is called in to go down in the basement and fix the pipes since the basement is flooded. He goes down there and finds water leaking out of the wall and immediately busts it open in an attempt to find the source of the problem (um, Hell maybe?) and the next thing you know, a hand comes out of the hole he just made in the wall and it smushes his face all up and squeezes out his eye !
Joe's body is found and hauled off to the hospital morgue. Joe's wife goes into the morgue by herself (but she did thoughtfully bring her daughter and made her wait outside) and starts to put Joe's best suit on him. Then we hear a little screaming and all this acid is pouring down on Mrs. Joe The Plumber and is melting her face! Her kid runs into to see what her mother is squawking about and watches in horror as this puddle of red acid stuff slowly fills the floor and advances toward her. She spends a good deal of time screaming and trying to open doors, but since it is a morgue the doors all lead to corpses.
Later at the funeral for her parents, we see the girl has green eyes just like Blind Emily has. And what about Blind Emily? What's she been up to? Well, she and her guide dog were found by Liza standing in the middle of the road hitchhiking (show a little leg next time and you'll get picked up sooner and wear sunglasses so that no one can see your demonic eyes - tends to turn off the truckers) so Liza gives her a ride back to Blind Emily's place and Blind Emily jabber jaws about something or other. (I always forget what these mysterious blind-types say, because it's always the same - you know - your house is possessed, get out, did my dog poop on the carpet, - that sort of thing.)
There's more problems with the renovation when the guy Liza has put in charge of the project goes to the hall of records. This is the place where really old musty books are kept that usually contain lots of damning information about whatever property, marriage, death, or birth is the subject of the movie. Wasn't there a scene in House By The Cemetery where somebody checked out some records on Freudstein?. This dude gets the blueprints for the hotel and is shocked to see that it is a lot bigger than he thought (actually we don't know what the big deal is with the floor plan because it's never referred to again) and is so surprised that he falls off the ladder he had to climb up on to get the book thus creating another opening on the hotel construction crew.
Following the death of the dude at the records department (which involved a tarantula attack carried out by a few real spiders and several fake spiders that ate the guys face, eye, and tongue) some more strange things occur. You got your situations where Liza sees really bad stuff, like that dude nailed up to a wall. There is also a scene where one of the workers goes into room 36 to get it cleaned up and finds that the bathtub is still filled with inky black water. She shows her stupidity by reaching in and pulling out the gunk that was clogging it up. If I was going to be cleaning a room that had been boarded up for fifty years and there was a bathtub full of stanky water, I wouldn't have nothing to do with it. I mean, any moron would know that after fifty years all the brackish water that the warlock used to bathe in would have evaporated and that if the tub was still full, it must be because a zombie is hiding it in.
Anyway the zombie comes out and mashes her head against a nail in the wall and sets back the restoration project yet another week. Blind Emily gets into a jam of her own when a zombie attacks her. She sics her dog on the thing and the dog seems to have his way with the zombie. The dog then comes back to Blind Emily and rips her throat out, showing you that all dogs are hell hounds at heart.
Liza has some more problems with people trying to get her and buzzers mysteriously going off and decides that now would be a fine time to have one of those episodes where she screams a lot, until her doctor boyfriend can show up and tell her what a loud fool she is and that she's embarrassing herself in front of all the zombies. The house acts up a little more and McCabe and Liza haul arse out of there to the hospital. This makes a lot of sense since there are lots of corpses there.
The best part of the movie is the last ten minutes when McCabe and Liza are confronted by an army of zombies at the hospital. McCabe shoots some of them including the little girl whose eyes turned green at her parents' funerals. It's one of the highlights of the film to see the little twerp's head blown clean off in all its messy glory.
Liza and McCabe go down to the basement of the hospital, but somehow end up back in the basement of the hotel! Turned out it was a lot bigger than anyone thought! They wander around down there and walk toward a hole in the wall where light is emanating from. They end up in hell I suppose since there's dead people buried and laying around and when they turn around all evidence of the hotel is gone and now they're stuck there while some off-screen narrator babbles about a Sea of Darkness! Oh my God! Sea of Darkness! Sea of Freaking Darkness! By the way, does anyone know what a Sea of Darkness is?
If all of the above wasn't enough of a recommendation, then there is this to consider: The Beyond is pretty much the same movie as City Of The Living Dead! In both films, some doofus has gone and opened up the "gates of hell" or the "doorway to hell" depending on the movie, leaving a couple of people to survive some yucky scenes sometimes involving maggots, sometimes spiders, but always involving eyes getting injured! You've got gore, you've got bad acting by that MacColl woman, and as a bonus, a much better finale than in City Of The Living Dead!
Make no mistake, this is a Fulci zombie movie, and as such, most of it makes no sense. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to what is happening, only that Fulci or whomever has thought up a good gross out scene and decided to put it in there. Who knows why the doors to hell would be found in an old hotel in New Orleans? Who can say what was up with the hospital turning into the hotel? Who has any idea why Fulci made the same movie twice with the same woman? Really, who did he think he was? Bruno Mattei?