The Beyond

Girlcreeture and I watched this recently, and she liked it a lot. It was good, don't get me wrong, but I would have to see it again to give a solid opinion. Feel free to write a review, if it turns ya on.

You are right, there should've been more violence, but the gore was plentiful. A little too plentiful, if you ask me.

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EAT THIS

I reviewed it HERE:
http://dvd.ign.com/reviews/993.html

I liked it a lot. I really liked the way it was filmed and the gore was fantastic. I didn't feel it was too gory at all. The atmosphere created in this movie is just top notch.

My only problem with it was that the plot was very wafer-thin (say that in your best Monty Python voice please ). I can deal with semi-acting and such, but the story was just barely put together, IMO.

But that's the price to pay I 'spose when you see all the good stuff this movie offers which is just plain creepiness. The spookies cavort and play throughout in some rilly cool scenes. And again, the death in this movie is great too, many nasty ways to bite it, mm mm good!

I liked the Beyond for its atmosphere.

-yt (desperately trying to hatch)

Let me clear this up; I loved the gore, but the amount and frequency of it was a little on the excessive side. Don't get me wrong, it was all great stuff, Fulci can make anything look horrific if he tries hard enough, I just didn't see the point of all of it in a "serious" movie. But that's me.

Good luck with the hatching, yt. If you ask girlcreeture nicely enough, she may sit on you for a while...

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EAT THIS

[This message has been edited by Johnny Butane (edited 12-02-2000).]

"Eye" thought there was a lot of gore in it.

Watching a Fulci film for the story is like watching Baywatch for the story.

This movie was great. A little slow at first, but excellent once the zombies started coming out.

I like this film. Not raving, crazy in love with it, but I like it for being such an unusual film. There's definitely an atmosophere of creepiness to it, and some original ideas. I prefer the more frantic zombie films, but I like this one much more than Zombi.

I live in New Orleans so I like the film a bit more than usual

plus, you just gotta love the hilarious death metal video on the disk

RAWK ON, BRAH!

Just don't you darer make fun of Baywatch Nights.
I always thought the Beyond was a bit overrated, but that's just my opinion and I haven't really gotten than into Fulchi. I saw it in a theatre with an audience and it was more "fun" than scary.

I always really liked The Beyond. Something about it made me feel warm & fuzzy. I like it. It's not a perfect film, but it has moments of coolness and interesting bits. The strange dreamy, wafer-thin-plotted feel of the flick I really enjoyed for some reason, which is odd. o_O

Though I do love laughing at Warbeck shooting zombies in the stomach after he's pretty much established a headshot'll take'em down.

THE BEYOND was just god-awful ... The incoherent feel in Fulci's films sorta worked with ZOMBIE, and to a lesser extent, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY , but I saw THE BEYOND as a boring mess ... Even the gore was fake and obviously low budget ...

While watching THE BEYOND I remember really wanting to like it, but midway thru, I just grew tired of chuckling under my breath at its utter incompetence ... and sadly, Fulci has never been the same for me ...

Once you cross the "Fulci Line" , you never really can go back ...

It is definitely one of Fulci's better films but that doesn't say much in my book. I never really understood what's supposed to be so damn great about his films.

I liked the few minutes of zombie action, which were just awesome and the ending, which was really quite chilling, atmospheric and not what I expected.

But the rest of the film is just plain cheesy and I found it hard not to fall asleep at times. The spider attack scene had me rolling on the floor. It was hilarious but not in a good way.

The Beyond was a great big letdown for me. I'd heard on another, less-reputible site, that Fulci was "God." This led to me buying The Beyond sight unseen, the most money I've ever laid down for a DVD. This movie and The Haunting are why I'll never buy a DVD without watching the movie first again. Ever.

As I've stated before on these boards, I care about the story above all else. The Beyond was a mess of imagery and gore, very little of it making any sense at all. And by the time Warbeck started
I had passed the point of laughing at the thing. This repeated crap brought my disappointment with the film into a roiling rage.

I do confess to liking Zombi a hell of a lot more-- but not coincidentally that's the only Fulci film I've seen to follow a coherent, followable plot.

Anyway. Consider this bill for .02¢ to be paid in full.

There's actually an extra-diegetic reason for Warbeck's shooting the zombies in the stomach: he got into a twatting great arguement with Fulci about how unsafe the blank firing pistols were on set that he refused to shoot at the actors heads for fear of wounding them. The time's you do see him pointing the gun at an extra's head it's angled in such an awkward way to mask the fact he's shooting over their shoulders. Weird, but that's the wacky world of shooting at CineCitta

Pretentious it may (in both execution and my viewing of it) but The Beyond (in fact most of Fulci's pictures) have arthouse aspirations - even if they're not actually realised that well. Like Argento (who is obviously much more talented, visually), he's less concerned with cohesion and narrative than and overall aesthetic and feeling in his pictures. Very primal, very emotive and direct. Which is probably why so many people have terribley forceful negative reactions to his pictures. Perfectly understandable, and justifiable in a lot of cases. I certainly have a hard time justifying my liking of Fulci's pictures. I just like them. They click with me far more than, say, Massaccesi or Lenzi or even Sergio Martino (who's made some brilliant pictures).

However, there's much more bubbling under the surface than mere tacky gore and shoddy zooms. Like Jess Franco, Fulci's a wasted (and deceptively intelligent) talent for most of his career, who's subtext was in many cases more interesting than what turned up onscreen. Many of their pictures are awful - more than few most definitely aren't. For me, The Beyond is amongst that number.

Ahh, The Beyond. What a great flick.

I love this movie. It's one of my alltime favorite horror films. It has a great surreal atmosphere, and the gore is pretty damn good. BTW if you don't want that tin I'll buy it off you.

I like this comparison. I like thinking of Fulci as "the poor mans Argento." It makes sense to me anyhow. I think we're all pretty pleased with the head exploding scene, and I for one LOVE the shot of the acidic blood flowing towards the camera. It's beautiful actually. In that arthouse sort of way I suppose. It's like that shot of the spheres in Suspiria that roll towards the bed.
The difference being that Fulci's shot is slow and menacing, while Argento's got the energy cranked at that point.

Two excellent shots that demonstrate how to use good pacing.

The Beyond is a dreamlike nasty gory movie that sometimes makes no sense, just like most of Fulci's movies...

That is one of the charms of this movie. The zombie scenes do seem a bit tacked on, and they were-for German audiences and distribution zombies sell!

The acting ranges from mediocre(sp?) to horrible.

But some of the effects are wonderous indeed.

A great movie, and the tin from Anchor Bay is top notch!

Michele Soavi is the poor man's Argento.

Fulci is more like a moderately well off linguini chomping Ed Wood.

Tha man's got a point. I think you're being a bit harsh on Fulci though - Massaccesi is surely the Ed Wood arabiatta with a side of Jim Wynowski.

Fulci's some ungodly breeding of Roger Corman and George Kuchar with a gothic enema...yet somehow, someway, it all works.

I'd say Vincent Dawn/Bruno Mattei or Joe D'Amato make movies of poorer quality, in production qualities and linear thinking than Fulci, but since I love their movies also, I won't say it.

I love Mattei. His films are bad on almost every conceivable level but he still manages to entertain. I'd much rather sit through one of his low budget epics than almost any horror created by Hollywood. Give me a rubber lump on a conveyor belt any day over some CGI tomfoolery any day.

Of course, if you really wanted to talk bad we could start talking about Claudio Fragasso and Luigi Cozzi.

I love Fulci

but Manhattan Baby really had me doubting my love

but Gates of Hell always brings me back

oh snap....Sweet House of Horrors was another stinker....but atleast he did it with tongue in cheek

Careful dude, there's a couple of Troll 2 fans round these here parts...

I can't fault the Luigi Cozzi pan though. Although Contamination isn't dull...and Dario Argento: Master Of Horror is great.

Starcrash is a work of art...

I think I'm one of those Troll 2 fans of which you speak. Don't hate us.

So Fulci may not be the poor mans Argento. But I can claim ignorance seeing as my encyclopedic knowledge of all things splatter related is lacking in the section that includes those other guys.

Is there anything else that I should see from these other directors? Is it monumentally important that I see, say, something like Space Vampires?

well, apart from Dellamorte, Dellamore. fucking GREAT film.

Browning (Robert, not Todd), for Fulci:

"But a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a Heaven for?"

wink

You could do worse than see Planet of the Vampires. Good movie.

I read a news item recently (forget where..wish I could find a link) where a preacher was doing a sermon on drugs and kids or something, and he had a gun that fired blanks as a prop. For effect, he wanted to demonstrate what doing drugs was like, so he took the prop gun and put it to his head and fired the blank.

It had quite a spectacular effect, as the discharge cracked his skull, fatally wounding him. It's true, I swear.

Then there's Brandon Lee...

I thought Contamination kind of dragged once they went to South America. Other than that it is an entertaining knock down and drag out cheese fest.

I really do enjoy Fragasso and Cozzi's work. I think they're endlessly entertaining, just like Mattei. The only real difference is that Bruno manages to cobble together a few moments that somewhat closely pass for competence. Cozzi and Fragasso don't. They might manage one or two.

It's the film Star Warscould have been.

I like it too. It's just no Hell of the Living Dead. But then again, what is?

"Robotic kid with the knife" was originally in [/B]Profondo Rosso[/B] but was kind of self-homaged in the nutzoid climax of Butane bete noir Sleepless as well...

Hell of the Living Dead has it all!