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THE BEYOND
(Anchor
Bay) DVD. Horror. 89 minutes. NR, gore. Directed by Lucio Fulci. In
1927, an angry mob beats, murders, and nails a man to the wall in the
basement of a New Orleans hotel. In 1981, Liza has inherited the hotel and
hires craftsmen to start renovating it.
Amid the renovations, people start to die horrible deaths and a
blind woman named Emily pleads with Liza to go away and leave the hotel
alone. However, Liza stays because if she didn’t, it would be a short
movie. Instead, Liza and the town Doctor investigate the eerie hotel and
it’s hellacious secrets. Come to find out, there are seven gateways to
hell and this hotel just happens to sit on one of them.
Although considered to be the masterpiece of all Director Fulci’s work,
I found it to be incoherent at best. Don’t get the wrong idea, I still
enjoyed the crap out of this movie. However, it appears that Fulci came up
with a bunch of shocking, gore filled deaths and surrounded them with a
weak plot and sloppy storyline. The deaths are rather gruesome and will be
a smash hit with all the gore hounds. Many of the deaths really shook me
up due to their icky nature. You see, I can handle anything sick in life
except for, due to a childhood accident, eye injuries and big ugly
spiders. Of course, Mr. Fulci’s gave me three realistic, nasty eye
injuries in the first 45 minutes, one of them involving huge tarantulas!
Christ! DVD features include; photo gallery, interactive menus,
interviews,
audio commentary, theatrical trailer, music videos, scene access. The
video is presented in widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio Standard 1.33:1 and
enhanced for 16x9 TVs. The picture is clear and the colors are great. A
lot of the movie is shot in dark settings and this print perfectly
reflects the creepiness of the movie. The audio tracks are in English
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, which sounds phenomenal, and Italian mono.
Stars David Warbeck and Catriona MacColl provide the audio commentary,
which I did not listen to because I really don’t give a flying fuck what
these two people have to say about anything. The music video is just some
god-awful death band playing in a Brady Bunch like setting with clips of
the movie edited in. There is also a hidden Easter egg that I will not
spoil for you. Go hunt for it Sherlock! This release is a joint effort
between Anchor Bay, Grindhouse, and Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder
Pictures. Fans of gore (not that asshole politician) and Lucio Fulci will
dig this disc. Damn eye injuries. – Denis Sheehan
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