Terrifying and unspeakable secrets of hell, huh?
Can you believe I’ve missed four whole months of participating in Final Girl‘s Film Club?
Know why? Well, I’d like to tell y’all it’s because I’ve been super busy getting ready for the birth of my son…but the truth is…I’m kinda’ lazy and I haven’t been all that enthused with the Film Club movie selections recently…
Well laziness be damned and interest be peaked this month, boners!
Today we’re diving face first into Lucio Fulci‘s THE BEYOND…It’s a “graphic frenzy of gory crucifixions, chunkblowing chain-whippings, eyeball impalements, sulfuric acid meltdowns, flesh-eating tarantulas, throat-shredding demon dogs and ravenous bloodthirsty zombies!”
Man, can the back cover of this DVD sell this fucker or what?
But before I get to my thoughts on this bad boy, I think we should start with a little song called, Seven Doors Hotel, by Swedish rockers, EUROPE! (Yes, that Europe!) It’s totally about THE BEYOND and does a pretty good job summing up the plot to a horror movie like only heavy metal lyricists can…but with guitar solos!
Okay…so…um…how to describe the “plot” to THE BEYOND?
So there’s this warlock, right? And he’s all into magic and doors and painting and stuff…and, um, the sepia toned residents of 1920s Louisiana don’t cotton to no queer necromancers in their parts.
Seriously, the Creoles are one thing, but they just can’t stand for no frilly wizard settin’ up shop in one of their fancy hotels!
Soooo, they catch him, whip him with some chains, crucify him to a wall, and give him a face full of caustic soda as warning to all the other sissy Satanists round these parts! It’s a total “All warlocks, keep out! This means you! Love, Louisiana!” kind of thing.
And there’s this book. It’s the Book Of Eibon and it’s full of cool stuff like a magical formulae for “the slaying of certain otherworldly horrors” and it even has the rites of Zhothaqquah in it! But for some reason the movie doesn’t really get into all that…I think it’s still a pretty neat book though.
Anyway, the hotel where the warlock was murdered back in the 20s is inherited by a young woman in the 1980s…and woe be unto this poor woman that inherited this creepy money pit! The Seven Doors Hotel is all sorts of fucked up! Weather beaten exteriors, bad plumbing, crappy interiors, a flooded basement, two weirdo servants, the ghost of one dead warlock…oh, and it was built over one of The Seven Doors To Hell! Heh…who knew?
This might be a bummer for her, but it’s too good to be true for us! Once she tries to get the hotel up and running all sorts of Hell starts breaking loose and the promises made on the back of the DVD all come true!
Eyeball impalements!
Sulfuric acid meltdowns!
Flesh-eating tarantulas!
Throat-shredding demon dogs!
Ravenous bloodthirsty zombies!…Well, kind of…they weren’t that ravenous or bloodthirsty…and some were zombie ghosts…or were they ghost zombies?
Either way, they really weren’t very threatening and the guy with the gun shouldn’t have wasted so many bullets when he was perfectly capable of walking around the nonthreatening ghost zombies, uh zombie ghosts…or whatever.
I won’t spoil the “mind bending” ending here but let me tell you, I was all, “Huh?” and “Wha?” and even a little, “Uh, okay?” And then I realized THE BEYOND was a surreal
hallucinatory masterpiece and it all made sense in an André Breton kind of way.
So that’s that! Let’s see what Stacie herself has to say and what the other Film Club Coolies thought over at FINAL GIRL!
Awesomeness For Awesome's Sake. 
March 30, 2009 at 2:30 pm
so were all seven doors at the hotel? Because I’m pretty sure one was in a really spooky hooker’s vagina. My cousin used to call her “the Harvey Tunnel.” (it’s a tunnel in Westwego). I apologize for these retarded New Orleans jokes. I broke down once on that causeway that’s in the movie. Had to walk about 11 miles with this idiot girl I was fucking. Wanted to throw her over the edge by the time we got to Mandeville.
March 30, 2009 at 7:33 pm
bwanavoodoo:
I’m pretty sure there can’t be any more than 4 doors to Hell in/under/around that hotel. Let’s do the math: there used to be one in Sunnydale, CA (btvs), there’s definitely one in Cleveland, OH (btvs, watchers) and I refuse to believe there isn’t one in Washington, DC (real life). So three are already spoken for.
; – 0