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Oh hey, are we just jumping right on in here? As soon as the DVD goes in, the swanky old Grindhouse Presentation sorta thing scene in, well, Grindhouse pops up... and not in particularly ironic fashion, The Beyond here is from 1981. Turns out that was just a pre-menu thing though... and oh hey, we've got one of them optional intros by someone involved. Bla bla bla "... favorite of the trilogy..." Doh! Pausing for some quick research, yeah, this is apparently the middle of one of those thematic trilogies, like Time Bandits/Brazil/Munchausen. So breaking order not a huge deal, but this may lead into me feeling obligated to follow up with City of the Dead and The House by the Cemetery it seems. Anyway, Italian horror. Watching time.
Here's some sepiatone guys in 1927 Louisiana rowing boats to a house. There's some girl inside. Here's her eyes in extreme closeup, here's a book labelled EIBON in extreme closeup. Here's a dude painting. Here's his eyes in extreme closeup. Let's focus on his being room number 36. This is all being shown in THIS IS IMPORTANT vision. And... back to the boats. OK, yeah, the boats are a portion of a proper torch bearing mob, the rest took cars. And... apparently Girl collected a bunch of prophecies in yon book... also, what an astoundingly polite mob this is. I think they even checked in at the front desk. So yeah, apparently painter is a prophet of some sort, making ominous prophecy talk about 7 doors of evil and whatnot. The locals aren't big on that so they're here to torture him to death in pretty savage fashion. First we're pretty much beating all his skin off with a chain, now we're nailing his wrists to a wall, and now splashing him with huge amounts of... lye I guess? It's white and foamy and seems to have melted his face off. Oh and they do all this against a stone wall with a funky rune carved in it, which is just never a good idea. Anyway though, it's been a while since I've covered any Italian horror here, but you get something of an idea here. Vi-o-lent.
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Anyway, we now jump ahead to the present day of 1981, where some girl has bought the hotel where this stuff generally went down, and is having it repainted. One of the painters sees some creepy dead-eyed girl through a window, is freaked out, falls, and suffers some pretty significant internal injuries. Oh and yeah, we keep seeing 36 it seems, here it is on a broken cash register. The oldschool cute pop-up sort. So yeah, basement's flooded, we're calling in a plumber, here's some creepy basement lady who built a bridge across it apparently. Guess she's part of the existing staff. Seriously though, she might as well be wearing a sandwich board that just says I AM TOTALLY EVIL. Anyway yeah, he has to break down part of a brick wall to get the pipes working, because the leak is in the section where they murdered that guy then bricked it up. As a plumber from Louisiana I'm sure this is just another day at work for him. Which makes you really have to wonder what kind of person is willing to take a job like that. Now here's another staff member type. He also looks absurdly evil. And greasy. His face is so red and shiny he looks like he just came off someone's barbeque. But yeah, back to the plumber, apparently the main water pipe of this building actually gets routed directly through hell. Seriously, he's tracing it back, past the big ominous rune, starts knocking that wall down too, then some big nasty demon hand reaches out and pries his eye out.
Now here's the owner, driving down a really surreally vacant stretch of highway, and stops just short of hitting... oh hey, the girl with the creepy dead eyes and her seeing eye dog. The seeing eye dog is apparently named Dickie. That's... really not at all an appropriate name for the dog of the creepy dead eyed mystery girl. Anyway, that scene... could have stood to go somewhere. It didn't just end there, they start walking around for a while, just... nothing comes of it. Now cutting back to the basement, here's evil staff lady stumbling onto the body of the plumber. His face is pretty pulpy. Also another body, I guess of painter. Now hopping back to Owner and dead eyes, they're having a weirdly cheerful version of the seriously, leave this accursed place bit. And... again we just cut right out to performing an autopsy on the plumber. Come on movie. Pick a scene and stick with it a while, will you? Now here's owner in traffic... and we're back to the autopsy. The second corpse, which was kinda mummified in the wall and is probably painter's, apparently develops a... heartbeat when everyone leaves the room? Is that a heartrate monitor? Why would you have something like that hooked to a corpse? OK, apparently it's actually a type 545A Oscilloscope. Uh.. thanks for that close-up I guess. Anyway, here's... someone. Possibly Evil Staff Lady I guess, come to visit Plumber in... the morgue, and give him some rosary beads. Whoever she is, she has a twin ponytailed girl waiting outside, getting creeped out by an orderly pushing a creaky dolly by, then she's attracted by her mother's screams as uh... a big huge glass jar full of acid bubbles over and then tips over and melts herface into a room filling red foamy puddle. She flees because yeah, who wants hat on their shoes, but the only door that isn't locked is to a freezer, which ha a corpse falling on her which may be a zombie. So... telekinetic 60 year old mummified corpse, I guess?
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Now here's owner out on a date with this guy. Hey, movie? Could you, like, establish these characters some? It'd really facilitate things. Ah good. She's on a date with a doctor, possibly from the morgue there actually, and yeah, Evil Staffers are indeed the creepy people who came free with the purchase of the hotel. Also, Pippi Melt-mother here apparently made it out of there OK, we're at the funeral now. She sure is keeping her eyes closed though, gee, are we going to reveal something? Yup. She has weird dead eyes now too. OK, those last couple scenes actually ended sensibly. Anyway, here's owner getting up in the middle of the night, coming downstairs, meeting Blindy (original, not Pippi) and she's going to deliver some exposition it seems. But... we're taking a break first to watch an Evil Dead Cam head up to room 36. Anyway yeah, she starts explaining how the hotel was built on one of the 7 gateways to hell, and that painter had found the key that opens it, and oh, it's not a cash register that popped 36 before, it was the buzzer system. So owner's not buying all the creepy talk, blindy is feeling up one of painter's paintings and gets all stigmata-y and... runs out in weird loopy footage. OK...
OK, @#$% it, I'm just busting that room open with a hatchet, Owner decides. It's... pretty dull really. Lots of sheet covered furniture, and oh yeah, that "EIBON" book. Now here's the creaky creakycloset door opening itself and ... look out! Old coats! OK, maybe the bathroom's more interesting. Oh hey Corpse Nailed to the Wall! Thought you were in the morgue, having been hauled out of the basement? So she screams and runs and here's Doctor come to the rescue. See, there's no corpse on the wall. Just a couple nails where the hands were, with weird stains. Doctor declares the stains on the nails look more like rust than blood. Uh... you know old dried blood pretty much IS just rust, right? Doctor doesn't believe in Blindy either. Also evil book is missing. Man, don't you hate when you have a haunted house and some skeptic comes in and all your concrete evidence vanishes like that?
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So the next day, while walking around with some guy discussing renovations, she sees the evil book in a bookstore window. She runs in to buy it, but it has apparently turned into some lame other book. Also the owner is a crazy laughing weirdo. Anyway, later renovation planning guy is in the town records looking for original floor plans, while on a precarious ladder. Will he fall to his death? Yes. Also, tarantulas. For good measure. There's kind of a weird mix, where at least one of those is clearly real, and the others are cheap puppets, and uh... either would work, but with both, it's way too clear that the puppet ones aren't moving their legs right. Also they are really dragging this out. OK, they're finally almost neat his face, which, I guess is the bad news? OK, now they're taking big bites out of his face as he starts to come to. That's something, I guess. Seems more weird than creepy though. I mean, we've got some nice extreme close-up gore effects, sure, but I'm just not getting creepy off tarantulas eating your face. Oh and then the floor plans erase themselves.
So now here's Doctor checking out... stuff. Oh hey, there's the book. Time to read that sucker. Also here's Evil Staff Lady checking out the formerly locked off room 36 and, you know, cleaning it. Kind of her job. Anyway, we seem to have hit kin of a lull, so can I just say I generally don't fid myself liking Italian horror as a rule? Ew, that is one nasty corpse containing bathrub. Wait, why is the plumber in there? I guess he's a zombie now, with a totally unmoving face, which hurts the scare value of that. The tub water is so much more unsettling than the zombie in it. Anyway, he shoves her head onto one of the nails causing her eye to pop out of her head. This movie really likes causing eyes to pop out. But anyway, yeah, Italian Horror. There's a huge emphasis on realistic flesh tearing, which really I can get behind because I love practical effects for their own sake. The problem is though, there's no context for'em. I mean, look at this movie for instance. OK, there's some creepy stuff going on at this hotel, involving the hates of hell opening and... that's it really. There's no actual plot. None of these characters are really doing anything. They just help establish that yeah, creepy's going down, and then die in weird ways. There's nothing to get me really invested as a viewer. You know? I mean, Phenomena totally works because it's this weird Horror/Giallo hybrid and it has one of the best soundtracks ever, but usually you get something like this. Giallo incidentally is this Italian movie genre where you have these same levels of gore and weird posh visuals, but instead of pushing this sort of supernatural horror with'em, you get a straight up murder mystery with'em. Works much better.
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Anyway, here's a fun bit. All these really lame looking zombies come for Blindy, apparently to drag her back to hell or something. She freaks out in the corner for a while, before it occurs to her to sic her dog on them. It previously was just sitting there watching and looking really bored. So yeah, now we've got zombies getting trashed by a dog, from the perspective of a blind girl. Anyway, dog is apparently killed in the struggling, and thus becomes Zombie Dog, and returns to tear her throat out. Moving along uh... bla bla Blindy's house has been abandoned for the last 50 years, Doc thinks Owner's just crazy, but he did find and read the book, and it does say the hotel is on one of the 7 gates of hell, and when they go down to the basement there are some apocalyptic opening of the gates of hell special effects going off, so hey, let's go to he hospital and call some authorities. Oh hey, turns out the hospital is arbitrarily full of zombies. Doc grabs a gun from... somewhere? Oh wait, this is an 80's movie. No explanation needed. Anyway, they flee to the elevator, and... holy smurf, Owner? Did you really decide to hide from the hordes of zombies in the frelling morgue? How stupid are you? Pippi turns out to be down there too, but she has the excuse of being possibly possessed and evil at this point.
Doctor meets some guy and they fend off zombies for a bit, but then a window explodes in his face for no apparent reason, killing him, so now it's just Doc, meeting up with Owner and Pippi. I guess we're not going to have zombies attacking in the morgue. OK... lobby though? Totally more zombies. Apparently every living patient got zombified, but not the corpses in the morge. Oh, they did, they're ust having a hard time opening those body bags the're in. I'm digging how casually Doc's shooting'em all though. And hey, here's Painter Zombie n the fridge. You know, if you shoot him in the head, and not the torso like you keep doing, that might, you know, end horror or something. What happened to your aim all of the sudden? Anyway, Pippi goes all evil and grabs Owner's face, so... Doc just casually turns and shoots and hits her in the head explode center of the brain I guess. The zombies are all kinda shocked he had the balls to do that, so they flee down a staircase into... the basement of the hotel. It's very Silent Hill. They freak out about how that totally shouldn't have happened, but hey, let's keep escaping! Through the glowing light in the hole where the gates of hell were suposed to be!
Huh. Actually yeah, hell does seem a whole lot more pleasant and safe than anywhere else you can go. Nice gentle fog, soothing music, I mean, corpses lying all over the ground, but at least these ones aren't getting up and trying to grab your face. Of course, the doorway disappears once they're through, and now they have the dead eyes too. hen they... disappear for some reason. And... I guess that's it. Credits. So yeah. That movie kinda forgot to have any real sort of plot or likable characters in it. Kinda nice special effects, sure, but they just don't work in a vacuum. Briefly describing this to a friend, his reply was "So what, it's like budget porn?" And... yeah I guess that's it. Most Italian Horror is just Practical Effects Porn. Here's the flimsiest, least important setups ever, followed by a couple hours of really just totally context free gore for gore's sake. And I guess that makes me the relative prude who's totally fine with the content, but I need a story with it. Yeah... this metaphor's getting weird, time to abort.
