I watched the beyond as part of a triple bill with City of the Living Dead & The House by The Cemetery to make up the "Gates of Hell" Fulci Trilogy.I will say from the beginning this movie is a big step up from City of the Living Dead. It starts out with a brutal kill of an artist in the Seven Doors Hotel back in 1927 as he was believe to be a warlock. The kills were definitely an upgrade from City of the Living Dead and the grabbing the brain out of the back of the head or blood out of the eye balls. I am glad we live in a time where we are able to view these movies as they were meant to be seen without all the censors blocking the gore/content.The thing I love most about Italian Horror, specifically Fucli and Argento is they are well made movies in addition to being good horror movies. Some of the late 70's and early 80's slashers were terribly made movies that we graded on a scale because a lot horror movies had bad acting/plot. The Beyond definitely stands up along with other non-genre films.

The "most helpful review" as of the time of this review is one that proclaims "the atmosphere is so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw" and pulls out a fandom gatekeeper card with "if you haven't seen this cult masterpiece don't call yourself a horror buff." I am here to tell you that this 10/10 review could not be more wrong and that you will benefit greatly from not bothering to watch this film.First and foremost, let's get the gore out of the way. I'm sure for the time it was pretty good but it is unconvincing and has aged poorly. The blood is runny like fruit punch and there is an unfortunate combination of actors doing things a person would simply never do and shots lingering far too long. Some of the effects are well done but too many of them are bad for reasons other than the models used for the effects. Way too much time is spent on lingering gore shots.Oh dear god, the music. The music is terrifically inappropriate for a horror film. It's hard to explain just how out of place it feels. Imagine you see a gory scene and in the middle of the gory scene you start hearing a song that sounds like it should have a 1970s movie detective looking for clues in a building with no tension whatsoever. Yeah, it's really that bad. For a movie that's notorious for gore and connections to Hell the music is horrible.I watched in English but it's almost certainly a dubbed film. The dubbing is atrocious but it's also weirdly good-seeming in parts. The verbiage chosen in some areas (mostly towards the start) matches mouth movements very well and doesn't sound too unnatural for English...but it never quite seems right and it gets far, far worse as the movie goes on. I had subtitles on for some of the time as well and the subtitles don't match the verbal utterances well at all. Both are so bad that it's hard to look past it. Maybe it'd be better if I turned the audio off and just watched in silence with the subtitles...The plot? It's simplistic. It's one of those "and then this happens...and then this happens...and then this happens..." movies. The structure of the story is garbage. We are not led to like or care about any of the characters. There are a couple of jump scares that got me but the horror atmosphere is simply not there. You know something bad is going to happen long before it happens and the thing that happens is likely to be poorly executed. Character motivations are never clearly expressed except for the main female character to some small extent. This movie's concept had a lot of potential but the execution is just plain c***.If you don't see this film, you will miss nothing. It doesn't even have the "so bad it's good" thing going for it. It was not completely incompetent but it was bad enough that I never want to see it again, not even ironically.

A woman inherits a hotel where one of the seven gates of hell has been opened, she must discover its secret before the world ends.Director Lucio Fulci presents a Louisiana opening set in 1927 in sepia tone, as a lynch mob descend on a hotel. An artist Schweick is busily painting a vast apocalyptic painting in room 36. Thought to be a warlock the artist pleading only he can save them as the hotel is built over the seven doors of hell, is taken to the basement and gruesomely murdered. As a woman reads a prophecy from the book Eibon which sets alight leaving her fate, for the moment unknown, prompting titles over Living Let Die, Terminator 2, burning flames. Incidentally, I also viewed an erroneous bluray version (which the distributor have kindly since sent a corrected copy) where the opening was miss-coloured in a Night of the Living Dead, Universal classic black and white. Regardless of which version the wince enduring killing opens one of the Seven Doors of Death.1981 present day workers go about fixing up the hotel for Liza Merril played by Fulci's City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery actress Catriona MacColl. Its not long before the trades men have a series of accidents and Liza is introduced to David Warbeck's Dr. John McCabe. Fulci pulls no punches, but pulls focus on the camera with close ups of nails blurring our main characters and Sergio Leone-like eye close ups. When plumber Joe arrives at the hotel to stop a flood creepy Martha advises him where to go and it's not long before he uncovers Schweick's reanimated body who pops poor Joe's eyes out.In contrast to Zombie Flesheaters (1979) straight forward story, here writers Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Fulci explorer a metaphysical concept in which the realms of both the living and the dead bleed together. It spent some time on the UK video nasty list before being removed without prosecution. Though it was released in Europe in 1981, The Beyond did not see a U.S. release until 1983 under the alternate title "Seven Doors of Death." The Beyond is debatably Fulci's finest film, The City of the Dead appears to have been a practice run. The Beyond has a surreal edge, with a milky eyed blind woman (a look that American Horror Story Coven borrowed), a spectre appearing in a road, the woman who assists Liza is none other than the Eibon reading lady from 1927.Cadavers, autopsies, bodies coming back to life, it's all odd creepy stuff. Fulci can be heavy handed at times, notorious jarring cuts, dubbed dialogue nuances synonymous with his work, but The Beyond is finely shot, with top notch composition. It's appears Fulci is paying homage to his idol, the French playwright Antonin Artaud with The Beyond being less about linear plot and more about imagery and symbolism with its exploding windows glassing a man's face, corpse writhing in body bags, creaking gurneys, acid attacks and melting faces oozing blood, it's gruesome practical effects by Giannetto De Rossi retain a timeless horror charm. Cinematography from Sergio Salvati on the backdrop of New Orleans gives it a distinct feel, with jazz playing in the background. The icing on the cake is Fabio Frizzi's piano lead orchestral and vocal chants score which is outstandingly powerful during the eerie scenes and death setups.Liza walks around the oil lamp lit house encounters the blind woman Emily and entities. Of course New Yorker Liza ignores Emily's warnings and won't leave the hotel she's inherited. Shafts of light, dusty rooms, shadows, pianos playing by themselves, creeks may not amount to much, but Fulci build up tensions and jump scares with inexplicable lightening and crusty bony bodies on occasion nailed to the wall. Later while Liza tries to find out more about her hotel and missing book her friend Martin visits the public library to find the hotel's blueprints only to be attacked by a horde of hungry tarantula's who bite at his eyes and face - its gruesome stuff, with icky sound effects. Yes, there's lapses in logic, but it adds to the off beat creeps and sadistic torture and gore it delivers.David Warbeck is great as John (and equals Carlo De Mejo's lead Gerry in City of the Living Dead). John breaks into Emily's house, which appears to have been abandoned for years to find the book Eibon there and you realise, if you already didn't know that Emily is a ghost of sorts. Back at the hotel Martha is killed by zombie Joe (probably still annoyed at Martha inadvertently sending him to his death) and we're headlong into the final act with more dread-filled surrealism. Emily doesn't want to go back to hells gate with Schweick and sets her guide dog onto him and the zombie victims who inexplicably appear and disappear before her own dog turns on her, ripping her throat out in a graphic blood filled scene.To the writers credit the ending to this nightmarish extreme Italian horror is an unconventional brave one as Liza an John flee a hospital overrun by reanimated cadavers. Holding the hyper real effects and scripts shortfalls together are Warbeck's and MacColl's grounded performances. John goes all Dirty Harry shooting at the undead and Schweick's crusty corpse. Rushing down a set of stairs the couple find themselves back in the basement of the hotel and stumble through a labyrinth into a supernatural wasteland of dust and corpses mirroring Schweick's painting. Nihilist endings don't come much better than this - and Fulci simply out does himself. No matter which direction they travel, they find themselves back at their starting point and are ultimately blinded just like Emily stuck in hell - as they dissolve, cue Fabio Frizzi's pounding dramatic score.Excellent atmospheric horror, Fulci at his best.

It's the type of horror that makes a midnight screening audience laugh out loud as we watched some brilliantly bad English dubbing. A young woman, runs from evil to the sound of a kick ass Italian rock band, and an Italian filmmakers strange love of eye popping terror (literally eye popping). Demons, ghost and zombies all in the same movie in the back drop of New Orleans. A woman inherits a house in the city that just so happens to be one of the seven gateways to hell, bummer. The plot is a hot mess after that is explained, than the movie becomes a series of kills after kills and the lady being lorded around the house looking for an answer that did not really exist.The death scenes are archetype giallo, very slow with scenes cutting back and forth from the victim to the weapon and then very Gory.But I've seen other movies like Suspiria or zombie that have done this a lot better and less cheesy But at this point , that is the fun of the movieNote worthy 12'O clocker