Start Making Sense – THE BEYOND

In the world of cinema, Italian Supernatural Gore films are rare and magical beasts.  They were only created during a small window, between the mid ‘70s to mid ‘80s.  Born from a heady mix of extravagant set pieces, dream logic, and excessive violence, they could simultaneously be wildly unexpected and thoroughly predictable. Plot took a backseat to atmosphere and spectacle.   Sometimes plot took a separate car altogether, and made frequent rest-stop breaks.  Concepts like continuity and coherence were afterthoughts.  Was it all an excuse to string together a bunch of gory deaths, or do you just have to be crazy to follow them?  Probably the former, but I’m concerned that after multiple viewings of Lucio Fulci’s most inexplicable masterpiece, THE BEYOND, I’m starting to make sense of it.  

The Capsule:

New York gal Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) jumps at the chance to reinvent her life when she inherits a historic hotel in New Orleans.  Unfortunately, she finds the Seven Doors Hotel in need of a major overhaul.  The shutters need fixing, the electrical system is wonky, it was constructed on one of the seven gateways to hell, and it badly needs dusting.  Her new spooky blind friend Emily (Cinzia Monreale) tells her the hotel went downhill 60 years ago when a torch wielding mob got mad at this painter for reading a weird book and crucified him in the basement.  Liza decides to tough it out and stay, despite all the people around her having random accidents like falling from a scaffolding or having their face eaten by spiders.  Her jerky doctor pal John (David Warbeck) thinks she is going nuts when she starts having horrific visions of mutilated corpses and the Book of Eibon, but Liza fears it may already be too late to avoid a one-way ticket to The Beyond.  

Let me start by admitting THE BEYOND is my favorite Fulci, and I like a lot of Fulci.  I hold it in higher regard than ZOMBI 2, my love of which has been well documented.  The entire film is smothered in a thick, invasive atmosphere of doom.  It is filled with stunning, haunting images.  Make no mistake, though, this flick is baffling.    The sepia toned opening gives the impression this will be a straight forward cursed house movie, perhaps in the vein of Fulci's also delightful HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (released in the same year!).  The deeper we get into the story, however, the less coherent it becomes.  Nothing ties together and more crazy elements get added as we go.  Who is this Eibon guy, and why is his book important?  Why mention seven gates to hell if you are only going to talk about one.  Did that plumber open the gate, or was it already open?  By the time we hit the surreal, elliptical ending, you could make a quilt out of all the loose threads.  

Catriona MacColl plays a perfect surrogate for the audience, a woman destined to be overwhelmed.  Liza starts off cool and in control, determined to make a go of restoring this hotel she’s inherited.  We never find out who she inherited the place from, but that’s the least pressing question in the movie.  A lifetime New Yorker (despite her hybrid British/Southern accent), she thinks she is prepared for anything.  She takes the first few accidents in stride.  Painters occasionally fall from their scaffolding, plumbers sometimes get their eyes gouged out while fixing a pipe.  Things like that can happen in any restoration.  

The tale really starts to get strange when Liza meets the mysterious Emily.  If there is a face of THE BEYOND, it’s Cinzia Monreale (credited as Sarah Keller).   The former model had an ethereal quality even before donning the most painful looking contact lenses ever made (seriously, they look like broken china plates covering her eyeballs).  In full makeup, Emily looks like a vision out of place and time.  She’s introduced just as dramatically, standing in the middle of the 24-mile-long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, with her seeing eye dog, right in the path of Liza’s car.  That seeing eye dog is terrible at its job, in my opinion.  Emily fills Liza in on the sordid events that happened in the hotel 60 years ago, though she doesn’t mention the part about her being there when it happened.  It’s never made clear what Emily is supposed to be (ghost? witch? ghost witch?) or exactly why she is there.   She is like the personification of the film, an unknowable beauty. 

Emily also warns her never to go into Room 36, the crucified painter’s old room.  Naturally, the next scene is of Liza busting open the door to Room 36.  From then on, she is tormented by visions of the painter’s corpse and other inexplicable sights.  She gets no support from her studly love interest, John.  Dr. Condescending practically pats her on the head when she tells him about the clearly supernatural events happening around her.  At one point, he even accuses her of setting the whole thing up just to mess with his head.  There’s an open gateway to hell to deal with, John, it’s not all about you.

THE BEYOND shares several similarities with Dario Argento’s gorgeously bizarre INFERNO.  Both are about haunted high occupancy dwellings.  Both have prominent mysterious books that don’t really amount to anything.  Most of all, both are relentlessly confounding, emphasizing the parts over the whole.  Specifically, they are all about the fantastical set pieces.  Fulci never had Argento’s eye for striking composition and color, though.  His magic comes in the form of inventive, unconventional, and profoundly excessive gore effects.  Fulci doesn’t film death scenes, he creates blood operas.  They are so elaborate and audaciously staged that it doesn’t matter if they are utter nonsense.  

Many of the deaths in THE BEYOND are from supernatural happenstance, along the lines of THE OMEN.  This gives Fulci the excuse to really go wild.  Take the unfortunate demise of Liza’s interior designer.  He is high up on a library ladder when he makes a startling discovery about the hotel’s floorplans.  We never find out what he discovered, since a sudden crash of thunder makes him fall to the floor.  The fall seems to have paralyzed him, so there is nothing he can do when a swarm of Louisiana Squeaking Tarantulas noisily crawl over him and—in exactly the way spiders don’t—chew his face off.  They don’t just eat it, though, they slice his mug to pieces with their pincers (?) like a retiree cutting coupons from the Sunday paper.  The camera lingers on the dissection in close-up, paying special squirm inducing attention to the eyeball (eye trauma is the Fulci calling card) and the tongue.  There is no part of this sequence that is not insane.  In that sense, the obvious cheapness of the effects (a prominent spider appears to be a windup toy) only enhances the spectacle.  

My favorite set piece is less absurd and more beautifully grotesque.  A mourning wife of one of the hotel’s victims goes into the stark white hospital morgue while the doctors are away and finds her husband’s body on the slab.  Clearly under a tight timeline, she starts dressing the corpse—mid-autopsy—in his funeral suit.  Something (again, we never get to see what) frightens her so much she either passes out or dies.  Hopefully she died, because her body hitting the floor sets off my all time favorite preposterous horror gag, the uncovered container of acid perched precariously on a high shelf.  The container tips, and her creepy daughter (by law, all children in Italian horror are creepy) walks in just in time to see her mother drenched by acid.  It must be a deceptively large container, since the acid flows in an unending stream until the woman’s entire head has melted.  If that wasn’t disturbing enough, the frothy blood puddle expands across the whole floor as the little girl desperately tries to avoid getting her mom’s face on her shoes.  For such a horrendously violent scene, it is strangely serene, like really gross performance art.  

Don’t worry, that scene does not involve any physical harm to the child.  Fulci saves that for the climax.

I always thought THE BEYOND was best enjoyed by simply surrendering to the madness of the story, just float along and take in the sights.  Imagine my surprise this time, on probably my sixth watch, things suddenly started to fall into place.  That place is still Crazytown, and it is filled with gaps and mysteries, but I think there might be a (semi) rational story under all the blood, fog, and cobwebs.  

I won't go into my theories here (you're welcome).  There is no way of knowing if my interpretation is what Fulci had in mind.  It's highly likely he just said, "Let's make a movie where some spiders eat a guy's face."  That's fine, too.  THE BEYOND is wholly unique and wondrous any way you slice it.

 But seriously, does anybody know the deal with this Eibon guy?

C Chaka

Always Coming Back - ZOMBIE

All movies are art.  Whether they are Rembrandt level masterpieces or pre-school macaroni pictures is up to the viewer.  Like all art, movies sometimes affect you in ways you cannot explain.  There may not be a rational reason why you are drawn to a particular movie.  It might not be a  genre you’re usually interested in, or it doesn’t have the most compelling story or performances.  Maybe it’s kind of dumb.  It doesn’t have to be your favorite, but you keep coming back to it year after year.  It’s your siren movie.  

It seems fitting to start the New Year with my number one siren movie, Bette Midler’s 1988 drama, BEACHES.  

Nah, I’m just fucking with you.  It’s Lucio Fulci’s 1979 gorefest, ZOMBIE.

The Capsule:

Investigative reporter Peter Wells (Ian McCulloch) and Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) head to the tiny Caribbean island of Matul in search of Anne’s father, whose boat drifted into New York harbor with only a very well fed zombie inside.  They charter a boat with Brian (Al Cliver) and Susan (Auretta Gay) a vacationing couple who enjoy fishing and topless scuba diving.  When they reach Matul, they find the island decimated by a mysterious disease that is killing the inhabitants and causing their corpses to rise and eat the flesh of the living.  Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to hold things together, but he can’t even keep his wife safe from zombie related eye trauma.  What little stability is left quickly unravels and Peter & Company find themselves running from the extremely slow, extremely disgusting hoards of the dead.  They make a final stand at Menard’s hospital, which could become a fiery grave for them all.  

Alright, it's not such a stretch that my siren movie is ZOMBIE (aka ZOMBI 2, aka ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS).  Everything adds up.  I’m into Fulci, Italian zombie flicks, and gory movies.  The film is filled with incredible and well executed scenes, some decent performances, and is consistently fun.  There are just other zombie movies I love more.  I’m a bigger fan of the original DAWN OF THE DEAD (the king of all zombie movies, in my opinion).  I have more fun with the ridiculously schlocky ones like BURIAL GROUND or HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD.  I even think there are better Fulci films.  But I go back to ZOMBIE more than any of them.  I own a double DVD of ZOMBI 2, a Blu Ray of ZOMBIE, and a region B Blu of ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS.  They are all the same cut.  I can’t explain it.  I just re-watched it for this piece, and I kind of want to start it up again.  The heart wants what it wants.

Granted, there is A LOT to love about this movie.  The opening scene of the derelict sailboat is legitimately brilliant film making.  It harkens back to the classic passage about the ship carrying Dracula’s body floating unmanned into the port of London.  Fulci takes his time with it, slowly following the Harbor cops as they board the ghost ship.  The sense of dread builds as they wade through the debris and rotten food left behind in the cabin.  Just when the suspense becomes unbearable, the grotesque butterball zombie bursts through the door and takes a chunk out of the cop’s neck before he can even pull his gun.  It’s probably the most nightmarish sequence in the film because it nails that feeling of lingering in a place you know you shouldn’t be.  The rest of the movie can’t maintain the exquisite tension of that opening, though it often comes close.  

ZOMBIE is probably most famous for being the movie where a zombie fights a shark.  The fame is well deserved, as this is not a camera or editing trick, but a real live shark wrestling with a real live zombie.  Alright, he’s just a stuntman in zombie make up, but he is underwater with no breathing apparatus, and it is a real shark.  The best thing about the scene is that it is a full sequence.  Modern movies, like say, your SHARKNADOs, tend to just throw out batshit crazy ideas like this with no set up, focus on if for thirty seconds, and then move on.  It would only amount to one badly done computer effect, a virtual elbow in the ribs to tell the audience how wacky and irreverent the movie is.  Shark vs. Zombie, can you believe that shit?

Fulci plays the scene absolutely straight.  He also lets it build.  Exhibitionist diver Susan is first menaced by a tiger shark.  She eludes that danger, but then comes face to saggy face with a zombie.  It’s only after she fights her way out of the zombie’s grasp that the two hunters square off against each other.  The zombie draws first blood, tearing off a chunk of fin.  The shark bites off his arm and slowly swims away.  The zombie might claim that swimming away was a forfeit, but I would say the match clearly goes to the shark. 

I’ve seen some online criticism that the shark is toothless.  I definitely saw a few teeth in its mouth, though, and any amount of teeth in a shark is significant, in my opinion.  Regardless, a dude in zombie makeup wrestled a real, physical, very large shark.  It’s a cinematic accomplishment. 

This is not to say ZOMBIE is a perfect film.  The cast, for the most part is unexceptional.  Tisa Farrow, Mia’s less famous, less talented sister, has two expressions for the entire movie: frightened and idle.  Most of the time she looks like she is trying to remember her childhood phone number.  Al Cliver is little better.  He has the hunky action hero look down, but he is out acted by the zombies.  Ian McCulloch is one of the bright spots.  His quippy, self-deprecating Peter elevates the grim and serious tone in just the right moments. 

Richard Johnson also gives a nice performance as Dr. Menard.  Scruffy faced and perpetually dour (and drunk), he completely sells Menard as an exhausted scientist at the end of his rope.  He is set up early in the movie as having nefarious motives.  His ill-fated wife (Olga Karlatos) seems to think so, she threatens to tell everyone what he’s doing.  The thing is, he doesn’t seem to be actually doing anything.  There is no indication he is responsible for the outbreak, or that he is exploiting the victims, he is just treating them the best he can.  The fact that he can’t do anything to stop the disease or ease anyone’s suffering is why he is in this pitiful state.  

Much like Romero’s movies, the explanation of why the dead are returning is a mystery.  There is a lot of talk about voodoo rituals being the cause, but we never see any of them in practice.  Decades old corpses dig themselves out of their super shallow graves at one point, which seems to be supernatural, but the outbreak follows the pattern of a disease and zombies can be killed by destroying the brain (which the decades old corpses shouldn't have anymore, but do).  Menard doesn’t have conclusive evidence either way.  His superstitious lab assistant Lucas (Dakar, just Dakar) has the most plausible answer, “When the earth spits out the dead, they come back to suck the blood from the living.”  It’s a less elegant way of saying, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

This being a Fulci film, the gore is lovingly gratuitous.  It has a very well earned spot on the UK’s Video Nasty list.  Aside from the juicy headshots and jugular spray, there is one stand out bit when Menard’s wife gets her eye impaled on a shard of wood.  It’s not the penetration that is so disturbing, that bit is clearly fake (though effective).  The true horror comes from the extended tension as she is pulled towards her fate.  She sees exactly what is coming, but there is nothing she can do to stop it.  Except maybe turn her head.  She could have tried that.  In any event, this movie cemented Fulci’s title as “The Man Who Hates Eyeballs.”

My favorite thing about the movie, hands down, is the ending.  Peter and Anne have escaped the island on Brian’s boat, which could break down at any moment.  To cheer themselves up, they turn on the radio, only to hear an emergency report about New York City being overwhelmed by hoards of the undead.  Cut to a shot of dozens of zombies shuffling across the elevated walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It’s a great shot for a few of reasons.  One, zombies matched against the old NYC skyline is eerily beautiful.  Two, it drives home that “oh shit” realization that the heroes haven’t really escaped anything.  Three, it proves that zombie outbreaks are actually very good for traffic, because on the roads beneath the walkway, cars are moving along at a very steady, even leisurely, pace. Keep that in mind when planning your next vacation.

As great as that shot is, my favorite thing about the ending is the realization that an entirely different story was going on the entire time Peter and Anne were on the island.  The zombie infection spread, either from the reanimated Harbor Patrol officer that we never saw rise, or the butterball zombie that fell off the boat but was not shot in the head, or both.  As good as ZOMBIE was, I can only dream how good the ZOMBIE side story would be.  This leads me to a theory.  

ZOMBIE was marketed in Italy as a sequel to DAWN OF THE DEAD, which was released there as ZOMBI.  Italy did this all the time, changing the title of a completely unrelated movie to cash in the success of a different movie.  But what if they weren’t as unrelated as everyone thinks?  What if the events leading to the beginning of DAWN OF THE DEAD (society crumbling under the weight of a growing zombie plague) were a result of what happened in New York during ZOMBIE?  So instead of DAWN being a sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it is actually the sequel to the unseen side story in ZOMBIE (aka ZOMBI 2).  How's that to twist your noodle?

ZOMBIE, I don't know how to quit you.

C Chaka