THE BEYOND (L’ALDILÀ) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: LUCIO FULCI / SCREENPLAY: FULCI, GIORGIO MARIUZZO, DARDANO SACCHETTI / STARRING: CATRIONA MACCOLL, DAVID WARBECK, CINZIA MONREALE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Back in 2018, when STARBURST interviewed director Panos Cosmatos about his batshit crazy Nicolas Cage-a-thon Mandy, he described it as his attempt at realising the kind of insanely OTT flick that, as a kid, he imagined within the garishly-covered, oversized VHS boxes in his local video store. It’s likely young Panos never caught Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond back then (and a good job too), because it truly fulfils the promise of its own immortally messed up promo cover. If you were old enough to rent it back then, we’re betting you’ve never forgotten the experience: a nightmare ramraid on the senses by a creator at the top of his macabre game. Here it comes again in a newly-minted HD package.
American lass Liza (glacially beautiful Fulci scream queen Catriona MacColl) inherits a New Orleans hotel that happens to have the gates of hell flapping open in its rotting basement. Aware this DIY challenge-and-a-half might prove bad for business if left unfixed, she enlists a smooth-talking doctor (David Warbeck) in a race to get the ghouls back into purgatory before the first intake of guests arrive for the Summer season. The so-so setup is a deliciously unhinged framework for Fulci to unleash a series of belief-beggaring mechanical gore effects. From the young girl menaced in a mortuary by the encroaching, bloody foam from her mother’s acid-melted head to the poor chap who has his face eaten by giant spiders (some really convincing, others delightfully made out of pipe cleaners, Fingerbobs-style) to the bumpkin plumber who gets his eyes gouged out by a zombie – all curiously static, of course, and lensed by the great Sergio Salvatti in lascivious close-up – this is a kinetic feast of extremity for the discerning horror hound. The cast are all game, the late David Warbeck hitting the perfect, square-jawed groove as Catriona’s medicinal sidekick and Cinzia Monreale giving an unnerving performance as blind seer Emily, whose fate at the hands of her own guide dog provides a shocking coup de théâtre, even by Lucio’s outrageous standards.
If you’ve never taken the plunge with Fulci, this new version of The Beyond from Shameless is a great place to jump in. It has the excuse of offering four different tints of the dread-drenched 7-minute opening prologue, including an exclusive new ‘golden’ hue that, the box blurb tells us, renders the gore “strikingly visible” and the accompanying torches and car headlights “more luminous.” Whatever you say, chaps. Elsewhere, there’s a maggots’ nest of new interviews and the delightfully candid Catriona MacColl/David Warbeck commentary from the previous Arrow release that remains a true classic of its kind. Best of all, the film has never looked better than the new 2K scan here, even if the gore was quite luminous enough in the first place, thanks very much.
Special features: Interviews with Cinzia Monreale, Michele Mirabella and Giorgio Mariuzzo, The Beyond prologue four-way comparison, Sergio Salvati audio commentary, Catriona McCall and David Warbeck audio commentary, Lucio Fulci banter on set.
