When you go to the cinema to watch a Fulci movie, unless your name is Roger Ebert, you most certainly know that you are not going to be viewing the latest bitter-sweet romantic comedy! Fulci's name is synonymous with outright splattery gore and it would be insane to expect anything less. Strength of plot and narrative were never Fulci's stronger points and this movie just proves the point even further. The plot is so perforated with holes its unreal. The movie is more hole than not but then its a gore epic from Italy - what else could one expect.

Proceedings begin in sepia tinted Louisiana of 1927, or what is meant to be Louisiana where a lynch mob are moving in on an old artist who they accuse of being a heathen warlock before lashing him to a pulp with steel chains. As if that wasn't enough, he is then subjected to an acid bath which leaves him a little worse for wear. Years later an american accented beauty inherits the old Louisiana Hotel and is busy trying to resurrect it for reasons best known to her. Little does she know that within the old Hotel lies one of the seven doorways to hell.

She hires Joe the plumber to sort the gooey mess in the basement and he ends up taking on more then he bargained for. In another marvelous scene, a fake German Shepherd loses it in a serious way with hysterical resulst. Though rather light on logic the film is strong on style as well as the gore which is spectacularly staged if a tad fake at times.....which only adds to its charm. The scene where the tarantula's, rubber and otherwise, attack their victim and devour them bit by bit is a truly deranged bit of gore, supremely over the top. The zombies are typically well turned out as can be expected in a Fulci film and the music is typically bizarre with scenes of the worst splatter set to a strumming acoustic guitar!

The acting is uniformly awful, but in keeping with the Italian horror tradition. There are one or two magnificent shocks along the way and generally Fulci is able to make up with magnificent style what he clearly lacks in logical narrative. There is more than enough to please jaded gorehound though with several literally eye-popping scenes along the way. The film may well not hold up as an exercise in logical storytelling but it does come across as a splendid showcase for some spectacular set pieces of cinematic gore. The gore effects are quite brilliant, not due to the technical brilliance which is palpably lacking, but due to the sheer "love of gore" that the director clearly suffers from. He relishes the gore to a maximum.

Roger Ebert trashed the film for various reasons but what on earth was he doing watching a midnight Cult showing of a Lucio Fulci film to begin with and what on earth had he expected to watch....a Scorsese film? This one would do well to remember is the same reviewer who felt as though he needed to have a shower after he had watched I Spit on Your Grave on New York's pre-santiation sleaze pit 42nd Street where all the other movies playing were porn. Once again, when Ebert was being so shocked and disgusted by I Spit.....it begs the queston, what on earth kind of film had he expected to find in those cinema's during the 70's and 80's? Suppose its just a case of what people want to get out of a movie.

Can a bad movie not be an entertaining one? some of the "worst" movies are the most entertaining of all (Showgirls), at least in our opinion and our criterion is that if a film manages to entertain, in whatever way, then it works! Entertainment comes first, good and bad is secondary. The Beyond is one of those films that is clearly not a conventionally good film, but it certainly entertains and is done with dollops of stylized horror which will leave genre fans most satisfied. You wont find one "conventional", respected critic in the world giving The Beyond a truly positive reveiw - they just can't. However it took a kook like Quentin Tarantino to revive the film on his own Rolling Thunder label not only in cinema's but on home video too.