I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A hotel in Louisiana is built upon one of the seven gates of hell. It was walled up in 1927 and was real;eased later in 1981. This was supposed to be satanic, but the zombie like walking dead would classify this as a zombie film. I was rather bored with the film.The restoration was excellent, which allowed us to know how horribly dubbed it was. Not worth a rental.

This is probably my favorite horror movie of all time, and that stacks up against the pure genius of stuff like Phantasm, Evil Dead, Phenomenon and Dead Alive or any Romero. We have "Shocktoberfest" at my place every year over several nights, and I remember it being the 2008 election season when we watched The Beyond (like we do just about every year). We were totally blown away by John McCain and Joe the Plumber being in the same movie from 1981!!! Well, it's actually "John McCabe" but being that close to the election we could only hear "McCain," and our heads probably weren't on completely straight. Fulci is a master and transcends space-time to bring us the ultimate in fear and gore.

****SPOILERS**** Italian film director Lucio Fulci who gave us such diverse classics as "Escape from Sing Sing" and "Sins of Casanova" cleaned up in the box office with his 1979 horror flick "Zombie" that he just had to make a sequel and settled for "The Beyond". Another zombie movie that was so gruesome and upsetting that it took two years for it to be allowed to be shown in the USA. A country that's noted for it's own brand of gore and slasher films that are beyond anything coming out of the European movie market. The film "The Beyond" has something to do with the seven doors to hell which one is at this creepy Louisiana hotel, were never shown or told where the other six are, that's been shut down for the last 55 years. That when this artist named Schweick, Antoine Saint-John, was killed and crucified by a local lynch mob for his paintings that were considered not just to be pieces of pure junk-which they were- but to have been inspired by the Devil himself.It's New York's Catriona MacColl, Liza Marril, who inherited the hotel and decided to open it up a a bread & breakfast place with a scenic view of the local alligator and snake infested swamps while those staying there are munching down and eating their breakfast lunch & dinner. Together with her boyfriend Dr. John MacCabe, David Warbeck, Catriona moves into the hotel not expecting what their soon to find there; What seems like and army and incubation room of zombies living in the sub, or in Hell, basement. All hell breaks looses when the basement is flooded by this black muck and Joe the Plumber, Giovanni De Nava, who later made a name for himself in the 2008 US Presidential Election is called to fix or unplug it. It was Joe who got unplugged when he was killed by one of the zombies and later became a zombie, like when he ran for president, himself!***SPOILERS*** It took a while, after almost 3/4th of the film was over, for both Catriona & Dr. MacCabe to realize what they were up against: An army of snail like moving flesh eating zombies who kill but at the same time, in them being dead already, can't be killed. As anyone knows who ever saw a zombie movie the only way to stop a zombie dead in its tracks is to shoot him her or it in the brain. But naive in these matters Dr. MacCabe uses up most of his entire cash of bullets and ammunition by shooting mostly at the zombie's everywhere else but. Even after seeing that it's only a head not body shot that's able to stop them! Trying to escape from the zombie hoard both Catriona and Dr. MacCabe end up in the hotel's sub-basement and find out that they are in a far worse place-hell-then they were anywhere else in the movie!And are forced to stay there, even after the movie is over,for all eternity.

The Beyond is the middle chapter of Fulci's 'Death' trilogy (AKA 'Gates of Hell' trilogy). As I started watching this, I knew what to expect: Gallons of gore, lack of a coherent plot and a deeply cynical, downbeat tone. The movie is pretty much this and a wee bit more. What I didn't expect to see was a stunningly good cold open. Shot in rich sepia tone and with dazzling visual artistry, the scene showed Fulci could be every bit as artistic and flashy as Argento and Bava if he wanted to.Unfortunately, the movie went off the deep end with a lot of meandering punctuated with some brutal gore sequences. Fulci really likes to show us close-ups of his gore effects. During a scene of tarantulas biting off a man's face, I could almost taste the latex and fake blood. That said, the movie picks up during the last 15 minutes with a well-shot (pun unintended) zombie action sequence ultimately concluding with a brilliant display of the hell/purgatory/whatever-the-hell-it-was.MacColl is better here than in City of the Living Dead primarily because she is given more stuff to do. The male lead, David Warbeck lacks the class of Christopher George but makes up for it by looking the part of a doctor who is a crack-shot with a handgun. It was disappointing to not see Daniela Doria or Giovanni Lombardo Radice turn up after their wacky antics in City. Though we do get Mater Tenebrarum in an appropriately creepy role.Ultimately, at least to me, The Beyond, while watchable, is not the magnum opus of Dr. Lucio Fulci. Ah if only if the rest of the movie had been as good as the beginning...