Post by SeventhSeal17 on May 8, 2007 22:49:49 GMT -5
The Beyond (1981)
Directed By: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay By: Dardano Sachetti and Lucio Fulci
Starring:
Kathrine MacColl
David Warbeck
Antoine Saint-John
Veronica Lazar
Anthony Flees
Giovanni De Nava
Al Cliver
Michele Mirabella
The Beyond opens with what has become one of my favorite scenes. A strange man is painting pictures of Hell on a canvas in room 36 of an old Louisana hotel. The year is 1927 and the mans name is Sweik. The natives of the town believe that Sweik is placing a curse on thier village through his drawings and what follows is a typical southern stereotype. A lynch mob storms the hotel and constrains Sweik as he is finishing one of his paintings.
The mob then drags him down a spiral staircase into the basement where he meets his fate in the form of being crucified against a wall and then drenched in flesh eating acid. All while that typical annoying as hell gaillo music is playing in the backgound. Kathrine MacColl inherits the hotel where Shiek meet his unfortunate and horrible demise some six odd years later.
The hotel has all sorts of strange occurances, not the least of which is the consistant flooding in the basement. As she is preparing to open the hotel the flooding in the basement starts to present a real problem, thus she calls in a plumber. Joe the Plumber (yes that is the characters actual name) is called in to fix the issue. What he finds is far more serious than leaky pipe...
The reason that this film works is because of its take no prisoners presentation. Fulci knows what we want to see, and he more than delivers. It works on the same principle that John Carpenter's The Fog works, the events are presented with no context. You never really know why this guy has no head, or why that lady just got an acid bath. Nor do you care. Fulci doesn't raise any questions and he certainly doesn't answer any, but hey, thats ok with me.
Rating:
Directed By: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay By: Dardano Sachetti and Lucio Fulci
Starring:
Kathrine MacColl
David Warbeck
Antoine Saint-John
Veronica Lazar
Anthony Flees
Giovanni De Nava
Al Cliver
Michele Mirabella
The Beyond opens with what has become one of my favorite scenes. A strange man is painting pictures of Hell on a canvas in room 36 of an old Louisana hotel. The year is 1927 and the mans name is Sweik. The natives of the town believe that Sweik is placing a curse on thier village through his drawings and what follows is a typical southern stereotype. A lynch mob storms the hotel and constrains Sweik as he is finishing one of his paintings.
The mob then drags him down a spiral staircase into the basement where he meets his fate in the form of being crucified against a wall and then drenched in flesh eating acid. All while that typical annoying as hell gaillo music is playing in the backgound. Kathrine MacColl inherits the hotel where Shiek meet his unfortunate and horrible demise some six odd years later.
The hotel has all sorts of strange occurances, not the least of which is the consistant flooding in the basement. As she is preparing to open the hotel the flooding in the basement starts to present a real problem, thus she calls in a plumber. Joe the Plumber (yes that is the characters actual name) is called in to fix the issue. What he finds is far more serious than leaky pipe...
The reason that this film works is because of its take no prisoners presentation. Fulci knows what we want to see, and he more than delivers. It works on the same principle that John Carpenter's The Fog works, the events are presented with no context. You never really know why this guy has no head, or why that lady just got an acid bath. Nor do you care. Fulci doesn't raise any questions and he certainly doesn't answer any, but hey, thats ok with me.
Rating:
[glow=red,2,300]SeventhSeal Says:[/glow]