Let's get this nice and sparkling clear shall we? The Beyond makes no sense whatsoever, and is as incoherent narrative-wise as any movie this side of Cat in the Brain (directed by guess who?). The 64,000 dollar question is, was the incoherency deliberate, a sort of Lovecraftian attempt to recreate the mood and atmosphere of nightmare; or was it simply down to the fact that Fulci can't tell a story properly? The jury is out, and judging by the spread of opinion here, will remain so.
IMHO, The Beyond is grossly overrated. Whatever one's thoughts about the narrative - or lack of it - the execution of this film is very shoddy: the acting is wooden, photography amateurish, production design cheap and lazy. Of course, what counts about movies of this genre is the gore effects, but The Beyond simply doesn't deliver even here: a couple of the SFX set pieces are effectively bloody (the canine throat-ripping, the kid getting her head blown apart), but others, such as the execrable spider scene, are laughable rubbish. Tom Savini's gore effects for Dawn of the Dead, made around the same time, are in a different league.
Even Fulci's trademark "eyeball trauma" scenes are crap, especially the head-on-nail sequence. For a start, there is a stupid POV shot, taken from the victim's perspective just before her head is forced back onto the nail, in which an eye-shaped mask has been placed over the camera; then, in the money shot itself of the head getting spiked, the nail - a nail, remember, which is sharp enough to penetrate the back of a person's skull - pushes the eyeball out of its socket, rather than skewering through it!
As for the climax, in which numerous slow-moving (and I mean slow-moving; these guys couldn't catch an arthritic tortoise) zombies are repeatedly blasted by the hero, well, it's a joke, pure and simple. Dimwit David Warbeck, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, shoots a number of would-be flesh munchers in the chest and guts, to no effect (other than the detonation of squibbed bloodbags under their clothes), before finally dropping them with a head shot. He then persists with this two-useless-shots-to-the-torso-followed-by-the-coup-de-grace-to-the-noggin strategy until he runs out of bullets. (Which takes forever, by the way. Where did he get that miraculous self-loading revolver, I wonder?)
The Beyond is worth watching, for the chilling and nihilistic end shot alone, but it is nothing like as profound or interesting (or gory) as its reputation suggests. A little bit like Fulci himself: the self-styled "Godfather of Gore", God bless him, was basically a hack director who worked in film for years entirely without distinction, until one day, like Herschell Gordon Lewis before him, he happened to tap in to the inexplicable but innate human desire to watch people getting hacked, chopped, sliced, boiled, rotted, munched and blasted to death as graphically as possible, and spent the rest of his life milking it with ever-diminishing returns. Oh well, it takes all sorts.
IMHO, The Beyond is grossly overrated. Whatever one's thoughts about the narrative - or lack of it - the execution of this film is very shoddy: the acting is wooden, photography amateurish, production design cheap and lazy. Of course, what counts about movies of this genre is the gore effects, but The Beyond simply doesn't deliver even here: a couple of the SFX set pieces are effectively bloody (the canine throat-ripping, the kid getting her head blown apart), but others, such as the execrable spider scene, are laughable rubbish. Tom Savini's gore effects for Dawn of the Dead, made around the same time, are in a different league.
Even Fulci's trademark "eyeball trauma" scenes are crap, especially the head-on-nail sequence. For a start, there is a stupid POV shot, taken from the victim's perspective just before her head is forced back onto the nail, in which an eye-shaped mask has been placed over the camera; then, in the money shot itself of the head getting spiked, the nail - a nail, remember, which is sharp enough to penetrate the back of a person's skull - pushes the eyeball out of its socket, rather than skewering through it!
As for the climax, in which numerous slow-moving (and I mean slow-moving; these guys couldn't catch an arthritic tortoise) zombies are repeatedly blasted by the hero, well, it's a joke, pure and simple. Dimwit David Warbeck, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, shoots a number of would-be flesh munchers in the chest and guts, to no effect (other than the detonation of squibbed bloodbags under their clothes), before finally dropping them with a head shot. He then persists with this two-useless-shots-to-the-torso-followed-by-the-coup-de-grace-to-the-noggin strategy until he runs out of bullets. (Which takes forever, by the way. Where did he get that miraculous self-loading revolver, I wonder?)
The Beyond is worth watching, for the chilling and nihilistic end shot alone, but it is nothing like as profound or interesting (or gory) as its reputation suggests. A little bit like Fulci himself: the self-styled "Godfather of Gore", God bless him, was basically a hack director who worked in film for years entirely without distinction, until one day, like Herschell Gordon Lewis before him, he happened to tap in to the inexplicable but innate human desire to watch people getting hacked, chopped, sliced, boiled, rotted, munched and blasted to death as graphically as possible, and spent the rest of his life milking it with ever-diminishing returns. Oh well, it takes all sorts.