Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka The Beyond, aka 7 Doors to Death

• Directed by “Lewis Fuller” (Lucio Fulci)
• Written by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Lucio Fulci
• Starring
  • David Warbeck
  • Catriona MacColl
  • Sarah Keller>
• Produced by Fabrizio De Angelis

This is of course an alternate release of Lucio Fulci’s L’Aldila, aka The Beyond — and like so many alternate releases, it’s been chopped to some degree; the back of the box gives the running time as “approx. 80 minutes,” whereas the IMDb lists the most complete version at 87 minutes. The recent re-release from Rolling Thunder, in midnight theaters a couple of years back, apparently had a running time of 99 minutes. (Fulci is also credited here as “Louis Fuller” — so much for respect for directorial vision.)

Our sepia-toned prologue places us in 1927 Louisiana, where a mob of locals enter the Seven Doors Hotel to accost Schweick, the crazy skeletal artist who resides in room 36. They tear him from his unfinished painting depicting naked bodies being covered by dunes in some kind of netherrealm, drag him to the basement, and crucify him to the wall, all the time calling him an “ungodly warlock.” (A side note: Why do Christian mobs in movies — and, occasionally, in real life — crucify their victims? You’d think they’d see that as a blasphemous burlesque of Jesus, an identification of their despised enemy with their God. But hey, it makes for a striking image.) They then coat the poor fellow with quicklime, casuing his flesh to dissolve. Intercut with all of this, we see a young woman reading an ominously-aged book with “Eibon” stamped across it, and her voice-over explaining that the book is a collection of the prophecies of Eibon, detailing the seven doors to Hell scattered across the world (upon one of which, naturally, this hotel was built).

Fast forward to the present (or at least to 1981), when young Liza from New York (Catriona MacColl) has inherited the hotel through her real-estate magnate uncle and plans to turn it into a going concern. Unfortunately, while trying to discover the source of the flooding in the basement, Joe the Plumber breaks through a wall into the hidden chamber containing the still-crucified corpse, and gets his eyeball gouged out for his troubles.

I would love to tell you how the story proceeds from there, but I really can’t quite get a handle on it; after all, I may be missing as much as 19 minutes of film here. Obviously, all hell begins to break loose, but in a decidedly non-linear fashion. When both Joe’s and Schweick’s bodies are taken to the hospital, one of the doctors (the non-hunky one — i.e., the one who will not become the sketchily-indicated love interest) inexplicably hooks Schweick up to a “brainwave machine” to test some pet theory. (Hey buddy, if you’re looking for evidence of brain activity after death, wouldn’t it be more productive to check the fresh stiff first?) Naturally, it isn’t until he leaves the room that the monitor starts showing activity — a squiggly line which looks suspiciously like a heartbeat for a brain monitor.

Oh yeah, Joe’s wife comes to dress the corpse and ends up melted by a big bottle of acid.

What else happens? The service bell for room 36 rings inexplicably any time someone touches the painting; the mysterious Martha and her mysterious son Arthur are the caretakers who came with the place, and look ominous; and Lisa meets Emily, a strange blind girl, on the long, straight, existential stretch of road into town. Emily just happens to be a dead ringer for (or an ageless version of) the girl reading the Book of Eibon in the prologue, and the house she invites Liza to to visit has been abandoned for fifty years.

What else? Oh, Joe’s daughter somehow acquires weird-ass blind eyes just like Emily at the funeral, and Liza sees a vision of the crucified corpse in room 36, and the doctor discovers the Book of Eibon at the abandoned house and reads it, and Emily gets attacked by Schweick and his growing army of the undead and finally gets her throat ripped out by her own seeing-eye dog… And some other stuff happens, and none of this is in the correct order.

(I hope the haphazard way in which I’m describing this doesn’t give you the impression I didn’t like it. Honestly, I don’t know if I liked it or not — I feel like I had diarrhea and kept leaving the room abruptly, returning to pick up watching without rewinding.)

Eventually, of course, hell finally breaks loose, and Liza and the doctor find themselves in an empty hospital with nothing but a whole buncha surly corpses in hospital gowns (kinda understand where they’re coming from). After dispatching a horde of them with the revolver that every doctor should keep in his unlocked desk, they try to escape into the basement — and find themselves instead back in the basement of the hotel. Through the break in the wall they see a glow, follow it, and end up in a scaled-down-for-budget version of the landscape in Schweick’s unfinished painting. With those same weird-ass blind eyes. The end.

I sort of have a glimmering of the story behind all of these happenings — are the white eyes a consequence of having seen this hell, or land of the dead, or whatever it is? — but between the dreamlike quality and the massive cutting, most of the chances for coherence just weren’t on the tape. There are some beautiful images and some gory spots (and quite often the beautiful images ARE the gory spots), but there are too many build-ups without payoffs and vice versa.

Two examples:

Arthur goes into the basement to rebuild the wall. No biggie. Next time we see him, he’s one of Schweick’s zombie minions. Somehow we completely missed his death.

The architect goes to city hall to research the hotel’s foundations. He finds a floorplan that amazes him for some reason (too big? I dunno, he doesn’t say anything), but then he falls off the ladder and tarantulas eat his face, while the floorplan completely fades off the page.

All of this I could forgive, at least when in a lenient mood, but there is one persistent idiocy that I can’t accept. In the final zombie skeetshoot, the doctor shoots a zombie in the stomach with no effect; he shoots it again in the torso; and finally he plants a bullet in its head, which stops it cold. Then he turns to anothe zombie — and again wastes two bullets on its midriff before delivering the headshot. And a third time he does this. And on and on.

This complete lapse in intelligence aside, it’s an intriguing movie with an almost holy reputation in the zombie film subculture; for example, the recent The Dead Hate the Living made as many references to it as possible, and the ending thereof very obviously “homaged” this one.

A final nitpick, concerning this title: I know there are seven doors and all, but since we only deal with one, it’s a little bit misleading — it’s like having “The Dance of the Seven Veils” and stopping at the first one. Even The Seventh Door of Death would have been better…

Some Notable Totables:

(only good for this version)

• body count: 13
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: debatable
• ominous thunderstorms: 6 (according to this movie, Louisiana lives under a perpetual thundercloud)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0