Wow, this movie is so bad I forgot I reviewed it 18 years ago. Those were some of the last of the DMRs back in aught-seven when things got a little sketchy back then... Touches on most of the same things, almost same rating, I'm taking away the 2025 extra 1/2 bottle I gave if for Story because this movie makes me sad. so there.
Reviewed: 8/31/07
While starting off like an unabashed teenage splatter flick, it quickly gets bogged down in quite boring exposition amongst very occasional scenes of oddness. At first it gives off a vibe of multiple horror flicks of the time like The Shining and Rosemary's Baby to some degree, but mainly The Amityville Horror, all of which are superior to this film.
A family moves to a fairly remote house, by a cemetery, so a father can work some job. Bad music and plot-points ensue.
Throw it all at the wall, it's usually the shit that sticks, apparently. At least in this case. While it ends kinda creepy, I think the story falls short on pretty much every level. When you end with an obscure Henry James quote to justify the madness, I call Bullocks! It forces me to call on the Joe-Bob Briggs Scale of Justice: minus the short opening sequence, the film is boobless, suspense is rare, and the killer reveal is lame. How good is that? Apparently all "creativity" went into The Beyond. Yikes. One decent gruesome death does not a decent horror film make.
Reviewed: 8/31/07
I wasn’t going to watch this one but figured, sheeit, it’s the third of the ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy, I gotta wrap that one up, right? The one so loosely “based on” Lovecraft that it is kind of an insult to even have the name associated. Just because it takes place somewhere in New England doesn’t make it thematically sufficient! Ballz!
Sketchy Professor-kinda-guy in New York has a freaky Shining-kinda-kid and a wife who does not seem to know what reality is. She does, but after seeing her reactions to all this shit? I suspect more than drugs at play here. There’s A Creepy babysitter. A Bitch realtor. A Skeazy librarian. Maybe that was the point of the film, to included as many suspect-ass characters as possible while still somehow involving a haunted-as-fuck house. By the Cemetery.
They say this was Fulci’s best grossing movie of the 80s. If that’s the case, a lot of people got huckstered after The Beyond. I don’t know if they had like a month left on their visa from Italy for shooting and said fuckit, we, gots a couple grand left, let’s take the van up to New York and shoot another film. Not that it’s rushed. Competently shot. But man, the suspect story begets suspect actors, begets suspect gore. Except the neck stuff. I will give credit there, Fulci must have ditched his eye guy for a neck guy. So much burbling neck bloods! A bit of a difficult one to take beyond that. Gateway to Hell, my ass, just a cheezy supernatural kinda film with a lot of bad foley and sound effects.
