31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Night 6 - Beyond the Darkness

Beyond the Darkness

94 mins.

Dir. Joe D’Amato

1979/Italy

Iris is in love with Frank, but Frank is in love with Anna.  One of them is dead and two of them soon will be.  It’s another crazy love triangle gone bad from zany Joe D’Amato.  Just kidding, put on your goulashes, we will be wading through a lot of sleaze in gore in this Italian classic that takes us Beyond the Darkness.

Frank, an orphaned millionaire lives alone in his villa with his nanny Iris, played by Franca Stoppi who wowed us in such movies as The True Story of the Nun of Monza, The Other Hell, Violence in a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre.  Iris presumably has been taking care of Frank his whole life and fulfilled a growing man’s needs as we see in scenes of her breast feeding him and jacking him off.  Seems Iris has fallen in love with Frank or just wants his money.  Either way, she needs to get rid of Anna, played by Cinzia Monreale, most noted for playing Emily the blind girl in Fulci’s immortal classic the Beyond.  What’s an obsessed nanny after a younger man to do but kill her revival with a voodoo doll.  So poor Anna dies on her hospital bed while kissing Frank.

What’s a love torn taxidermist to do when the love of his life dies?  Well dig up her corpse and stuff it to keep it at home of course.  What Amato skimps out in the sex in this movie he makes up for with the gore.  Organs are removed and dumped in a bucket as Frank prepares her for taxidermy, including removing her eyes and replacing them with glass ones and taking a bite out of her heart.  Wait…what?  This is a love story after all and what could be more romantic then eating your lover’s heart, literally.  For whatever unexplained reason, Frank likes to eat people, or at least take a bite out of them.  It’s like his self-defense mechanism.  If he gets into a fight instead of hitting you, he will just bite you.

Frank tries to find love other than Anna, who he now keeps in a bed next to his, but he just can’t seem to get along with other girls.  He winds up ripping out their fingernails, suffocating them, biting out their necks, you know how it goes.  And Loyal Iris is always there to help him dispose of the bodies whether it is dismembering them and dropping them in acid or throwing them in the furnace.  Iris has her eyes on the prize, no matter how much abuse she takes from Frank.  It is not until Anna’s twin sister stops by for a visit that Frank realizes if he can’t have Anna, he can have the next best thing.  But do you really think Iris is going to stand by and let her man be taken away from her again?

With almost 200 directing credits to his name, though mostly hardcore movies shot on video, Joe D’Amato did at times manage to squeeze out a few legit films in the horror genre.  Most notably Anthrophagus and this one, Beyond the Darkness.  With very little dialogue throughout the movie and maybe not the best cinematography, Beyond the Darkness is actually a compelling tale told straight without any humor.  The sex is very tame by D’Amato standards, but it is those over the top scenes of dismemberment, entrails and the lovely Cinzia, made up as a corpse that us gorehounds relish the most with this movie.  And what could make this movie any better, why a sound track from Dario Argento’s favorite band, Goblin of course.  Goblin again manages to lay down the ground work atmosphere to add to this already Italian classic with some memorable haunting scores.

In the old Video store days Beyond the Darkness was called Buried Alive and came in one of those big boxes from Thriller video.  It was heralded as one of the best in the chunk blowing category.  40 years later watching this from the new blu ray release from Severin, this movie still holds the test of time as a true Italian splatterfest from the glory, or should I say gory days.