Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

Saw Fulci's The Beyond, and it's, well, let me put it this way: Argento is the very picture of coherence in comparison, and even Fulci's Zombie is more evenhanded and sane; this one jumps all over the place, you can barely keep track of the characters (what distinguishes them from the zombies is that the zombies have wounds and gore), and it's hard to swallow flesh-eating tarantulas if you know anything at all about tarnatulas (doesn't help that some of them wiggle their legs as if made of rubber).

All that said, it's unsettling all right, and I'm guessing an attempt on the part of Fulci to create a mythology much like Argento does with Inferno. That ending, incidentally, trumps Inferno's by a mile, I think.

I said nice things about Softley's Skeleton Key (not a lot); this blows Key out of the water, and urinates on the blasted remains.

ChrisJ: You have to approach most of Fulci on a surreal visceral level--even more than Argento. The shock gore, the almost comically absurd leaps he takes in terms of logic, story and the lack of character development create something unique.

I don't know that The Beyond can be called a good film at all. It's ridiculous, stupid in parts, yet parts of it you don't forget and if you let it, it's atmospheric, imaginative and of course tabu breaking.

He has this thing about eyeballs--best expressed in Zombie, I would say.

Yeah, I was thinking: none of this makes sense. Like a nightmare. Then it all made perfect sense, except for the wiggly spiders--they were just too giggle-inducing.

That ending was something, tho.