Beyond the Darkness

     This is another one of those little Italian horror flicks that director Joe D'Amato came out with that were very cheap to make, are extremely hard to find these days, and were categorized as what was considered a "video nasty". Video Nasties were usually films that could not be rated (if so, they would have probably gotten an X rating which would have given them an incredibly limited release).  They were usually pretty gory, contained sexual situations, or were just plainly too weird for consumption by the general population. For the most part, his films had very good plots that were just poorly executed with bad acting, not enough action, boring dialogue (made all the worse by the terrible English voice dubbing), and surprisingly not enough gore. Thankfully, Buried Alive was re-released on DVD a few years ago under the new title "Beyond the Darkness", (which makes it a little easier to acquire, but harder to identify due to the title and original cover art being changed). I've seen the VHS version and I can say for certain that the DVD release has acquired a lot more footage that wasn't on the VHS version. These extras made this film ten times better because when someone removes the parts they thought were inappropriate, then you're not getting the full story or the cinematic impact the movie was intended to provide. Apparently, several minutes of gore and sexual footage were removed and then thankfully replaced for the DVD version. 

      Well worth seeking out, now on with the story. Frank is a weird little guy whose hobby is taxidermy, and whose parents have recently died, leaving only a housekeeper named Iris who is madly in love with Frank. Iris is extremely jealous of Franks's girlfriend Anna, so she has a Voodoo priestess stick some pins in a doll and kill Anna with a curse so that she can have Frank all to herself. Anna dies, and Frank is deeply grieving and only has Iris to comfort him. He decides that this is not enough for him (did I mention that Iris looks like a horse?) so after the funeral, he digs up Anna, with the intention of using his taxidermy skills to keep her near (and not smelling too bad). 

      Unbeknownst to Frank, Anna's twin sister Elena has arrived in town to pay her respects (obviously played by the same actress). On the way home from the cemetery with Anna's body in the back seat, Frank picks up a pothead hitchhiker. The female hitchhiker gets really stoned and takes a nap in his truck. Frank brings Anna's body into his "house of horrors" taxidermy studio and proceeds with prepping her for the keep. First, he pulls out all her guts (deliciously disgusting) and replaces her eyes with glass replicas. He kisses her, tongues her, and when he can't hold his passions back anymore he pulls her heart out and eats it (yum, that formaldehyde goodness). The pothead hitchhiker comes out of her stupor long enough to catch Frank embalming his girlfriend. She runs, he chases her, she trips over a bucket of guts, he holds her down and proceeds to pull off her fingernails one by one with a set of pliers, then strangles her. Being the ever-dutiful keeper of pretty much everything, Iris helps him hack up the body and dissolve it in a bathtub full of acid. Frank puts Anna's body in bed and leaves her there. With the fake eyes, Anna looks like she has drunk about 17 pots of coffee, so lying in bed looks even more ridiculous. 

      Bored one day, Frank goes jogging and befriends a young female jogger who has just sprained her ankle. He convinces her to come back to his place where he can tend to her ankle. She comes onto him and he has sex with her in the same bed that Anna is still lying in. Eventually, the smell reaches her, she discovers the body and freaks out. She doesn't get far before Frank catches up with her and bites a chunk of flesh out of her neck. While she lays there dying, Frank really enjoys chewing on the hunk of her neck while watching the female jogger slowly die. Dutiful Iris again helps Frank dispose of the body in the incinerator. Why they didn't do that with the hitchhiker is beyond me, it just seems that an incinerator would be much less messy than a tub of dissolved guts would be, but I digress. 

      For some reason Frank allows Iris to convince him that marrying her is the way to go. He must have at least some interest because he sure sucks on her breasts a lot, like some mentally challenged adult seeking the comfort that a pacifier provides for an infant. Some detective comes snooping around with questions about Anna's grave being desecrated. Iris comes out from under her hangover from the previous night's wedding festivities and finds the detective looking around, so she stashes Anna in the closet. The detective eventually opens the closet, Anna's body falls out, and for some reason, the detective doesn't look very surprised and whips out his camera to take pictures of Anna's corpse.  

     Meanwhile, Anna's sister Elena shows up at Frank's house because she knows that he was Anna's boyfriend. Elena hears her sister's voice and the lights go out (either it's Anna's ghost calling or it's Iris throwing her voice to trap the sister. I'm not sure which). Elena sees her sister sitting in a chair, so she goes over to her and Iris comes out of the darkness with a knife and intentions of killing Elena. Frank sees Iris about to stab Elena and attacks her, Iris stabs him instead, but he grabs the knife and kills her. The detective returns and sees that Iris is dead, he goes to the basement and catches Frank burning something in the incinerator. The detective shoots and kills Frank when he sees that there are human body parts in the incinerator. He also sees a body on the table. Since they are twins, we don't know which sister was cremated but we are led to believe that it was Elena, probably to get rid of her body in the same manner as all the other victims. 

      The movie ends at the mortuary when a coffin is about to be nailed shut and Elena pops out alive. Apparently Frank had cremated Anna instead. I guess now that Elena (a live version of Anna) has come along, he decided that he no longer needed Anna's corpse. Of course, no one knows this but Frank who is now dead, leaving poor Elena to almost be buried alive (hence the title). Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? For some reason, it's not. You have to watch it a couple of times to be able to completely understand what has happened, but very few people have enough patience to do that. Once you finally get it though, it really isn't so bad.  I can see why it was considered a video nasty, but I've definitely seen much worse.