**_A New York woman inherits a cursed house outside of New Orleans_** This is southern gothic horror and the second in Lucio Fulci’s unofficial ‘gateways to hell’ trilogy, which all center around a portal to the underworld and include actress Catriona MacColl in three different roles (credited as Katherine MacColl). The first film was “City of the Living Dead” from the year prior, and the third one is “The House by the Cemetery,” which came out later the same year. They’re all self-contained. The gateway to hell in the basement element was ripped off from “The Amityville Horror” from two years earlier and “The Beyond” doesn’t hold up by comparison. “The Amityville Horror” was a huge hit for good reason. It took the time to develop several characters, and I don’t mean just the family members. Moreover, it has a warm heart and there’s light underneath the darkness. This one’s more surreal and uglier, naturally similar to Fulci’s previous “Zombie” and the aforementioned “City of the Living Dead.” His curious trademark of punctured eye sockets is on full display. Catriona MacColl has a face that’s easy on the eyes, but don’t expect anything more on the beauty front. In the masculine department, David Warbeck costars as the doctor or mortician. He brings to mind Roger Moore in the ’70s and was actually considered for the role of 007 before Moore took it. Even then, he signed a hush-hush contract to replace Roger at a moment’s notice if he quit or proved troublesome. I liked the artistic rural creepiness reminiscent of “The Shuttered Room” but, again, it suffers by comparison. Twenty-four years later “The Skeleton Key” took the same milieu, minus the portal to hell, and made a better film. Don’t get me wrong, there are some highlights in this flick, which make it worthwhile to fans of southern gothic horror, not to mention devotees of Fulci, many of whom tend to gush over it. It runs 1h 27m and shot from Oct-Dec 1980 in New Orleans and north of there, across Lake Pontchartrain in Madisonville, which is where the old boarding house is located. The causeway happens to be the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which is the longest continuous bridge over water in the world (24 miles). Studio stuff was done in Rome. GRADE: C
