Beyond Darkness (1990)

I thought this movie was pretty killer, though now I'm reading the internet reviews and they are negative across the board. Good thing I did not read those before watching, I'm very impressionable. It looks like this movie is written off by many because it's directed by Claudio Fragasso who soon after brought us the much maligned Troll 2. I mentioned that one in my 'most hated horror sequels' piece.

What's up with this movie? Father Peter and his family move into a possessed house. The dialogue is quite odd At first I figured it that was due to losses in the translation from Italian to English. Now that I see it's written by the same people who wrote Troll 2, Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, it's clear that it comes from people who write quirky stuff. For example, the little girl thinks the hole in the wall, a portal to hell, is a blow dryer. Some of this ideas in this movie are lifted from Poltergeist and The Excorist and perhaps even Videodrome with the body parts pushing out from the other side of a fleshy wall. The most original concept is the rocking black swan. Think rocking horse, but shaped like a swan, pretty neat.


Beyond Darkness, recommended by me, and me alone
There is a lot of talk about the title of this movie as sometimes it is called House 5, in reference to the popular American series, though it predates House IV. In Italy it's called La Casa 5, because they've got a different set of La Casa movies of there. Word is that Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 are the first two movies in that series, under the titles La Casa and La Casa 2, and the rest are Italian originals. Don't confuse this movie with Beyond the Darkness by fellow Italian, Joe D'Amato.

Here is a review in what I imagine is Italian, but the page shows a pic of the cool La Casa 5 artwork - splattercontainer.com

Beyond Darkness on the IMDB