At 8:29 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 25, I will unleash some 45,000 staggering, slobbering, rotten teeth-gnashing zombies onto Bardstown Road. We will convene as usual in front of Mid-City Mall.
If you're planning on doing battle against my legions of the damned, take heed: no guns will be allowed at the event -- not even replica weapons. Louisville Metro Police will take your gun if they see it.
What can I say? Insurance companies take the fun out of everything.
I did check with the organizers. They said Super Soakers would be fine.
Let's get in the mood.
This week's Thursday Thriller is The Beyond.
Lucio Fulci directed this 1981 film as the middle chapter of his Gates of Hell trilogy, which started with City of the Living Dead one year previously.
Apparently there are seven gates to Hell, but he only made movies about three of them. One of the gates is in the basement of a hotel in Louisiana. A lynch mob believes an artist named Schweick (Antoine Saint-John) opened it up in the 1920s, so they chain whip him to death for it. The chains tear the flesh right off his bones and it's the best chain whipping I've ever seen in film. Then they nail him to the basement wall and plaster him in.
In the present day, a New Yorker named Liza (Catriona MacColl) buys the hotel with the intent of fixing the place up, but accidents keep happening to her contractors. Joe the plumber (Giovanni De Nava) goes to see why the basement is flooded and gets his eye ripped out.
Then Liza picks up a blind hitchhiker Emily (Cinzia Monreale) and her German shepherd Dickie. Emily comes back to the hotel and warns Liza that the warlock is still there. She should know. She was there in the '20s when she still had her eyesight.
I could go on about the story, but it's pretty thin. You've got an old hotel that's haunted as fuck with zombies because there's a gateway to Hell in the basement. You don't watch Fulci for intricate story lines. You watch for the absurdly gory vignettes and this movie delivers.
While no single Fulci film is my favorite, each seems to have a scene that I love. Zombie (aka Zombi aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) has the underwater undead versus shark scene. City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell) has the part where the lady vomits her guts up before turning. The Beyond has a few great moments.
The scene where a bottle of acid turns over on a lady's face and it dissolves and bubbles off is pretty cool.
Then there's the part where a bunch of tarantulas eating a guy's face off, bit by bit.
And then Dickie has a great moment that I would rather not spoil.
The Beyond is absolutely gross-tastic and a perfect film to get you in the mood for zombie cosplay in the streets. It streams on Shudder.
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