Building a hotel over one of the seven gateways to Hell will come back to bite you in the ass. So will bringing home a woman with milky eyes and a German shepherd, especially if you meet them standing motionless in the middle of the road. These and other lessons, director Lucio Fulci imparts with torn parts in his splatter horror classic The Beyond, aka Seven Doors of Death.

In a sepia-toned prologue taking place in 1927, we learn that the occupant of room 36, a painter/warlock, fatally was beaten with chains and nailed to the wall by Louisiana residents who apparently don’t cotton to painters/warlocks, rendering the place cursed. Sixty years later, Liza (Katherine MacColl, Hawk the Slayer) inherits the place, complete with flooded basement, whereupon the hotel claims its first modern-day victim in Joe the plumber (not the Tea Party hero, but oh, if it were!). Liza is warned by the aforementioned milky-eyed blind girl (Cinzia Monreale, Beyond the Darkness) to move, but Liza is unswayed: “Listen, I’ve lived in New York!”

Melding two beloved fright-film subgenres — the zombie movie and the haunted-house thriller — Fulci’s The Beyond goes way beyond the horror norm, testing audience’s tummies with an triple-eye-gouging, face-melting, head-impaling, throat-tearing, forehead-penetrating, cheek-puncturing good ol’ time. The practical effects are grossly realistic, except for one point where some fakery is obvious. However, that’s the part where several tarantulas slowly crawl onto a paralyzed guy’s face and tear it apart, claiming the honor of being cinema’s all-time sickest spider scene. Arachnophobes will flip.

If you can stomach it, see it! Apropos of nothing, one of the walking dead at the 1:20 mark looks like a young Robert De Niro. —Rod Lott

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The Japanese horror film Uzumaki will make your head spin … but not necessarily in a good way. The crazy shit all starts when schoolgirl Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune) notices her boyfriend Shuichi’s father being mesmerized by a snail shell, then a pottery wheel — anything containing a spiral, which he captures obsessively with a camcorder.

The old man’s madness soon results in his suicide, at which point it spreads to the immediate populace via a spiraling plume of smoke. Soon, everyone in that vortex shape — hair curls, an inner-ear part, a millipede — sends everyone to Loopyville. As They Might Be Giants once sang, “The spiraling shape will make you go insane / Everyone wants to see that groovy thing.”

You’re better off with the TMBG tune or Junji Ito’s terrific three-volume manga on which this flick is based. Whereas the books move quickly, page by page, the movie shambles about at a pace of one of its supporting characters: the one who shows up at school shuffling along with a prodigious slime trail behind him.

Director Higuchinsky — yes, just the one name — succeeds in presenting the tale with some interesting angles and inventive setups, and does not skimp on gore when it’s called for. The apocalyptic end scene, however, looks drawn, demonstrating the limitations of the budget. It’s a semi-solid try, but with such rich material to draw from, could be far creepier and far better. —Rod Lott

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