Beyond Terror

Crypt In The Bud

Beyond Terror
aka Más allá del terror
Spain 1980
Directed by Tomás Aznar
Cauldron Ray Zone A

Well this is a film which has left me torn. Torn between a superb, better than it deserves, transfer and release and the fact that, ultimately, it’s a really grubby little movie. Pretty much the only horror film in a very short career for director Aznar, Beyond Terror is a Spanish horror film which... could have been a great experience but which kinda throws it away by having, pretty much no redeeming characters to root for when things start to get nasty. In fact, things start to get nasty even before the credits have started and that’s often by the hand of the people we are supposed to be following on screen.

The film starts off with a series of long, slow, shots with a static camera as one of the film’s main protagonists/antagonists, Lola (played by Raquel Ramírez), is having a smoke outside a cafe. This is something the director decides to do a lot and, though there are a number of moving camera shots dotted about the film, the director does tend to favour static camera with longish takes, it seemed to me.

The girl gets picked up by a guy who makes the assumption she is a sex worker. She directs him to drive her to some parkland, her ‘romantic place’, so they can do the deed somewhere other than a cheap hotel room. Right from the set up, you can tell this is a ploy and once she’s lured him to a place far from public eyes she attempts to pick his pocket. He catches her at it and gets naturally upset. So she stabs him to death, wipes her blade on the man’s tie and steals his money. She then runs to a phone box to phone her brother Nico to let him know she has stolen the money they need for drugs and then hitchhikes a car ride to meet him. As the driving title music plays over the credits (I’ll get to that) I was wondering why she didn’t just take the dead guy’s car keys and drive herself... something which became an obvious concern to me after the gang formed by her, her brother, ringleader Chema (played by Francisco Sánchez Grajera) and one other quickly expendable character... seem quite happy to steal any moving vehicles they can get their hands on.

Anyway, it’s not long before they hold up a pub for more cash but, when Jorge (played by Antonio Jabalera) and his girlfriend Linda (who is married to his boss and is played here by Alexia Loreto) turn up at the place and someone else calls the police, the bar turns into a blood bath. One of the thugs is shot (and then finished off by Chema with a shot to the brain) while two policemen and pretty much the whole pub are shot by the gang. On a slim plot pretext I couldn’t figure out, they take Jorge and Linda as hostages and get them to drive them somewhere.

When they come across a house in the country and kill the guard dog, the movie briefly turns into a home invasion movie (one of my least favourite kinds of films to watch... I usually steer well clear of that genre) but the grandmother and little boy who live there are killed by the gang when they escape in a new set of wheels and burn the house down. However, when they get in the car, every radio station plays the same music and, also, the voices of the dead people they just killed... even when the radio is smashed. They then crash... or come to a stop even though the brakes have stopped working... at an old, abandoned and semi-ruined church. Jorge tries to escape the place when he fixes the car but the spirit of the dead boy turns him back and the car bursts into flames killing him.

From hereon in it’s all about surviving the church, the shack opposite with the boy in it, the various dead characters... not to mention the dog... and the undead mummy things in the cobwebby crypt which also houses a fortune in lost treasure. Um... it’s a bit of a mix up and strange things happen... including masturbation and incest in the church plus a full on sex scene which kinda goes on just a little too long between Linda and gang leader Chema. Talking of sex, when Linda is alone in the crypt and various cobwebbed up zombie/mummy monk figures pounce (very slowly) on her, they decide to sex her up and when she is found later, she’s cobwebbed up with the rest of them in an undead state, presumably as their new constant companion.

Other notable things would be a big painting of people which changes whenever one of the characters die, to replace one of the figures with a skeleton and, in terms of the final victim of the film, Lola, a moment when the elderly lady returns in the form of some kind of witch woman and uses her magic thought powers to explode Lola’s head in a way that isn’t all that convincing but, there’s lots of blood to spatter said painting.

And, not much else to say about Beyond Terror, other than the soundtrack. It’s sparsely spotted and, according to a cassette release in the image gallery which plays the soundtrack album in question as it goes, it’s by a load of people I’ve not heard of credited to different tracks. However, there’s not even a composer credit on the film itself and I can’t help think that it was needle dropped from another film... the opening titles sound very much like Cipriani... or possibly from a music library (there’s a track towards the end of the picture which kinda sounds like a bargain basement version of something Goblin might have written and performed for it). I did enjoy the score though so it’s a shame it’s not been released on something more accessible, like a CD, because I would definitely grab this one.

Beyond Terror is an oddity of a film and has no redeeming characters so, I found it hard to enjoy to be honest. Cauldron’s Blu Ray release of it, however, is exquisite. The print and the transfer are absolutely ‘fresh out of the can’ gorgeous. Also, you get a reversible sleeve, an accompanying booklet and some cardboard, miniature, double sided reproductions of eight lobby cards. Plus, a nice slipcase with some beautiful embossing of the US poster on the front and a version of the Spanish poster on the back. The Spanish poster includes a big topless lady demon added to the artwork, which seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the movie but perhaps may have more to do with the May 1971 Issue 11 of Warren Comics original Vampirella series, from which it was filched.

I wouldn’t recommend Beyond Terror to anyone except Spanish horror completists, to be honest (although, even as I write this review, I can feel the film beginning to grow on me) but, as a beautifully produced piece of packaging from Cauldron, then I absolutely would recommend it if graphic design is your thing. I bought another Cauldron release at the same time, a giallo I’ve not seen called The Crimes Of The Black Cat, so I’ll get back to that one on here when I start revisiting that genre for this blog at some point in the near future (hopefully this year but possibly next). In the meantime... yeah... I can;t really recommend this movie, to be fair.