Beyond Darkness aka La Casa 5 is…uh, wait a minute, hold on…La Casa 5? Huh? You haven’t heard of the legendary Italian La Casa franchise? And you call yourself a horror fan?! Because who would know about this franchise that barely exists.
So, here’s La Casa explained: La Casa is the Italian title for The Evil Dead (1981) and La Casa 2 for Evil Dead II (1987). Ok, so where do we go from here, then? We make a fake clickbait sequel that capitalizes on the big success of the two previous La Casas, of course. Ah. Clever. Because if you loved Evil Dead II, you’ll surely love the dull, uninspired, boring and lazy Ghosthouse (1988) aka La Casa 3, directed by the one and only Humphrey Humbert aka Umberto Lenzi.
And already next year we have Witchery aka La Casa 4, which will have zero excuse for being boring and unfunny despite having Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff in the main roles! Then, the year after that, we have the one and only “original La Casa film“ that will be worth watching, Beyond Darkness. Because when we have a director like Clyde Anderson, aka Claudio Fragasso, you know you’ll at least get some showtime in one way or another. We can always count on our man Fragasso, even if he makes a bad movie. Capisci?
The last two, La Casa 6 and La Casa 7 are the Italian titles of House II: The Second Story (1987), and House III: The Horror Show (1989). And no, I’m not making this shit up, La Casa 6 came somehow before La Casa 5, possibly in an alternative dimension called La Planeto Bizarro. The series never made its comeback with the Paranormal Activities, weirdly enough.
Now, back to Beyond Darkness aka La Casa 5 and not aka The Conjuring, and also not to be confused with Joe D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness aka Buio Omega aka Buried Alive aka House 6. The film starts with Father George giving the last rites to a bald Sinéad O’Connor-lookalike who’s ready to be fried in the chair after killing a bunch of children in the name of Satan. As she walks through death row, the priest sees a vision of her with the ghosts of the children she killed. She then says: Priest! I want you to witness my last orgasm. Uuhm… no comment.
Then we cut to a regular happy-go-lucky American Christian family who moves into a nice old big house. Say hello to Peter, his wife Annie and their two kids, Martin and Carole. And yep, the kid who plays Martin is the same one who made himself a living film legend after pissing on hospitality in Troll 2. Anyway, Peter is a priest, so there’s no chance in blue heaven that they have just moved into a house built on an ancient burial ground. Right? But things already seem to look ominous when Peter’s Holy Bible falls into a pile of mud. The kids discover a hole in the wall with some lightning beaming through. They also have a big black swan rocking chair in the bedroom, and not even the most competent use of light and shadow could make that thing look spooky.
The priest and his wife are about to have sex just when the evil wind from the west blows into the room and rips away all the pages from the freshly-ironed bible. The only page that’s left is an image of Baphomet. The family gets attacked one evening when they get chased by a flying meatcleaver, Evil Dead-style. A legion of ghouls n’ demons emerges in the house as Claudio Fragasso’s favorite fog machine is already working overtime. The soundtrack is overblown with some intense loud organ synth. And yeah, an old antique radio gets possessed, soon ready to be placed in a certain occult museum in Connecticut. OoO the horror! One of the demons looks like a mishmash of Darth Maul and The Lipstick Demon, by the way. Luckily, the priest’s bible has somehow fixed itself so he can chant some prayers to cast them out. Works for a short while, until the boy, Martin, gets captured and dragged to The Other Side by the ghost of the evil lady we saw in the beginning.
Now it’s time for some professional assistance from Ed and Lorraine or Father Russel Crowe.
Instead we have the priest who said the final rites to the evil lady before her execution. And his encounter with her has turned him into a traumatized alcoholic as he shambles through the streets with his moldy bible, acting like a schizophrenic lunatic and dressed like Castiel from Supernatural. Life’s tough. There’s some back and forth bullshit with some older minister at the local church before Father George puts his collar back on and pays a visit to our haunted family to give us the shocking news: This house is cursed! Huh, you don’t say. I seriously thought everything was just a Halloween role-play with all that fake fog. Mom Annie spots Martin in a mirror and…well, just like any mom would have done to save her boy, she dives into the mirror that leads her to The Other Side where she eventually finds him in a casket. She brings him back to the living just as if she went outside on the porch. No ropes needed. The bad news is; Martin is possessed. Now, let the exorcism begin.
By just looking at the cheesy n’ tasty poster and seeing the name Claudio Fragasso as director, the expectations go a certain way. But this is not at the same level as Troll 2, or Night Killer, which both were released the same year as Beyond Darkness. This is actually his most (if not only) professionally-made film, with the most professional actors he ever had the privilege to have on set. And when I say “professional“ I only mean in contrast to Fragasso’s other horror films, like the low bar it already is. Because there are a lot of hiccups here where the clownish aura and energy of Fragasso oozes all over the place like his fog machines. And with a script filled with plot holes driven by hazy, incoherent dream logic, also written by Fragasso and his recently deceased wife Rossella Drudi (RIP) it’s near to impossible, even for the most pro actor, to deliver dumb and cheesy lines without looking like a simpleton.
Then we have the obvious riffing of Poltergeist, Amityville, The Exorcist, Phantasm and The Conjuring before The Conjuring. If James Wan directed the aforementioned movie high on laughter gas from the dentist combined with some early dementia, something like Beyond Darkness would probably be the result: messy, tone-deaf, oddly entertaining, and maybe suitable enough for a goofy and mesmerizing gateway horror.
Director: Claudio Fragasso
Writers: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi
Also known as: La Casa 5
Country & year: USA/Italy, 1990
Actors: Gene LeBrock, David Brandon, Barbara Bingham, Michael Paul Stephenson, Theresa Walker, Stephen Brown, Mary Coulson
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103802/
