Severin Films and the director of TROLL 2 venture BEYOND DARKNESS.

When Reverend George (David Brandon, STAGEFRIGHT) goes to take the confession and administer last rites to condemned child murderess Bette (Mary Coulson, Lucio Fulci's DOOR TO SILENCE), he finds that she is unrepentant since she has devoured the souls of her victims to take to hell with her to her god Ameth. He believes her to be mentally ill until he sees the spirits of her victims after her "final orgasm" in the electric chair, and he leaves the church a broken man. One year later, George's replacement Reverend Peter (METAMORPHOSIS' Lebrock) moves into a fog-shrouded Louisiana mansion with his wife Annie (Barbara Bingham, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN), son Martin (TROLL 2's Michael Stephenson) and daughter Carole (Theresa Walker).

No sooner have they said grace at their first dinner than they are experience power outages, moving objects, chanting voices, and desecrated Bibles. Martin is creeped out by a black swan rocking toy that moves on its own while Carole is drawn towards a glowing hole in the closet that seems to be a portal to another dimension. When Peter confides his troubles to his superior Reverend Jonathan (Stephen Brown, METAMORPHOSIS), he learns that the older man has appointed him not only a replacement to administer to George's parishioners but in his specialization as an exorcist to purify the house which was the sight of a mass witch burning. What they do not realize until too late is that Bette has come back from the beyond with those witches and are after Peter's children. George tries to recover his faith to help Peter save his family, but he may just be on his way to his own meeting with Ameth and reunion in hell with Bette.

Reusing Carlo Maria Cordio's cues for WITCHERY and KILLING BIRDS – as well as the house from THE BEYOND recycled in the latter film – and throwing together a plot from elements several years too late to cash in on POLTERGEIST, THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, and THE EXORCIST, BEYOND DARKNESS is the least interesting of the three LA CASA unofficial sequels to THE EVIL DEAD and EVIL DEAD 2 (which were released in Italy as LA CASA) produced by Joe D'Amato, following Umberto Lenzi's LA CASA 3 which was released here as GHOSTHOUSE and LA CASA 4, released here as WITCHERY. The cinematography of Giancarlo Ferrando (TORSO) is generally slick and intermittently striking, but the plotting is as flat as the spook show theatrics. The leads try but are bland, and the only performer with any true conviction in the film is Brandon who reportedly did his scene of public drunkenness harassing passersby without a permit and the filmmakers shooting out of sight with a telephoto lens (it is his performance in his death scene combined with the stirring organ cue from KILLING BIRDS that are most successful in wringing out emotion). Stick with the first two films for more grue and more entertaining absurdity.

Released stateside direct-to-video by Imperial Entertainment, BEYOND DARKNESS was previously issued on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory in a double feature with GHOSTHOUSE with only trailers as the extras. In the UK, 88 Films put out a deluxe special edition with an audio commentary by film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, an interview with composer Cordio, and one with Filmirage production executive Alessandra Lenzi, as well as the film's trailer. Like these previous editions, Severin's Blu-ray – which was first released in June as part of Severin's Mid-Year sale with a slipcover featuring the litigious HOUSE 5 title – utilizes the same so-so master for their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen encode, and the film as drab as it always has while the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track features the sync-sound performances of the American cast an optional Italian dub has also been added to this edition with SDH subtitles for the former and English subtitles for the latter. Comparison between the two tracks reveals that the beckoning voices on the soundtrack were only recorded once, with a very Italianate pronunciation of the "Carole" on both tracks.

Severin Films includes their own set of extras and, interestingly, they feature none of the 88 Films participants despite being interviewed by the same people at Freak-O-Rama. I say "interesting" because the Italian participants on the UK disc noted Fragasso's lack of interest in the film and claim that it was cinematographer Ferrando, not Fragasso, that directed most of TROLL 2. On Severin's disc, Fragasso appears in "Beyond Possession" (37:16) in which he notes that he and his wife Rossella Drudi (ZOMBI 3) conceived of the film before D'Amato requested a project for the LA CASA 5 moniker, and that in spite of the Louisiana setting he was "cold" to the supernatural device of voodoo, favoring instead EXORCIST-inspired possession motifs and witchcraft. He has warm memories of the cast apart from Coulson who claimed to be a psychic and could feel the souls of the executed while sitting in the electric chair, and notes that it was less complicated to get permission to shoot in a church and on Death Row in a prison in America than in Italy (the guards even let their children play the ghosts of Bette's victims), and recalls how slow the American effects crew behind SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE were compared to the Italian crew.