Beyond Evil (1980)
3/10
Possesses little in the way of originality or charm.
16 September 2021
Your best pal arranges for you and your wife to move into an old house that, as legend would have it, is haunted by the spirit a woman who practised black magic and who returned from the dead to kill her philandering husband. What do you do?

If, like me, you have seen enough horror films to know that living in a house like that will seriously affect your life expectancy, you'll politely decline and book into a hotel. But if you're newlyweds John Saxon and Lynda Day George, you'll happily set up home in said haunted house, and not even bat an eyelid when creepy shizz starts happening.

Soon after settling in, Barbara Andrews (George) starts to act very strangely and, when hubby Larry (Saxon) isn't looking, she shoots green laser beams from her eyes. When Larry's friends and associates start to die in mysterious circumstances, he eventually cottons on to the fact that his wife's might have something to do with it, so he seeks help from local faith healer Dr. Solomon (David Opatoshu), who tells him that she is possessed.

Beyond Evil is an utterly abysmal supernatural horror that suffers from a cheesy plot that brings nothing new to the table, an awful central turn from George, and some really cheap visual effects (the day-glo green solarised effect is particularly nasty). Even the usually reliable Saxon cannot help make this one work. The only decent things about the film are a couple of reasonable gore effects (when the faith healer performs operations on his followers) and the Omen-esque score by Pino Donaggio.
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