Seven Doors of Death Is The Beyond

In the early 1990's there was still a thing called video stores. They had videos. On VHS. I know, I know. It was insane. You could get a hernia carrying four or five of those boxes to the car for a weekend horror fest. And if you were a zombie fan there wasn't much of a selection. There were Romero's movies, probably Zombie, and on occasion one or two others. So when you did see a new box on the shelf it was an exciting event. For instance, one night I saw this box on the shelf at Blockbuster Video on Riverside...

7 Doors of Death from Thriller Video

I flipped out. What a box. Problem was there was no movie next to the box, which meant some dastardly dingus was hoarding the movie. I'll just wait, I though, life is long. Two years later that movie re-appeared on the shelf at Blockbuster Video. Two years. Had one person kept it all that time, then stricken with a pang of guilt, brought it back so other zombie fans could enjoy it? Had a series of people rented that movie only moments before I arrived at Blockbuster Video in one of the greatest series of coincidences in history? I don't know. At this point I'll never know. What I do know is this...

Seven Doors of Death is The Beyond. Is it a good movie? Pafunda. After two years there was nothing that would have been sufficient to meet my expectations. Twenty years later I have almost instantaneous access to almost every zombie movie ever made, including the seventy-eight that were just released within the last hour, but none of it will ever have much meaning to me anymore. The hunt is what it's all about, and there's just not much to look for anymore. 

P.S. Oasis of the Zombies and Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies are the same movie. It took me over two years to learn that. Because I'm stupid. 

FEBRUARY 21, 2013 UPDATE: I've come to the conclusion after these many years of writing about zombies that I don't enjoy Fulci or Jess Franco very much. In the past if you wanted to watch zombie movies you almost had to watch their movies because there wasn't as much choice as there is now. But the misogyny and outright cruelty of their movies isn't something zombie fans have to endure anymore. 

January 25, 2015: I saw City of the Walking Dead was on El Rey network earlier in the week, and I got excited because everyone was in bed, and I thought I'd watch it instead of Night Gallery, and when I turned it on I realized to my horror that it was actually Fulci's Gates of Hell. I'm not a big Fulci fan, and the maggots didn't help at all, so I turned it back to Night Gallery. Still don't like Fulci.

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