Easily the highlight from the twilight era of director Lucio Fulci's career,
Voices from Beyond finds the director aiming for the mixture of gothic horror and queasy gross out thrills that characterized his celebrated streak from 1979's Zombie into the mid-'80s or so. If the end result doesn't get close to the level of his zombie masterpieces, it's at least a respectable shot and makes for a good penultimate film before he finally signed off for good with the much more sedate Door into Silence.
an excuse to string together a bunch of grisly horror gags (with plenty of very sweaty nudity thrown in for good measure), Voices from Beyond is a brisk, entertaining potboiler from the famously misanthropic director, who was suffering health problems at the time and probably knew his time was drawing nigh. The only real name in the cast is Del Prete (who also died just a few years after this film at the age of 57), an actor best known for his attempt at American stardom in Peter Bogdanovich's ill-fate At Long Last Love and Daisy Miller. He fared better back in Italy with films like The Divine Nymph, The Sensuous Nurse, and the wildly exhibitionistic thriller A Spiral of Mist, which still has yet to see an English-friendly release in any format. Sleaze fans might also
recognize Pascal Persiano, who plays the persecuted Mario, a familiar face from P.O. Box Tinto Brass, the wacko Paganini Horror, and Fulci's Sweet House of Horrors. However, the biggest name involved with the film besides Fulci is easily composer Stelvio Cipriani, a veteran of numerous '70s horror films working with the director for the first and only time.
Code Red issued nearly thirteen years later, and obviously the advances in technology have helped it about as much as possible. This is a low budget film loaded with soft filters and crazy diffusion effects (especially during the nightmare scenes), but this appears to be an accurate reproduction of the film's appearance with modest grain intact and colors looking about as vibrant as a '90s Italian horror film can. The film was shot with the actors mostly speaking English on the set, but it was entirely looped later due to their heavy accents; as such, the English audio here is about as good an option as any, presented in DTS-HD mono. The disc itself is about as bare bones as you can get, missing even a menu screen, but Fulci fans should find the upgrade itself to be reward enough.