Wild Spirit

BEHIND THE FORBIDDEN DOOR delivers arousing soft X level sex scenes involving some quite attractive women for the fans, but its romantic ghost storyline falls apart.

Contrary to the no-nothing previous review posting on IMDb, this is not a hardcore porn film by any stretch of the imagination. The British release which I just viewed runs 90 minutes, over a reel longer than the U.S. "Wild Spirit" R-rated edition, but has the typical sex simulation camera angles and no insertions or money shots. Even an early simulated fellatio scene is quite brief, and shot in the hokey circa 1969/1970 manner of the actress coyly hiding any visual evidence of oral sex behind her hands.

I ordered this video after watching a Seduction Cinema opus EROTIC WITCH PROJECT 2 because it was the only other credit in IMDb for the interesting Black actress Rio. I was surprised to see that the database had garbled the credits (which I'm currently fixing); the Rio co-starring here as villainess Ingrid is a blonde Caucasian performer.

Ingrid is engaged to our hero Lionel Griffith, a self-help author and radio dj who likes to insult his listeners. She's plotting with her slimy lawyer to kill Lionel on their honeymoon (!) and make off with his money and insurance. This is not James Cain level writing, but I was surprised to see that popular starlet Brinke Stevens is credited as co-writing the defective screenplay (unfortunately for her fans she doesn't show up on screen).

Film uses a corny ghost motif, set in motion as Lionel and his 18-year-old girl friend are partying in 1985 on New Year's Eve, but she's about to leave him and move to Minnesota. Urquhart with his hair combed differently is ridiculously unconvincing as a fellow teen in this segment, but Krystal as Marion is a real beauty, with baby fat still intact.

Story picks up in 1995 with a ludicrous gimmick of electrical problems at Lionel's radio station, causing him to receive a mysterious phone call from Marion. It turns out, laboriously, that she's contacting him from beyond the grave, and later starts pestering him at his home, with only Lionel able to see her.

This "Topper" device does not yield any laughs, as the anonymous director of this nonsense is strictly on board to deliver the sort of simulated sex Cinemax fans are accustomed to watching on cable TV. It means 4-minute sex scenes with full frontal female nudity, plenty of pumping, and not the quick cutaways of the disappointing R-rated editions (as is the case here with the bowdlerized WILD SPIRIT version). It's not hardcore at all, just soft X.

Of the cast women beyond Krystal, villainess Rio is pretty hot but the most buxom femme is Kimberlyn, an enthusiastic blonde performer portraying Lionel's and Marian's school chum. Kelly Wales as Ingrid's trim & sexy masseuse is also a visual treat.

Helping to confuse matters, in England a film is marketed as a sequel under the title BEHIND THE FORBIDDEN DOOR 2: LUST CONNECTION, but it is merely Jim Wynorski's BUSTY TWINS aka LUST CONNECTION under a different name. Coming full circle, it IS from Seduction Cinema, the source of the Rio film that set me on this pointless (but for me essential, as I'm a stickler on identifying alternate titles) video quest.

This is a heavily edited (78 min.) softcore reconstruction of a hardcore pornographic movie named BEHIND THE FORBIDDEN DOOR that was released solely outside the United States, although not all members of the cast take part in the explicit action featured within the original work. Playing in both editions is flat, thereby matching an unimaginative screenplay that allows for frequent disrobing in order to heighten the picture's commercial possibilities. This rather lifeless film opens upon New Year's Eve, 1984/5, with two young couples frolicking upon a large lawn, property belonging to the parents of one of the girls, Marian ("Krystal"), and when her mother and father return to their home unexpectedly, the other three lovers flee, leaving Marian behind, but not before she and her swain Griff (Rafe Urquhart) exchange pledges of everlasting love. Action then hops forward ten years, where we see Griff as host of a successful pop therapy call-in radio program, and soon to be married to guileful and unfaithful Ingrid ("Rio"), who additionally is plotting along with an attorney friend to murder her fiancé in order to obtain his money, all while empty-headed Marian (empty of body as well since she has been dead for the mentioned ten year span, killed in a traffic collision, unknown to Griff) has returned as a phantom with an objective of cajoling her former beau into accepting a daunting task: tardily extirpating her virginity. This is all quite silly, of course, and not helped in the least within this lightly financed trifle by what is essentially non-existent direction that lacks even a negligible point of view, along with largely non-professional actors, of whom the females are for the greatest part veterans of the "adult film" industry. Here there are, for voyeurs, forms of simulated erotic activity for nearly all tastes, excepting good.