Le démon aux tripes

BEYOND THE DOOR definitely riffs on THE EXORCISTS, but has an entirely different feel. While THE EXORCIST took normal, banal moments or settings and injected them with a sense of dis-ease, BEYOND THE DOOR has a disturbed, dream-like feel to it. There isn't a single normal thing about this movie to lull viewers into safety or complacency. Juliet Mills' erratic, violent behavior, the montage-like exteriors as Mills shops in San Francisco and her husband visits the psychic are weirdly unsettling with no pretensions. Ditto for the sequences with the children and the glowing-eyed dolls. The scene in which Mills is trussed up in bed with electrodes attached to her scalp is almost unbearable to look at for Mills' creepy facial expression. I first viewed this when I was a sophomore in high school, watching it on an independent TV station late at night. The movie weirded me out like no film before it(until I saw ALICE SWEET ALICE)and was truly unsettling. Very symbolic, with attempts to convey concepts of evil through cinematic language. Interesting, if only for seeing a different interpretation of the demonic possession genre.

You know you're in trouble when you're watching a movie where Satan is the narrator. This is an early effort by Olvidio Assonitis, who was considered a rip-off artist even in a country famous for its rip-off artists (Italy). But where some later Assonitis films like "Tentacles" are sporadically entertaining, this movie falls flat largely because Assonitis is trying to rip-off two big Hollywood movies simultaneously --"Rosemary's Baby" AND "The Exorcist". Assonitis obviously doesn't have the budget to rip off the latter or the directorial skill to rip-off the former, but the best director with all the money in the world couldn't successfully combine these two films because "The Exorcist" is sheer outrageous spectacle (including among other things a possessed 12-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix) while "Rosemary's Baby" is a very subtle exercise in creeping paranoia that never even shows the titular baby. Sure, they're both about Satan, but they are completely different kinds of movies and combining them is a fool's errand. But of course, only a fool would start out a movie with Satan as a narrator.

Juliet(sister of Haley) Mills plays a housewife whose third child is apparently Satan's spawn. The unborn infant has possessed her, somehow turning her into a low-rent Linda Blair. How did she get pregnant with the devil's child? Who knows (guess I missed that part), but her creepy ex-boyfriend has been pulled by Satan from a fatal car accident and given ten more years of life so he can make sure the baby is born (seems like there should be an easier way). Meanwhile, her husband and two older children are completely befuddled (although probably not as much as the audience). Obviously, this movie makes no sense, but its one saving grace is that it is pretty funny at times (mostly unintentionally). At one point it copies a creepy scene in "Rosemary's Baby" where the pregnant heroine eats a barely-cooked piece of meat by having Mills pick a rotting banana peel off the street and eat it. I don't know if it's supposed to be serious or a parody but its hilarious. Then there's the 10-year-old daughter who talks in the dubbed voice of a 70's hippie chick ("You're a stone drag, man," she tells her little brother at one point). I'll give Assonitis some credit and assume that that is SUPPOSED to be funny. Unfortunately, most of the movie is not so funny and it is certainly not very scary. Not the worst Italian horror movie I've ever seen, but I wouldn't waste your time.

I won't waste time summarizing the plot for this film since the other users have done quite a good job themselves. Basically, you've got just one more in a stream of films that cashed in on the success of William Friedkin's 1973 classic "The Exorcist". I can only recommend "Beyond the Door" to those who enjoy these types of movies. Director Ovidio G. seems to be the Italian version of William Girdler, who directed his own "exorcist" knock-off that same year with "Abby", a blaxsploitation version that was actually taken out of theaters after two weeks due to a lawsuit filed by Warner Brothers for plagiarism. If I'm correct, "Beyond the Door" was also attacked by Warner Brothers but I'm not sure what the outcome of that one was. It did manage to stay in the theaters though and actually did good at the box office. "Beyond the Door" copies "The Exorcist" in almost every way and you will either hate it or love it. This time, instead of a young girl, we have Juliet Mills (Nanny and the Professor, Passions) who levitates, vomits, spins her head around, and curses like a sailor, saying things like "lick the whore's vomit" in a demonic voice. Sound pretty familiar? "Beyond the Door" was marketed during it's theatrical release as being filmed in Possess-O-Sound, which was basically the same thing used for the Sensurround effect in the film "Earthquake"; huge speakers with the bass turned way up. To sum things up, this is not a well-made movie at all. I was especially turned off by the devil himself doing a little narration at the beginning of the film. You will, however, have a good time watching it and be entertained if you like this kind of thing. There's a few lines of dialogue from the girl playing the daughter that are a hoot and have to be heard to be believed. I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote this script was smoking some of the wacky tobbacy. I voted 7/10 for entertainment value and being one of those movies that are bad in a good/fun way. Otherwise, I give it only a 3.

Of all the "Exorcist" rip-offs made right after the box-office success of the original, "Beyond The Door" is the most blatant. All of the sensationalistic happenings of the first movie occur here (head spinning, levitation, green pea vomit, foul language spoken in a demonic voice), but in "Beyond The Door" they occur not so much as a manifestation of demonic possession as they do because they occurred in "The Exorcist". This tale of a woman becoming possessed by her demonic fetus (they even threw some "Rosemary's Baby" into the mix) certainly didn't help the careers of its stars Juliet Mills and Richard Johnson, despite its box office success (indeed, Shakespearean trained Johnson saw his career degenerate into more and even schlockier films than this). Still, one has to admire the film for its chutzpah: it's such an OBVIOUS rip-off that one can't help giving it credit for having the nerve to be such.

If "The Exorcist" is a big taco, "Beyond the Door" is a taco burp: vaguely reminiscent of the real thing, but with no substance or nutritional value. I don't like tacos anyway, and I don't like this movie. It tells the tedious, glacier-paced story of a dull woman who is pregnant with some sort of demonic baby and starts vomiting pea soup and spinning her head around. She and her family are plagued by a Mr. Beale-esque gentleman who tries to exorcise the demons, but may have his own nefarious reasons for helping- like we care. The only good parts in this crappy, boring movie are the foul-mouthed little kids who cuss like sailors and read cheap romance novels. Also appearing is the guy from "Deep Red", "Zeder", and "Inferno", but this performance is much different from his previous roles because this time he has a mustache.

Not recommended, although I do heartily recommend Mario Bava's "Shock", which was released as "Beyond the Door II" despite the fact that it has nothing to do with "Beyond the Door" and actually has things happen in it.