In this horror movie, a dutiful grand-daughter goes home to take care of her elderly grandmother. Once there, she finds herself trapped inside the house with a homicidal maniac.In this horror movie, a dutiful grand-daughter goes home to take care of her elderly grandmother. Once there, she finds herself trapped inside the house with a homicidal maniac.In this horror movie, a dutiful grand-daughter goes home to take care of her elderly grandmother. Once there, she finds herself trapped inside the house with a homicidal maniac.
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The film is worth watching for the extremely unsettling phone calls the protagonist gets while in her grandmothers big house alone... That and a general creepy mood and giallo like filming makes this a nice old horror. There's some killing but it's not over the top.
Acting is also .. not bad actually, the girl is headstrong and the judge has a menacing persona fitting the film, the museum curators face has a plasticity that makes his real emotions eerily unpredictable, well done sir
Plot vise this dosent make much sense but I can't say much without spoiling things, I don't think that matters as much as you might think though, crazy people dont act rationally do they.
Acting is also .. not bad actually, the girl is headstrong and the judge has a menacing persona fitting the film, the museum curators face has a plasticity that makes his real emotions eerily unpredictable, well done sir
Plot vise this dosent make much sense but I can't say much without spoiling things, I don't think that matters as much as you might think though, crazy people dont act rationally do they.
A young blonde woman named Amanda goes to look after her aging grandmother in her home but finds herself being menaced by a obscene caller,who enjoys collecting dolls and talking to his mannequins."Don't Open the Door!" is a low-budget horror movie made in Texas by S.F Brownrigg.The scene of psycho talking to his mannequin predates the behavior of Joe Spinell's character Frank Zito in "Maniac".The action is slow and there are some dull spots,but the film certainly delivers suspenseful atmosphere.Most of the creep factor comes from Larry O'Dwyer as the breathy,giggling and sleazy psycho in the walls.The characters are bizarre and utterly dysfunctional,the direction is competent and there is a bit of unsettling violence.I loved "Keep My Grave Open" and enjoyed "Don't Open the Door!" as well.8 out of 10.
Don't Open The Door comes from S.F. Brownrigg who made the equally bizarre Don't Look in the Basement which has become a drive-in/grindhouse/cheapie VHS and DVD staple for years. While this film doesn't have exactly the same kind of manic, low budget energy that film has, it has enough charms of its own to make it worth a watch.
Don't Open the Door follows a young woman who returns home to the house where her mother was murdered and begins receiving strange, obscene phone calls from a psycho who wants her dead.
The acting, much like Basement, is enthusiastic but amateur hour. No one is really awful, but no one is exactly brilliant either. You get the feeling that you're watching the area's most competent community theatre actors having a good time. The concept is solid, but the suspense and scares seem to be put on the backburner until towards the end of the film, which gives us a lot of time to watch the leading lady take a bath or go exploring the house, which isn't terribly exciting.
Where Don't Open the Door excels is with the creepy phone calls and the mood. The phone calls are perhaps some of the genre's creepiest and most unsettling. It also manages to produce a fairly haunting ending.
With a little more effort put into the script, pacing, and scares, this one could have been a contender, but as is, it's an interesting regional time capsule. It's worth seeing once.
Don't Open the Door follows a young woman who returns home to the house where her mother was murdered and begins receiving strange, obscene phone calls from a psycho who wants her dead.
The acting, much like Basement, is enthusiastic but amateur hour. No one is really awful, but no one is exactly brilliant either. You get the feeling that you're watching the area's most competent community theatre actors having a good time. The concept is solid, but the suspense and scares seem to be put on the backburner until towards the end of the film, which gives us a lot of time to watch the leading lady take a bath or go exploring the house, which isn't terribly exciting.
Where Don't Open the Door excels is with the creepy phone calls and the mood. The phone calls are perhaps some of the genre's creepiest and most unsettling. It also manages to produce a fairly haunting ending.
With a little more effort put into the script, pacing, and scares, this one could have been a contender, but as is, it's an interesting regional time capsule. It's worth seeing once.
An eerie low budget shocker that features a lot of the horror/thriller standbys such as creepy phone calls, a young woman returning to a scary childhood home, and lots of frightening mannequins. Performances are stagey and pitched a little too high but it all adds to the charm.
I have a great affection for 70s rednexploitation/hicksploitation films, so my rating for this film may be a bit inflated in comparison to viewers who do not enjoy the likes of "Gator," "Walking Tall," or "Cockfighter." The story follows a young woman who moves into her grandmother's house only to find herself stalked by a madman. A madman with a creepy doll collection, which later figures into why he's stalking her. "Don't Open the Door" is an oddball low budget horror film that's best described an Italian Giallo crossed with "The Town That Dreaded Sundown." It has the low budget drive-in rural east Texas feel of a Charles B. Pierce film, but it also has some hints of Dario Argento and Mario Bava with colorful lighting schemes, inventive camera angles, and a whole lot of extreme close-ups. However, director S.F. Brownrigg is no Argento or Bava (or Pierce, for that matter) and this is certainly no "Bird with the Crystal Plumage." Still, the film does have some effectively creepy moments (including a creepy montage of dolls over the opening credits), but there's no escaping how amateurishly made the film is (and by amateurishly made, I mean badly made).
Did you know
- GoofsThe shot of the man's lifeless face is actually Amanda Post's doctor boyfriend, Nick, dead on the ground floor - not Judge Stemple upstairs.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Dusk to Dawn Drive-In Trash-o-Rama Show Vol. 5 (1998)
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