15. BEYOND THE DOOR
(1974) Dir. O.G. Assonitis; R. Barrett
*/*** / Amazon Image - C-
Even a lot of fans of crappy Italian horror are dismissive of this obvious Exorcist's Baby cash-in, but maybe that's why I have a spot in my heart for it. I'll grant you: it is terrible--rushed by the horns of its pants through production and into theaters the same year as The Exorcist (1974) and making a bad precedent-setting mess of a fortune in the process. I'll grant you: it's full of shameful ripoff moments (we get the green slime vomit and the 180 degree head turn!). I'll grant you that the Prime print is only so-so--kind of murky albeit still very (or barely) watchable SD. And I'll grant you the dubbing of some of the actors is strictly the 'phoned in, maybe literally' variety... BUT Franco Micalizz's score (his ninth in 1974 alone!) has lots of soul singing (the theme song--"Bargain with the Devil"--is by the great Warren Wilson), death rattles, billowing noises, quiet storm flutes, groovy bass and Satanic sighs. Adding a meta twist, we hear the Wilson's song while its being recorded in the studio by the soon-to-be-pregnant-and-possessed woman's anemic music producer husband Robert (you know he's a great producer from the he keeps yelling at everyone to "do it better"). AND the San Francisco backdrop is as vivid and strange as only a European director can make it (there's even a scene where the hero is walking through the Tenderloin and being semi-exorcised, shunned and serenaded by a gang of steel drummers!). Thus the B-roll travelogue driving rips take on a weird frisson.
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The story mixes Exorcist possession antics with Rosemary's Baby as a Satanic enigmatic critic of the mystic arts Dimitri (British Italian film expat Richard The Haunting Johnson) is saved after his car plunges off scenic Highway 101 (he know it's by Satan because of his eeeevil laugh!). If Dimitri will help facilitate the birth of the devil's most unholy firstborn child---currently gestating in the womb of his ex-wife Jessica (Juliet Mills, looking a lot like Kirsten Dunst)--he will earn a few more years back in linear time. Robert (Gabriele Lavia, the boozy, gay friend of David Hemmings in Deep Red) is the dad. Once the green vomit starts bubbling forth and no medical opinion offered is worth a damn, in comes Dimitri offering to help. Robert's doctor friend warns him not to accept, even while offering absolutely no solutions or alterantives! Robert keeps brushing off until he's too beaten down by the vomit and head-spinning to resist. The couple's other two kids, meanwhile, are regularly left alone with their demon mom since dad is too busy wandering the San Francisco streets looking stricken to be much of a parent. The children barricade themselves in their room as best they can while mom floats around trashing everything. "Please don't leave us alone with mommy again," becomes a chilling, flatly intoned request any kid could relate to. But daddy still has lots of B-roll streets left to muse through, and that comes first.
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Maybe the reason I'm partial to all this is that I remember being freaked out by the TV commercial, which was on regularly, for quite a few weeks, as a kid. I remembered there was a door cracked open, billowing curtains, whooshing winds, and the implication that something evil was waiting.... beyond the door. That's all we kids needed back then. A door.. The ads for the Exorcist didn't even go in the house at all! They stopped outside the front steps, looking up from under a streetlight, and still we were scared. That's the law of diminishing shock value (next commercial would have to go up the stairs, through the door, into the bed, to even rouse us from our evening stupor).
Proceed at your own risk and throw expectation to the breeze. Followed by several name-only sequels, including Mario Bava's last film/son Lamberto's first, Shock!
The story mixes Exorcist possession antics with Rosemary's Baby as a Satanic enigmatic critic of the mystic arts Dimitri (British Italian film expat Richard The Haunting Johnson) is saved after his car plunges off scenic Highway 101 (he know it's by Satan because of his eeeevil laugh!). If Dimitri will help facilitate the birth of the devil's most unholy firstborn child---currently gestating in the womb of his ex-wife Jessica (Juliet Mills, looking a lot like Kirsten Dunst)--he will earn a few more years back in linear time. Robert (Gabriele Lavia, the boozy, gay friend of David Hemmings in Deep Red) is the dad. Once the green vomit starts bubbling forth and no medical opinion offered is worth a damn, in comes Dimitri offering to help. Robert's doctor friend warns him not to accept, even while offering absolutely no solutions or alterantives! Robert keeps brushing off until he's too beaten down by the vomit and head-spinning to resist. The couple's other two kids, meanwhile, are regularly left alone with their demon mom since dad is too busy wandering the San Francisco streets looking stricken to be much of a parent. The children barricade themselves in their room as best they can while mom floats around trashing everything. "Please don't leave us alone with mommy again," becomes a chilling, flatly intoned request any kid could relate to. But daddy still has lots of B-roll streets left to muse through, and that comes first. 
Thanks to inept editing and that misguided score, scenes that might have been really scary are then just cut away from before they go any further, so instead of the children's screams and panic when mom gives them a 360-head spin after they come to her in the dead of night in fear of something else (very close to what I experienced as a kid around the same approx. time), we get a long pointless scene of Robert's headlights driving through town. When he finally gets home, everything is normal again. There are some good creepy doll close-ups though.
You could deride the film for all that, but that's part of what makes Italian exploitation so indelible. Reaction shots, linear logic, easy resolutions, clarifying establishing shots, all must die. We don't really know where we stand in a film like Beyond the Door, and that can be terrifying in a backhand kind of way. Thus, even though it's a blatant Exorcist rip-off, at least its fast and has a finger on a pulse deeper than most Americans can find (full of great anti-Christian beats, such as the elevated position from which Jessica finally gives birth, commanding Dimitri reach up into her vagina and pull the baby down and out - below); and it's from before the rise of video, which means it was meant for theaters, which means more money and care (better framing) than would be synonymous with 'cheap' by genre standards in later years (though it's still pretty cheap). The hair and clothes and music are all worlds better than they'd be in the decade to come. Sorry, but there's a reason half of Europe and South America still dress like its the 70s, it's cuz the 80s was the true abomination against all that is holy!
Proceed at your own risk and throw expectation to the breeze. Followed by several name-only sequels, including Mario Bava's last film/son Lamberto's first, Shock!
2. VAMPYRES
(1974) Dir. José Ramón Larraz*** / Amazon Image - A
As with Larraz's other British filmed work, Symptoms (starring the undervalued almost-eyed elf being Angela Pleasance) the two things going on here are 1: Gorgeous cinematography capturing a rustic English countryside grown fecund, and 2: Lesbianism as the ultimate in male swinger waterloos. Here we have Anulka Dziubinska and Marianne Morris as a pair of lovers who--just like so many innocent sapphic pairs before and after them--are machine-gunned in bed by, presumably, some unknown jerk-off misogynist. Unlike the others, this pair gets a kind of wide-net revenge-by-association when they return from the grave and use a run-down but very cozy English castle for a den in which to bring back louche male swingers for a rollicking good three or foursome. In the morning, if the men are still alive, they're more than usually 'drained.' They can barely find their way back to their cars. If they're bad at directions, they won't even find it, and will be trapped on the grounds when the sun falls yet again. If they're really crazy, they won't want to leave even knowing the riskks. This being England the men are all the kid of leisure suit and side-burned pale, bloated types who seem horribly drained and hungover even before their night at the castle begins. One such blighter (Murray Brown) is determined to get to the bottom of it all, as is the nosy girlfriend Harriet (Rose Faulkner) of traveling artist John (Brian Deacon); the couple have been caravanning around the countryside to take in the foliage. She can't let go of her curiosity about the two mysterious women, glimpsed briefly hitchhiking as they drove past, or the man who came running past their caravan in the dead of night, yelling for help, but wasn't there once she woke John to do something about it. Dam, Harriet, John says, let it go! But she won't, and that will mean...
It all sounds a tad sordid and it's at least nudity and blood-drenched and has some pretty richly erotic moments, especially from the interesting team of Dziubinska, the quieter, blood-drunk blonde, and Morris, the more verbose and ferocious of the pair. If Harriet thinks she's in their league, she needs to think twice. But hey, it's Larraz country, where women always get the last stab, and the fall has never looked more autumnal, making it the ideal Halloween late night treat after the kids have trundled off to their stomach-ache induced nightmares. (Recommended also Daughters of Darkness).
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BONUS Third Feature:
3. LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM
(1985) Dir. Ken Russell
*** / Amazon Image - A
Though it's cheap and cheeky (Ken Russell on a bunbury after the exhausting Crimes of Passion), laden with endless puns and campy jokes and constant symbolic references, it's a grand lark, laden with drolleries. Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force as the ageless evil druid priestess of the serpent cult, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. The good guys are Peter Capaldi as a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull (or wurm) and Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of slaying the giant white worm. The two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty; and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom and sees a white snake attacking Jesus on the cross while Roman soldiers rape and murder nuns. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film and Grant goes to sleep with two bottles of Bolinger chilling at his bedside. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, Grant was melting hearts like only Cary Grant used to before him including mine. There's also the hottest/weirdest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2. So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke, and you may be charmed yourself. (for more Ken Russell weirdness on Prime: check out GOTHIC)