Touches You

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

How can a film be scary and funny at the same time? I don't know, but that's what Beyond the Door manages to be. It's an Exorcist rip-off with a bit of Rosemary's baby thrown in for good measure, filtered through some Italian film companies' shattered brain pan. Best example of this is the very beginning of the film, which Satan narrates himself while we watch a writhing naked woman on a plinth, whose face then turns into Jesus. A Jesus with boobs.Jessica lives in San Francisco with her husband Robert and their two kids, Gail (who talks like a hippy and sounds ten years older than she looks) and Ken (who is about five and swears like a trooper!). Jessica is once again pregnant, and therefore exhibits the usual symptoms of what we used to called Irish Toothache: nausea, eating weird things, in this case a rotten banana off the street, extreme mood swings, murdering a bunch of gold fish, blaming her husband for every single wrong in the world, slapping her kids about.Vomiting blood isn't the best indication that the pregnancy is going well, and even stranger is that the pregnancy is progressing at an alarming rate. Jessica is concerned and wants to have an abortion as the pregnancy is now causing her to float about the room and leave mud everywhere (don't think about it). When the doctor agrees to the abortion, she goes mental and insists that the baby be born! Women, eh?I burst out laughing when the kids started begging with their father not to leave them alone with their mother, but then the film did a strange thing by becoming effective and creepy. When the kid brother is alone he starts talking to an invisible thing sitting in a rocking chair, his sister arrives, going on about something or other and totally oblivious to the fact that every doll in the room has turned to stare at her. What's harder to ignore is the room going completely mental, the dolls walking about, and a cake floating up to the ceiling and getting squashed.The kids are shipped off somewhere and the strange fellow turns out to be Jessica's ex-boyfriend Richard Johnson, who didn't fare to well with the occult way back in The Witch In Love either. He wants the baby to be born and insists he help, whereas the doctor thinks it's probably for the best if the demon spawn of hell be removed. It's like the worst abortion debate in the world, all set to the soundtrack of a woman vomiting, cussing and flying about the room. I've been looking forward to this film for some time and wasn't disappointed. I thought the really daft period of Italian horror started later in the decade, but here it is, a fully fledged trash classic that ticks all the boxes you need. Or I need, anyway.

Finally, after years of searching, I found a copy of the long lost gem, Beyond the Door. Even better, I found the longer, director's cut released under the title The Devil Within Her, which has everything from the original chopped up version that I first saw when I was eight years old, but it made a bit more sense with all the additional footage--I'm pretty sure the version I saw forty years ago as a kid didn't have a woman floating in mid-air begging someone to rip the fetus out of her vagina! Wow. No, this is NOT an Exorcist ripoff any more than Friday the 13th is a Halloween ripoff. It's just a movie about satanic possession. What do you want a movie about satanic possession to look like, Lassie? Of course it's going to look like The Exorcist. And with all the lame Exorcist ripoffs being produced today, you should be glad to see something original from the day and something NOT politically correct. Beyond the Door was one of my absolute favorite movies growing up. It scared that bejesus out me and today, when I finally got a chance to watch it again, of course it didn't scare me as much as it did when I was a child, but I still found it scary as all hell and an absolute blast to watch. And it's funny. It's camp. Unintentionally camp, which is important. If you are a movie buff do yourself a favor and give this one a screening before Quentin Tarantino makes an absolute joke out of it or something. Beyond the Door is the ULTIMATE low budget schlocker.

THE EXORCIST (1973) lent a sensationalistic aspect to the theme of diabolism, which was enough to guarantee box-office receipts; consequently, it proved the most imitated among the three most notable Hollywood excursions into the subgenre from that era (the others being, of course, ROSEMARY'S BABY [1968] and THE OMEN [1976]). Being the most notorious – and commercially lucrative – rip-off of the film (though it included elements from the first for good measure), obviously I have been interested in checking this one out for a long time. Given the extremely divided critical and audience reaction to the picture, I was not sure what to expect…though I guess I should have, having recently re-acquainted myself with the same director's TENTACLES (1978) – in its own right, a dire JAWS (1975) cash-in (but, then, his reworking of THE OMEN i.e. THE VISITOR [1979] resulted in a much more worthwhile venture: see my review elsewhere)! To be fair, the first 45 minutes or so of BEYOND THE DOOR (or, as the on-screen title denoting the longer U.K. version would have it, THE DEVIL WITHIN HER) are not that bad; even so, the slow build-up to the possession is nowhere near as effective as in Friedkin's picture. Where in the latter we had character development and a palpable sense of dread, here we get ceaseless (and very tedious) chatter and a plethora of absurd situations: campy devilish intro (by which the film immediately shoots itself in the foot!), foul-mouthed kids (as if one expected them to be similarly afflicted – and the finale gives us just that!) and idiotic gestures to demonstrate the personality change Mills is undergoing (crossing her eyes, destroying hubby's cherished aquarium and eating a banana peel picked up off the pavement)! Thankfully, some care seems to have been applied to the film's look (from the San Francisco exteriors to the predominance of the color red) – so much so that the cinematographer was eventually given co-director status! – and sound design (though it actually skimps on devising a truly scary demon voice, only really effective when she suddenly slips into it at the doctor's office!) – and Franco Micalizzi's surprisingly upbeat score easily proves to be its mainstay. Juliet Mills' performance has garnered a good deal of praise, but I do not feel she was up to the demands of the role – her possessed antics recall more a dotty old crone (particularly when given to raspy laughter) than a malevolent spirit (the head-spinning is creepy but obviously an effect and the repellent vomiting a mere genre contrivance)!; besides, it seems unlikely that the Devil would allow its 'vessel' to be scientifically scrutinized, not to mention get back into a strait-jacket after having tricked her husband into getting her out of it! Richard Johnson's authoritative presence lends credence to the often banal dialogue (especially his repeated cry that "The Child Must Be Born!") but is defeated by a vaguely defined role. In fact, it is in his relationship with Mills that the film falls apart: to be sure, the latter stages become so hopelessly muddled that I gave up trying to follow the plot (this confusion is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the question "Who Are You?", the literal English translation of the original Italian title, is directed by the Devil at the meek, bewildered doctor rather than the other way around – WTF?!). Incidentally, without the presence of an exorcist (apparently nobody thought of calling one in!), the struggle between good and evil so central to THE EXORCIST is lost; the only reference to religion we ever get is in the prologue where the nude sacrifice victim's face unaccountably turns to that of Christ – an unexpected but lame attempt to equate the crucifix masturbation scene from the earlier film! We do, however, get an inkling that the power at work is so complete that the Devil and his minions (Johnson is actually a ghost who wants to re-incarnate himself in the protagonist's baby) are even prepared to double-cross one another! Gabriele Lavia, then, is the ineffectual spouse – a recording producer whose latest tune is called "Bargain With The Devil" (as the saying goes: Play With Matches And You're Liable To Get Burnt), is accosted on the street by a bunch of hippie musicians(!) in a period of respite from the diabolic onslaught, not to mention thrown about (and literally ejected from) the room by unseen forces. What to make of that head-scratching twist ending I mentioned earlier, where Mills' son (David Colin Jr. who would go on to play the possessed child in Mario Bava's SHOCK [1977], which actually got retitled BEYOND THE DOOR II!) is revealed to be the Devil himself? So why have him be the victim of a poltergeist (another highlight of the film, by the way) and, more importantly, what was the point of possessing and impregnating Mills in the first place?! Unfortunately, the DVD supplements I went through shed little to no light on what the script's intentions (four writers were credited for it!) really were, no concession was made to the picture being a deliberate copycat (in fact, this accusation was vehemently denied!) and, frankly, I still have no idea why this became the smash hit and cult item that it did. For the record, the other possession titles I am familiar with (not taking into account various "Nunsploitationers" which dealt with the subject) are IL DEMONIO (1963), THE ANTICHRIST (1974), THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM (1975; the bastardized version of Mario Bava's LISA AND THE DEVIL [1972]), RUBY (1977), OBSCENE DESIRE (1978; viewed recently), MALABIMBA – THE MALICIOUS WHORE (1979), SATAN'S BABY DOLL (1982) and THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (2005); I also own ABBY (1974) and THE MANITOU (1978) but these got somehow left out of the challenge, and three more I am interested in would be L'OSSESSA aka THE SEXORCIST (1974), EXORCISMO (1975; starring Paul Naschy) and NAKED EXORCISM (1975; with Richard Conte)!

..this one was so incoherent and silly that i can't imagine possible giving this more than 3 stars. the main reason i didn't give it 1 or 2, is because there were one or two well done "scary" scenes. minus the one or two decent scenes, overall, the plot, and development was so nonsensical it was jaw dropping. Satan's narration was laughable. if Satan and evil is responsible for plagues, and war, and suffering, he's fairly intelligent and has accomplished his goals in that department. if he even want's to take it to a personal level, and possess people, OK, ill drop common sense and believe it, a la the exorcist. at least the exorcist had a good vs. evil theme. the outcome, and overall "plot" of "Satan" in this film made me seriously feel like buying the guy a drink. hey, Satan, you need it more than i do. if you have a chip on your shoulder, and want to cause humankind suffering, at least have your evil plan make some sense and benefit you in some way. i'm not addressing the complete insanity and retardation of this film as eloquently as i would like, but seriously, even if you are a b-movie junkie, a huge horror fan, and don't mind rip off movies, steer FAR FAR away from this film. it may cause you to like horror films less. this was not fun on ANY level. if you want a ridiculous, hilarious, horror film that lacks sense, watch Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. that one is a winner on every level, this, a turd. on every level.