Beyond the Door (1975)

(Credit IMDb) Juliet Mills plays a young pregnant woman in San Francisco who is going to have the devil's baby during her strange possession. Richard Johnson shows up to help her... but what does he really want?This is a huge Exorcist rip-off! So much that Warner Bros sued! There is flattery and ripping people off! This movie proves to be the latter. Don't expect much entertainment in this movie! It's dull as dishwater with not much going for it. It's filled with laughable dubbing that is amusing for a while, but ultimately winds up becoming tiresome. It's very crude as well. The dad calls his son an idiot! and the kids are major brats. How is it the kids are so intelligent at that age? They speak like they are 15 years old with their impressive vocabulary. The kids curse like a sailor, too. We also get a very confusing storyline that has no real payoff. Dimitri (Richard Johnson) plays Satan's disciple, but I have no clue of the story they were trying to tell with it. There isn't one major suspense scene until 40 minutes in! Jessica's possession is beyond cringe-worthy. If you love pea-soup and gibberish, this will probably be right up your alley. The most laughable scene in the movie has to be when Jessica is puking up blood, and the husband asks if she is OK! The ending is painfully bad & angered me as well. The acting is hard to rate because of the dubbing. Stay far away from this crud. It's not even amusing in a so bad it's good way! It's dull, lame, and thoroughly stupid. 3/10

This movie came out in 1974, a year after The Exorcist exploded in theatres. The resounding effects of The Exorcist's success are very apparent in this movie. I was shocked to see the blatant similarities! I thought ripping off movies was a 90s disease, but no...The plot is very simple - Jessica Barrett (Juliet Mills) is a San Francisco housewife to a record dealer husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia). They have two foul-mouthed children who call their parents by their first names. The daughter is especially interesting to watch, especially if you get a bad-dubbed copy like I did, and you hear her throw out curse words like a sailor.Beautiful Jessica finds out she has a bun in the oven, despite not missing a day of her birth control pills. The happy couple's excitement for the new baby are short-lived, as Jessica begins vomiting blood and her health quickly declines *(much like Mrs. Woodhouses in Rosemary's Baby). Jessica begins to turn into someone else, hardly recognizable by her loved ones. She starts murdering fish for pleasure, slaps her potty-mouthed daughter, and gives a long and awkward kiss to her young son (I believe this was meant to be a foreshadowing for the 'surprise' ending, but instead the kiss came off as really creepy and icky). Soon, she is in full possessed-Reagan make-up, and her head starts turning around.One of Jessica's past lover Dimitiri (played by a coolly evil-looking Richard Johnson, no relation to the blues guitar player who sold his soul) shows up out of nowhere. We first hear of him in the very beginning of the movie, where it is made clear that he has died in a car accident, and is bargaining with the devil for a couple of more years of life. The devil says that he might give him a couple of years, but will only consider it if he does one thing - "rip the baby out of that woman." So later on, Dimitri shows up and proclaims to be the only one that can help Jessica from her dilemma. He insists that 'she must have that baby!' even in the beginning of the movie, the devil tells him to rip it out of her (which I guess means 'to deliver it'). Dimitri finds out that the devil was just using him with no intention of letting him live, so he starts pounding away at Jessica's stomach in an effort kill the unborn demon. And when Jessica finally does have the baby, it turns out to have no mouth. Low and behold, her young son is now possessed. What was the point of the devil impregnating Jessica if it was just going to die? Besides the fact that this movie is a definite Exorcist clone (with some Rosemary's Baby overtones), and besides the fact that Juliet Mills looks like an aged Kirsten Dunst at times, I dug this movie.

A somewhat effective mash-up of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist," Ovidio Assonitis' "Beyond the Door" (1974) yet has little of the class and sophistication of the first or terrifying shocks of the latter. Released a year after "The Exorcist" kicked box-office tuchus (garnering $89 million; the No. 1 highest earner of 1973, if the book "Box Office Hits" it to be trusted), the film suffers from an aura of deja vu, but still has much to offer to the dedicated horror fan. In it, Juliet Mills (daughter of John, older sister of Hayley, but perhaps best known to American viewers as Phoebe Figalilly from the early '70s sitcom "Nanny and the Professor") plays Jessica Barrett, a wife and mother of two. She lives in San Francisco with her husband (a recording engineer played by Gabriele Lavia) and kids; in a further nod to "The Exorcist," one of these kids is an incredibly foul-mouthed little girl, while the son has the strangest habit of drinking cold Campbell's split pea soup from the can with a straw. (I know...ewwww!) Despite being on The Pill, Jessica finds herself miraculously pregnant, with her fetus growing at an alarming rate. She soon starts to evince some very odd behavior, such as eating banana skins off the street, along with violent mood swings and memory lapses. And that's nothing, compared to the inevitable head spinnings, levitations, sludge pukings and gravel-voiced cussing that soon follow. As a mysterious man from her past, Dimitri (Richard Johnson, star of the scariest film of all time, IMHO, 1963's "The Haunting"), tells her husband, Jessica has been taken over by "negative forces" (the "devil" word, strangely enough, is never used in the film)....As I mentioned up top, though occasionally effective, "Beyond the Door"'s ultimate impact is less than it could have been, especially for those viewers who are already familiar with its two antecedents. Still, there are pleasures here to be had. The film opens very strangely, with Old Scratch himself delivering a monologue in voice-over, while hundreds of ritual candles fill the screen; indeed, this might be the most original segment of the entire film! The picture makes good use of its San Francisco and Sausalito locales, while the sound FX are possibly the film's single scariest component. Some other chilling instances: Jessica's initial leering head swivel; Jessica's booming query "Who are you?" (the film's original Italian title, "Chi Sei?," translates as "Who are you?"); and Jessica tossing her husband about the bedroom while simultaneously cackling and dribbling. Unfortunately, the film also contains much that doesn't make a heckuva lot of sense. For example, after two viewings, I'm still not clear as to whether Dimitri was alive or dead, or, if alive, what he was doing for the 10 or so years since his fatal car crash. His ghostly manifestations toward Jessica, those possessed dolls in the kids' bedroom, and that blank-mouthed baby at the film's end all provided further head scratchings. The film is also a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be; that interminable scene with the street musicians, for example, could certainly have been done away with. And for those viewers who get a little restless with the film, try playing the game of counting how many times some of the characters say "The child must/will be born"; I counted a good eight. One further comment: the current DVD incarnation of "Beyond the Door," from the good folks at Code Red, looks just fantastic, and comes replete with many fine extras, including modern-day interviews with Assonitis, Mills and Johnson. Johnson, now in his mid-80s, looks and sounds terrific, by the way, and his, uh, devil-may-care attitude is a joy to behold....

Juliet Mills is "the one that got away". Beelzebub, angered at Richard Johnson(THE HAUNTING; ZOMBIE II)for allowing her to flee during a sacrificial ceremony to the Lord of Darkness, gives him ten days to find her. Having domesticated herself, two children, the music producer husband, convertible, the whole nine yards, Mills is in for a rude awakening. Despite taking the pill efficiently, and her period coming regular until about three weeks prior to her pregnancy, Mills' Jessica finds out that somehow she's more than three months so it's obvious something wicked this way comes.Director Ovidio G Assonitis and Antonio Troiso are responsible for the vulgar, unintentionally hilarious screenplay(some of the garbage Robert(Gabriele Lavia) spews during the movie, how he insults the musicians in his studio, and how he talks to Mills must be heard to be believed)good for a lot of shock, awe, and giggles. The daughter, Gayle, is a piece of work..swearing, reading the same book(Love Story; she has many copies of the same book she carries around with her!), sipping soup from a can with a straw(!), she will surely cause the eyebrows to raise and mouths to open agape. The son, Ken, actually tells his nasty sister to go stuff herself. Gayle calls a motorist who nearly hits her an a-hole. There are times where Gayle even speaks like a hippie("Ken, you've got to stop that or it's gonna blow my mind." or "Man, if you don't quit crying you're gonna have a real bad trip.").Weird shenanigans abound. You get to see the slow motion destruction of a fish aquarium. Jessica levitates in her bedroom, floating while standing straight up. Jessica speaks in a man's voice. She's often in a trance one minute, hostile the next. She picks up the peel of a half-eaten banana off of a sidewalk, finishing it! Unpredictable always. Everyone seems to copy the Exorcist scene where objects start moving about by themselves, drawers shuffling open and shut, lights going on and off, shirts flying off their hangings from the closet, etc. Dolls even go about by themselves, their eyes glowing. Even the damned bed lifts in the air! The most shameless rip direct from The Exorcist is when Jessica's head turns around. Jessica also has a case of "crazy eye"(the right eye moves around in circles while the left stares forward)which is more than a bit surreal. Oh, and her unborn fetus growls like a beast. Soon, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Jessica has yellow teeth and contact lenses, begging for help as the evil presence has control of her body. Pea soup(although, it kind of resembled spinach to me) and profanity also emerge. But, these incidents are in between lots of tedium(walks on sidewalks and streets, Johnson shadowing Robert waiting to approach him). Poor Johnson goes from a classy Robert Wise haunted house classic to this travesty, a stream of vomit showering his face. Appreciate Mills' loveliness while you can because her beauty fades as a distant memory once the filmmakers ugly her up.