ThiefHott Too much of everything

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Bezenby 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.

Scarecrow-88 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.

BA_Harrison In 1973, William Friedkin shocked audiences with his powerful movie adaptation of Peter Blatty's bestseller The Exorcist; unsurprisingly, 1974 saw opportunistic Italian film-makers offering eager horror fans several tawdry rip-offs, including Alberto De Martino's L'anticristo (The Antichrist), Mario Gariazzo's L'ossessa (AKA The Sexorcist), and this convoluted mess by Ovidio G. Assonitis, which also sees fit to throw in a bit of Rosemary's Baby for good measure.Beyond the Door (AKA The Devil Within Her) stars Juliet Mills as Jessica Barrett, wife of successful record producer Robert, and mother to pea-soup drinking Ken and foul mouthed Gail. When Jessica unexpectedly discovers that she is expecting a third child, she begins to suffer from severe mood swings, frightening her kids and worrying her husband.As Jessica's strange behaviour worsens (head spinning, vomiting, swearing, etc.,), a concerned and exasperated Robert eventually accepts an offer of assistance from stranger Dimitri (Richard Johnson), who just happens to be his wife's ex-lover; but is Dimitri genuinely concerned for Jessica, or does he have his own selfish reasons for helping her? Juliet Mills makes a very poor substitute for Linda Blair, dribbling puke from her mouth rather than expelling with force, levitating a paltry six inches above the floor, and lacking imagination when it comes to cursing, and Assonitis's dull direction, plus a script that makes virtually no sense, results in a turgid mess that is only worth watching if you're a movie masochist. In fact, the only moment in the whole film that really grabbed my attention was when Robert was inexplicably harassed by street musicians, including a funky jazz flautist who plays with his nose. Hilarious!

Backlash007 ~Spoiler~Beyond the Door (a.k.a. The Devil Within Her) has been called The Italian Exorcist, and for good reason. For that's exactly what it is...with just a pinch of Rosemary's Baby for good measure. Jessica and Robert Barrett are about to have their third child. But this blessing may be a curse in disguise as Jessica's ex-boyfriend, Dmitri, shows up. Dmitri is played by Richard Johnson, who can be seen in other Italian fare including Zombi 2 and Screamers. Seems his character has made a "bargain with the devil" (as the film's theme song informs us) to extend his life in exchange for a vessel to host the devil. Before you can say "pea-soup", the pregnancy turns Jessica into a possessed woman who levitates and spins her head in a 360 degree manner. It's a blatant rip-off and Warner Brothers wasted no time sending their army of lawyers in. That didn't stop the film from becoming a moderate success, although I can't figure out why. The best feature of the film has got to be the dubbing of the children. It's painfully obvious someone much older is dubbing these kids and the things they get to say are mindblowingly funny. Other than that, I'm sad to report that the film is largely boring. I've been looking forward to seeing this one for many years (as I do with most of Code Red's DVD releases) and it was not worth the wait. But what did I really expect from Ovidio G. Assonitis, director of Piranha II: The Spawning? Not much happens in the film and the only memorable bits can be seen in The Exorcist. Also, the way the film is edited it repeats many scenes in brief flashes that seem to serve no purpose. I really can't recommend this to anyone but hardcore Italian buffs. However, if you make it to the end, if you can bear it, you will be privy to one of the best head-scratching moments of Italian cinema. I don't want to spoil anything, but it certainly had me laughing hysterically. Beyond the Door was followed by two sequels, neither of which have anything to do with this film nor each other.