By Geno McGahee
I think that I may have seen the original BEYOND THE DOOR, but I didn’t recall any of it. So I didn’t really know any of the backstory going into this third entry, but thankfully it didn’t come into play. This movie is a stand-alone, but not for the right reasons. This film is relatively empty and it’s all over the place, but that’s not saying that it’s bad. It has a lot of things that saves it from the scrap pile.
We begin with Beverly (Mary Kohnert), an outcast due mostly to her being a virgin, going to Europe with a group of her peers, but there are people eagerly awaiting her arrival. We have a crazy, old toothless woman that smiles a lot. We have an evil professor (Bo Svenson) that has a master plan and we have a lot of cult members the bang rocks together in unity, which is pretty creepy. They really know how to get their rocks off.
The characters are pretty interchangeable, with the exception of Beverly. The filmmakers didn’t spend a lot of time developing anyone else and put them there mostly to be killed…sort of like a Jason film. To their credit, the death scenes are about as brutal and fun as they get. They are all torn apart or beheaded.
When the cult tries to kill the group by setting their huts on fire, most escape and make it to a moving train, which is where the rest of the film mostly transpires, and they are not safe. The group continues to die in unique and bloody ways. I kept thinking: “I don’t know what I’m watching, but I like it.” There really isn’t much to this, but it has a fun factor to it that any horror fan can appreciate and the visuals are outstanding.
At one point, Beverly is walking around holding a severed head, realizing that she is a tool of the devil. She then informed the remaining members that she slit her wrists to avoid killing any of them. Of course, when she collapses, one of the guys saves her life. She was hot, but he never got any and he ended up killed brutally. Was it worth it? I think not!
The expendable characters were killed off and the rock-banging cult get their claws into Beverly and are bringing her to the devil himself, which is a very cool scene, but that darn Satan gets double-crossed and the cult gets screwed over. Beverly overcomes her own demons and the devil himself to head back home and try to get some normalcy in her life. There are a few last second scares to wrap up this pretty decent horror flick.
In the end, I recommend BEYOND THE DOOR III. This is the sort of film that you can walk away from for 20 minutes and come back and you didn’t miss a thing. It’s like a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie. There are unique kills, pretty girls, and not much substance, but dammit, we still love them, don’t we?! Check this one out.
Rating: 6.5/10
