Beyond the Door (1974)

In the Italian-America rip-off of The Exorcist known as Beyond the Door, a woman gets pregnant with Satan’s spawn. Viewers may not be sure whether the baby could be odder than the two tots she already has: a daughter who carries a dozen paperback copies of Erich Segal’s Love Story wherever she goes, and a boy who drinks cans of room-temp Campbell’s green pea soup through a straw — not just once, but through the whole movie.

Juliet Mills (TV’s Nanny and the Professor) stars as Jessica, the married San Franciscian whose womb somehow becomes a home for a fast-growing fetus implanted by Ol’ Scratch. Assigned to guard that uterus at all costs is Dimitri (Richard Johnson of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie), in exchange for a few more years of living.

And so, much to the dismay of her husband (Gabriele Lavia, Deep Red) with the Donald Sutherland ‘fro, Jessica vomits blood and levitates and spins and twists her head and throws her hubby across the room and speaks in a smoker’s voice and nibbles off discarded banana peels she finds on the sidewalk.

With the movie’s shameless reason for existing, one expects Beyond the Door will have, to borrow a phrase from Jess’ spouse, “as much balls as a castrated jellyfish.” Luckily, it has more, and they’re filled with crazy. From a standpoint of horror, the glowing-eyed dolls’ attack on the children’s room is a highlight; from one of WTF, it has to be the husband being accosted on the street by an African-American guy aggressively playing the flute with his nose. —Rod Lott

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