Beyond the Door 3 (1989)

I’ve never ridden on a train for any extended length of time.  I have ridden on public transit trains to get around cities like Philadelphia and Chicago on occasion, but I have never ridden the rails outside a radius of a few miles.  I’ve been tempted to, especially since it satisfies my two travel criteria of being one, a means of transport for which my involvement in reaching a destination is minimal, and two, not an airplane.  However, the cost would have been much higher than gas consumption and upkeep on my car.  Worse, it would take more than a day to get where I was going, which is just a bit longer than I want to spend on a train (barring a “train cruise” or something, naturally).  Of course, Europe has America beat to shit in regards to locomotives.  If movies are any indication (solid reasoning, that), not only are train rides on that continent popular and affordable for all income levels, but they’re also filled to brimming with hot coeds looking to party (they could also be stuffy, British professor types looking to research) and maniacs/perverts/monsters looking to violate or kill said revelers.  If you get bored staring out the window at the lush scenery whipping by, you can always take in an eyeful of the bodily fluids in which each car is assumedly awash and/or encrusted at any given moment.  And if you’re one of the characters in Jeff Kwitney’s Beyond the Door 3 (aka Amok Train aka Evil Train aka Winds of Evil aka Il Treno), you can also get ensconced in a plot for which the phrase “hot mess” not only applies but also doesn’t even cover the half of it.

While blind fortune teller Vesna (Olga Poznatov) maps out a young woman’s life via very specific, non-standardized Tarot-esque (but more like newspaper clippings) cards on a Tic Tac Toe board, a gaggle of cultists gathers and holds candles.  Cut to modern day Los Angeles, where a teeny weeny Balkan Studies class (I didn’t even know such courses could be taken when I was in college, so just goes to show you) is shipping off to (I think) Serbia in order to witness a centuries old ritual (which could totally not have been recreated in Los Angeles, I’m sure).  Under the chaperoning of the unctuously straitlaced Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), the kids are quickly under siege by the aforementioned cultists and forced to hop a train which is filled (again, to brimming) with Evil and has its sights set on the perennially bug-eyed, ultra-tense Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert) as its object of desire.      

I’m not going to pretend that I comprehend the full spectrum of belief paths encompassed by the concept of paganism, but my perception is that it’s usually both polytheistic and nature-oriented (once more citing cinema as either educator or deceiver).  In films like this one, however, it strictly refers to Satanism.  In fact, I cannot recall a single film that has ever depicted pagans as anything other than either maleficent or humorously airheaded.  The students are supposed to attend what Andromolek refers to as a “passion play” centering on a virgin female.  We know that there is evil afoot, but rather than giving us some twisted play on a bloody-minded love goddess or something along the lines of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, we just get a Christian God versus Christian Devil conflict.  Like their portrayals of paganism, Horror films also love the notion that nature itself is filled with nightmares and malice for human beings to endure.  Just witness any of the Friday the 13^th films, Long Weekend, Grizzly, Frogs, ad infinitum for further evidence.  You go out into the woods, be prepared to wind up dead, and this film does fulfill expectations in this regard.  With that in mind, the portrayal of the Satanists is not necessarily what we would fully anticipate.  The village the kids are taken to is literally in the middle of nowhere and immediately offputting.  It is filled with stick and straw huts and has mud paths for roads.  The villagers are all old, pallid, and sneering.  They treat the students like the cattle they are.  This earthy connection is incongruous with what we normally envision about Satanists, though it does satisfy the requirement of thinly (very thinly) veiled enmity.  Movie Satanists are typically suave, affluent, higher class or at the very least, they are wielders of some type of power in a community.  They’re usually not poor, filthy peasants.  I suppose this is a nitpick, and it can be said that it doesn’t matter which deity these folks worship, but it’s one of those aspects of Beyond the Door 3 that stuck out to me, this inconsistency with the classic approach, but also bear in mind that I’m going forward with the idea that paganism and Satanism are not necessarily mutually exclusive.   

Ideas of destiny and fate are predominant throughout the film.  The credit sequence maps out the path of Beverly’s life.  Beverly is marked with a rather peculiar birthmark (a red, stylized Devil’s head shape spanning from below her navel to beneath her breasts) indicating she is the chosen one for Andromolek and company’s plans.  Everything pushes her toward a perceived end, and it’s in this respect that we can allow for the fact that Beverly is a truly unlikable character (and at least it’s also one of the very few things in the film that actually pays off somewhat satisfactorily).  She grimaces in a peculiarly slack-jawed fashion at everyone in the film (this is excused with throwaway lines about how all of her friends and classmates torment and tease her for being a virgin, though this really isn’t represented on screen).  She reacts in disgust to her mother, even while professing her tepid love for the woman.  She is a person in need of a father figure (her dad being deceased), and at first it’s implied that Andromolek will fill this position.  He pays special attention to her, and after she is mildly taunted during a meal, he comforts her.  And that’s about as far as this facet is carried (although, I suppose there could also be some creepy, psychosexual/incest underpinnings happening as well).  Outside of these couple things, Beverly is essentially a nigh-blank slate and not in a good way.  As a result, I honestly couldn’t be bothered to care about a single thing that happened to her (I said we could allow for her unlikability, not discount it completely in this film).  This engenderment of apathy, compounded by the film’s incoherent insanity (the ending is simultaneously “what the fuck?” and “who gives a fuck?”) and somnambulistic pacing, makes Beyond the Door 3 a chore with very little reward waiting when it finally pulls into the station.   

MVT:  The kills in the film are all relatively inventive, very gory, and mostly enjoyable, if that’s your thing (and it is mine, to some degree).  And that’s the long and the short of the good things in this movie.

Make or Break:  The break is, of all things, Beverly’s shower scene.  Yes, it gives us the only naked flesh in the film as well as a glimpse at Bev’s birthmark.  But it also gives us the first indication of Beverly’s full-blown, harpy-esque characterization.  It’s said that the lowest you can go is rock bottom.  I would disagree.  You can always dig down further, if you use the right tools.  Mary Kohnert is the right tools.

Score:  4.5/10

Primal Rage (1988)

Music and cinema have been linked together since the invention of the motion picture medium. While most films had their own scores written for them for a long time, the idea of source music (that is, pre-existing music) and movies combined has been around since before the talkies. Pianists and organists used to play either improvised scores or a compilation of repertory numbers over a silent movie before the studios homogenized the experience with cue sheets to be played with specific pictures. 

This symbiosis sometimes went the other way, with many films taking their titles and sometimes stories from popular songs. Everything from Take This Job And Shove It to Harper Valley PTA inspired films. Sam Peckinpah got into the act with Convoy, and The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia took its story from Tanya Tucker's cover of Vicki Lawrence's popular Southern Gothic song (the lyrics are somewhat different between the two). It's interesting that Hollywood took songs which were already heavy on storytelling (and story) for their bases. This inevitably brings us around to today's subject – Vittorio Rambaldi's Primal Rage (aka Furia Primitiva), inspired by the classic house music anthem by CLS & Wax. Wait a minute. That's completely incorrect. Aw, crap.

On a Florida college campus, filled with Jazzercising coeds and atrocious synth rock, young student (really?) newspaper photographer, Sam (Patrick Lowe, I don't believe he's a relation to Rob), scooters around, snapping pix. He Meets Cute with Lauren (Cheryl Arutt) and the two hit it off. Fellow cub reporter, Duffy (Mitch Watson, but I'll leave the His Girl Friday jokes to you), wants to nail local vivisectionist and all-around bizarro, Dr. Ethridge (Bo Svenson, sporting a very Clayton-Forrester-esque pony/rat tail), whose work in revitalizing brain cells involves baboon torture. Needless to say, Duffy and the now-even-more hostile monkey don't hit it off (unlike our adorable leads), and soon Duffy breaks out in ropy saliva and broken blood vessels and takes to creating havoc around town. As more people are infected and killed, Sam and Lauren endeavor to put a stop to the carnage and save their friends.

This is an odd, little thing of a movie. It essentially plays like a tween/young adult school story/soap opera with gore and rape (okay, attempted rape). We have all the elements: Two young, pretty, fairly innocent but resourceful youngsters who fall in love but find obstacles to their happiness, a new friend who is returning to school after a trying emotional experience, a free-thinking, truth-seeking rulebreaker who gets in over his head, and evil jock/fratboys who think only with their muscles and penises (I guess that would still be muscles, wouldn't it?) are mixed together as we've seen a thousand times before. You could take a list of movies produced in the 1980s for the 16 to 25 crowd, throw a dart, and almost always hit some slight variation on this formula. Add in some gore effects, and the confection is complete. And like many a delicacy from this time period, once you get done, you feel a curious mixture of satiation and malaise.

The jock characters, in particular, are singled out as almost comically villainous. They sneer and snarl at Sam and Duffy. They leer at Deb (Sarah Buxton) and Lauren. They work out and booze it up, even after being infected (come on, you didn't honestly think they wouldn't be, did you?). They kidnap and attempt a brutal rape on Deb. There is nothing even remotely tethering these characters to reality. I have always found this a curious movie trope. For how many millions of people enjoy and play sports (I am not one of them, just so all our cards are on the table), jocks are almost always portrayed on film as thugs, animals, and morons. Why don't more jocks complain? The other characters are just as stock, but they don't stick out quite so markedly.

The film posits, again primarily through the jock characters, that we are all animals at heart. The infection started by the baboon is merely a key for people to act the way they actually want to, to live out their wish fulfillment fantasies. And then things turn bad. This hues closely to David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, but where his treatment of the subject was intelligent, trenchant, and horrifyingly sad, Rambaldi's take sticks strictly to the surface. Of course, this also plays into Cronenberg's depiction of disease and body horror. Here, at least, Primal Rage does attempt to inject some pathos into the proceedings. Sam and Lauren want to help their affected friends, but Deb and Duffy only want to attack, slaves and victims to their infection. They try to fight back their murderous urges, sometimes even successfully, but ultimately they succumb to sickness.

Svenson is the consummate professional in the cast, and he truly does strive to bring something interesting to his character. Admittedly, coke-bottle glasses and a nasty pony tail aren't character but characteristics. Yet, Svenson plays Ethridge as a man who is playing God but probably shouldn't be. He's quiet, his mannerisms are quirky, and he speaks as if he is obviously better than everyone else. Ethridge contains a subtle hubris and the performance here is a pleasant change of pace from mad scientists of the past. Don't get me wrong, he's still batshit crazy, but Svenson's aloof placidity conveys a deeply creepy vibe about the man, his actions, and his motivations. In a movie loaded with over the top aspects, it's nice to see something which is still hammy but underplayed.

When it's all boiled down, though, Primal Rage exists only as an entertainment, and that entertainment's value is focused on and built around Carlo Rambaldi's special effects. The baboon animatronics are effective, if slightly exaggerated, but that gives the audience the sense that the monkey has changed in a substantial and fundamental manner. The gore is plentiful and nicely handled. It all culminates with the big campus Halloween party (doesn't it always?). Of course, this is a great excuse for mass butchery. But the film then puts the focus on the infected jocks stalking and hunting Sam and Lauren through the school's desolate hallways. There's some compelling tension built in these scenes. The problem is they stick around just a tad longer than they should. The final scene and shot of the film is quintessentially 80s, music and all. If you can stand the cheese, you'll find a nominal diversion, but outside some nice special effects work, there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

MVT: Carlo Rambaldi's effects are the showcase of the film, and they deliver when they finally show up.

Make or Break: The "Make" is the scene with Ethridge experimenting on the baboon. It's a cogent set up, has some solid puppet work, and gives Svenson a chance to establish how he's approaching this particular mad scientist.


Score: 6/10