Reviews
‘Door’ (1988) Is the Greatest Home Invasion Thriller That You’ve Never Seen
An overworked and underappreciated housewife, Yasuko Honda spends most of her days in a cluttered apartment, tending to the needs of her rambunctious son and typical working husband. With both of them leaving her alone throughout the daytime, her hours are occupied by housework and small talk over the phone. But soon, phone calls from a pervert herald a much worse threat: a maddened door-to-door salesman turned stalker named Yamakawa, who threatens Yasuko’s life and her family’s safety. The only thing between her and him? A front door that grows weaker to hold him back every day.
Screambox for as long as I can remember, and I say this with love, the scrappy underdog in the streaming world. With many larger services taking up the mental real estate of horror fans everywhere, it begs the question, what’s their strongest selling point? The answer to that question came up recently with the streaming premiere of the 1988 Japanese psychological thriller film Door.
ONCE FORGOTTEN, NOW VOD (COURTESY OF SCREAMBOX)
An overworked and underappreciated housewife, Yasuko Honda spends most of her days in a cluttered apartment, tending to the needs of her rambunctious son and typical working husband. With both of them leaving her alone throughout the daytime, her hours are occupied by housework and small talk over the phone. But soon, phone calls from a pervert herald a much worse threat: a maddened door-to-door salesman turned stalker named Yamakawa, who threatens Yasuko’s life and her family’s safety. The only thing between her and him? A front door that grows weaker to hold him back every day.
Directed by Banmei Takahashi, Door had a repertory screening this year at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which our lovely editor, James-Michael was able to catch, but I missed. I was delighted to find out, however, that Screambox has made the film available for a home release. This answers the question: if Screambox keeps putting up quality obscure titles like this, it has serious potential to become a repository for tons of great lost media that are currently being restored.
THE LONG SLOW DEATH OF ISOLATION
Door is best compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in that it’s a psychological horror trying to say something about the cinematic culture around it; being a weird psycho-sexual nightmare is sort of just the byproduct. As Haneke’s work commented on the violence of American media and the arms race of captivating audiences with atrocities, Door is about an ever-increasing push towards individualism, and the fear of that isolation’s effects on future generations.
Yasuko lives in a densely packed building, and a lot of the horror that comes from Door’s premise is that despite Yamakawa’s very loud and very visible attacks, her neighbors are little help. The building is more preoccupied with garbage codes than it is protecting its residents, and the police of the city do little to help. Door verbalizes a longstanding urbanist anxiety of being so close to the people around you while having no sense of community and in turn, no sense of protection. Yasuko is forced to keep her head down and shrug off the worst of her assailant’s offenses, because who does she really have in the end?
Moreover, Takahashi’s work was also especially prescient for a Japanese audience: it’s a foretelling of the much more dire conditions that would strike Japan’s Lost Generation, and the subsequent loneliness epidemic that plagues the nation today. With that loneliness epidemic spreading abroad, it’s frightening to think of how more relatable the film might become for Western audiences.
CAT AND MOUSE WITH A PURPOSE
As I mentioned earlier, the film also has a very overtly psycho-sexual angle, especially in the way the film represents the relationship between Yasuko and Yamakawa with objects rather than outright nudity, i.e., there’s a lot of blatant, smack-you-over-the-head phallic symbolism. Knives are penises. Newspapers are penises. Hands are penises. Everything is a penis.
This undoubtedly has something to do with Banmei Takahashi’s origins in the “pink film” boom of 1970s Japan. That trend involved a lot of sleazier fare, erotic thrillers made for dirt cheap, and playing up the scandalous nature of the stories as something to gawk at rather than analyze. But Door feels like an attempt to finally explore many of those films’ more salacious and violent aspects as the byproducts of a broken society rather than a source of cheap thrills.
Takahashi zooms in on how violent men like Yamakawa try to take advantage by exerting violence on the isolated. Sexual symbols here are more symbols of sexual violence. They’re on the nose, yes, but unmistakable in their intent; they show how Yamakawa is looking for control rather than any sort of sexual and romantic connection, and doesn’t mince its message on that.
Door’s climax (which I won’t spoil too much but will say involves a tiny chainsaw) is the most destructive and blatant example of this, and it’s captivating in how bizarre and long it is. It’s uncomfortable, rife for dissection, and a fascinating choice for a director whose style evolved quite a bit from humble origins.
FRAMING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL TRAPPED
Speaking of Takahashi’s directing, his camerawork here is incredibly efficient at backing up the thematic fears of the story. There’s a really effective contrast made between how Takahashi shoots Door’s interior and exterior shots. The exteriors emphasize openness with some expertly composed wides; outside, the camera often looks down from high up at Yasuko and her son Takuto, sometimes feeling like a voyeur viewing from a rooftop above and framing them perfectly. But inside the apartment, all that visual freedom is taken away to crank up the tension.
There is an unease in the Honda family’s home; it is cluttered, oddly shaped with a hard-to-pin-down layout, and cramped; those details add to the anxiety of it all. Door is, in many ways, a great crash course for anyone looking to see how influential shot composition can be, even when it’s something as simple as the furniture arrangement in a corridor.
Takahashi is able to build the maximum amount of fear with simple shots of unlocked doors and narrow hallways because everything feels claustrophobic without being outright close-ups. This factors most importantly into the aforementioned climax, where that tension pays off, and all hell breaks loose.
A SOUNDTRACK THAT DENIES YOU COMFORT
And what may be my favorite part of Door is its soundtrack. The music here can best be described as comforting and dulcet. It’s a byproduct of the booming music scene of late-1980s Japan and its focus on smooth jazz. It’s a gorgeous soundtrack composed by Gôji Tsuno, that has a sort of romantic lilt to it…
Until it simply isn’t.
Until it’s abruptly torn away, and a switch flips in your brain telling you something is wrong. The music cuts out at seemingly random intervals but is timed to disorient you. It leaves the viewer to listen to the sounds of struggle, the sounds of breathing, the aftermath of an attack, only to return and start the cycle over again. It’s a genius choice, and a highly underutilized one. It’s the first time in a while that a soundtrack wasn’t telling me how I should feel, but how I felt outright.
Door earned my fondness because Banmei Takahashi took a very common premise for a psychological thriller and imprinted his one-of-a-kind vision on it. To my knowledge, he was a bit of a hired gun in the pink film era who almost quit due to disagreements with producers, but persevered and went on to make a variety of films in many different genres.
Door marks one of those beautiful moments where a director reflects on their past works, and creates something wholly unique in the process. It’s a diamond in the rough (one that will likely land on my Hidden Gems of 2023 list early next year), so I hope you seek it out and enjoy it as much as I did.
***
You can stream Door (1988) on Screambox.
In this world, few things are more mildly perturbing than leaving a film unsure of what exactly it was trying to say. At least for me. Death of the author withstanding, I like to have some grasp over what the filmmakers are trying to tell me. What is the writer saying? How is the director conveying it? What was the gaffer doing lighting the scene like that? Was it intentional, or was it just difficult angling a light there? Body Melt is one of those films.
WHAT IS BODY MELT (1993)?
Body Melt is a 1993 Australian special effects cult classic that delivers a lot of gooey and gorey deaths, but initially left me feeling ambivalent about its message. Given its efforts to nauseate are the main thing on display, there isn’t much deep conversation to be had by its characters. They’re mainly pastiches of people you would see around the neighborhood (the power walker, the doofy bachelors, the crochety old man, the young married couple, etc. etc.), and they’re treated just like that; cardboard cutout people to be cut apart.
While a horror film about a cul-de-sac being disfigured and sludged to death might seem like regular slasher fair, the villain this time around isn’t an alien with acid blood or an incredible melting man: it’s a pharmaceutical company called Vimuville, making guinea pigs out of the neighborhood and rapidly mutating them to death in the name of researching a new super drug.
Sending out free health supplements to the denizens of Pebble Court, the film is a series of loosely connected set pieces, with the throughline being Vimuville’s “vitamins” and the people who drink them to disastrous consequence (sort of like an evil wheatgrass shot, or Herbalife shakes if they made your spleen explode out of your chest).
INCREDIBLE EFFECTS ABOUND, COURTESY OF BOB CARRON
What results is a cartoonish splatter film, amplified in its grotesqueries by the effects of Bob Carron, an Australian special effects legend. If you need to know his street cred, fans of more obscure animal horror will know his biggest and boar-iest creation, the titular pig monster from Razorback.
More likely you know him for helping to make the human battery scene from The Matrix, where a tube-fed catatonic Neo is awakened in a pod of viscous red goo. He’s also the man who helped do prosthetic application on the set of an early Peter Jackson classic Braindead, which was made only a year before Body Melt. Given how notoriously explosive the blood sprays and zombie deaths were in Braindead, there’s some definite creative crossover between the two.
His work here on Body Melt, like on Braindead, probably wouldn’t play well in most movies. It is excessive and absurd, with meaty melting tentacles and body fluid spraying demises. Imagine the defibrillator scene from The Thing, but repeatedly over roughly 80 minutes. People get inverted, imploded, and expanded, and then it happens again. And again. And again. And if it seems like I just keep talking about how insane the effects are, that’s because that’s really its main move; Body Melt is a circus of completely bad taste endings for each of its stars.
It’s Itchy and Scratchy’s idea of a public safety advertisement about checking with your doctor before taking a new medication. Ultimately, the story is sparse; you’re here to see Carron flex his skills with liquid latex and mixtures of lubricant and corn syrup. Which is quite fine, the movie is worth watching just for that. However, those looking for more than a highlight reel of splatter movie kills will be disappointed, and rightfully so.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN? (WHEN YOU BLOW UP YOUR SPLEEN?)
Which leads to the primary question that had me wrestling with how I would talk about the film: can a film be too irreverent to send a message? What is the goal here? I plumbed Australian pharmaceutical history to try and see if there was some sort of contemporary counterpart to events in the film, any inspiration that tracked.
The closest I could find was Australia’s slow and lacking response to the thalidomide scandals of the 1950s and 60s, but the ties were tenuous at best. The film’s goal of being a pitch-black horror comedy, mainly meant to skewer the fitness crazes of the 80s and 90s, are subsumed by its technical achievements in making the audience sickly with slime, and leave you mostly numb to the horrific things that happen in it.
I think on a rewatch, the film’s philosophy was made clear by that numbness. As the vitamins take their last victim during a shootout– I won’t spoil how it happens, but I will spoil the reaction its witnesses have: being rapidly underwhelmed. It was at that moment that I realized what I feel is the real approach of the film. Body Melt does not try to convey a message about bioethics, but rather an approach to violations of bioethics. An approach, albeit a passive one to living with corrupt companies and the exploitation of people for profits.
AN ODDLY EXPERT SATIRE OF OUR APPROACH TO FEAR
Body Melt is a satire that plays in excess to make a point about how people become inured to the horrors they’re exposed to. In a surprisingly smart way, Body Melt becomes an absurdist shrug towards being turned into a lab rat, a rising and ever-related fear as companies push to gain ever increasing powers to skirt consequences for violating laws and human rights. When companies hide behind dozens of proxies of legal protection and walls of money to surround themselves, how do you keep from going insane as they mistreat swathes of the population and force you to watch? You sort of just learn to live with it.
And as bleak of an idea as it is, Body Melt’s ultimate dark humor stems from this. The joke is ultimately on the viewer; it mocks our own ability to turn a blind eye to them, turning the experiment gone wrong into an uncomfortable laugh through its extreme execution.
“How silly. That wouldn’t happen to us! Someone would stop them!”
“…Right?”
Body Melt is streaming on Shudder.
The film forums, threads, and pages I follow have recently been abuzz with talk about a film called Tesis. Usually, when older films are hyped out of nowhere, it means a new physical release is coming, or a new cut of the film has been assembled. To my surprise, Tesis returned to the conversation when Shudder released it just a few weeks ago. It should be noted that discussions around Tesis probably started when Umbrella Home Entertainment released a gorgeous collection around October of 2024. Still, I hadn’t seen much talk about it until its Shudder release. Does the movie hold up to the hype? The title of this piece might just give it away…
Tesis follows Ángela Márquez (Ana Torrent), a student working on her thesis project on audiovisual violence. Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo) and fellow student Chema (Fele Martínez) assist Ángela with finding gnarly films to further her studies. Ángela finds her professor dead in one of their university’s screening rooms. She takes the tape he was watching when he died and watches it with Chema. They soon realize the subject of the tape is none other than Vanessa (Olga Margallo), a student who went missing from campus roughly two years ago. After subsequent viewings, Ángela and Chema realize the tape they’re watching isn’t a film…it’s a snuff tape.
Comparing Tesis to A Serbian Film
Personally, I would never recommend A Serbian Film to anyone. And it’s not because the subject matter is “too offensive” but because it’s not a good film. Even though it deserves to be on disturbing movie lists, there’s little substance to it other than the political commentary that lightly shades the film in a positive light. Tesis is a film I would recommend to someone looking for a Serbian Film-like film. It may not have the same amount of gratuitous blood, violence, and sex that Serbian does, but it does not fail at being disturbing, raw, and well-made.
Besides Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, there is very little modern media set around snuff in general. Alejandro Amenábar’s feature directorial debut broke the mold of good taste with this 1996 instant classic. Amenábar’s freshman film tackles not just the idea of snuff within the genre, but the human condition and how violence in media affects everyone differently. Ángela is fascinated from an educational standpoint, while Chema is more enthralled in a way that feels a bit too personal. Each character approaches the idea of snuff/ultraviolence in their own unique way that feels more personal than anything Schumacher attempted to do in 8MM.
Ana Torrent’s Pivotal Performance
Much of Tesis is more akin to a murder mystery, with Ángela thrust into the middle of this murderous game of cat and mouse. For a debut script, Amenábar finds impressive ways to keep the twists and turns coming without anything feeling forced or over the top. Each piece of information the viewer gets makes them feel like they know how it will end, until they get the next piece of information. The script feels like it could have only come from a seasoned professional. It’s almost as twisty as David Fincher’s The Game, only with a much better payoff.
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