The first flick in tonight’s double feature was this horror film from 1982. A woman named Kay is having nightmares where she sees the future, as well as a demonic figure attacking her. She works as a painter, and the visions in her dreams begin to show up in her artwork. Her husband David thinks she needs a vacation, so they go on a plane to an isolated island with Kay’s brother Eric and his wife. Upon arriving there, Kay begins to feel as if she’s been there before, recognizing certain places and things.
Kay eventually becomes convinced that her dreams are coming true again, after she has a nightmare of her husband David getting killed, and waking up to find him gone. She becomes convinced that a demonic presence that’s haunting her sleep is trying to use her to get into the real world. Her brother thinks there must be a logical explanation for David’s sudden disappearance, though his wife is not so sure. It becomes clear that someone is stalking them on the island, but is it a real person, Kay's imagination, or something else?
The movie plays like a mystery, with some good kill scenes and decent gore fx. The performances are standard 80’s horror acting, all pretty decent, nothing overly corny. It’s a decent flick, with enough suspense to keep you invested. I had never heard of this movie before, but I was able to stream it on Tubi. The 70’s and 80’s put out hundreds of obscure, lesser known horror titles, so I’m always coming across something I’ve never seen or heard of, like this one.
The next flick I watched was this obscure, campy late 70’s nonsense on YouTube called Beyond Death’s Door. It was about a doctor at a hospital who finds himself baffled by the rash of life after death (LAD) experiences that some of the patients who were clinically dead for a few minutes describe to him after being revived.
Dr. Pete Ferrari can’t explain why some of his patients are describing having gone to either heaven or hell during the brief time they were on the brink of death. His colleague Dr. Susan Kirk is a psychologist who believes that there is life after death, while his other colleague, Dr. Harry, is the atheist skeptic, who is sure that the near death experiences that the patients are reporting must have a scientific explanation, such as chemicals in the brain, or trauma. The patient subplots include a woman dying of cancer who’s struggling to find the meaning of life, a pimp, a woman having an affair with a married man, his lonely, pill popping wife, and an angry construction worker who doesn’t approve of his daughter growing up and having a boyfriend. Most of these characters suffer some kind of accident that causes them to briefly experience life after death, leading them to change their outlook on life.
This movie is not better known, probably because of how cheesy and bad it is. It plays like a cheap 70’s melodrama, with its silly storylines that would’ve been found on a soap opera, an old after school special (remember those?), or goofy retro shows like Emergency! The depictions of life after death are laughable, with a fog machine-produced heaven, and a cave with fire and creepy, screaming people as hell. The movie is also inconsistent in who goes where. The bitter asshole construction worker who disowns his daughter, the selfish, jive talking pimp and the atheist all go to heaven, while the lonely, pill popping housewife who’s husband is cheating on her ends up in hell. If the bad acting, ridiculous plots, and eye rolling positive changes that all the characters make after their LAD experiences doesn’t make you laugh, then the proclamation about how all these stories are based on real events at the end surely will. Whoever made this schlock was attempting to give us a serious exploration of the near death phenomena. Unfortunately, this unintentionally hilarious atrocity ain’t it.
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