Synopsis: A family of three move into a new house only to be haunted by the woman’s deceased first husband, possessing the child and using him as a conduit.
Today we dip our toes back into the world of Mario Bava with Shock aka Beyond the Door II. The second installment in the Beyond the Door trilogy. Not a direct sequel but basically cobbled together and retitled with two other films to be part of a supernatural franchise for the English speaking market. The only real connective tissue between them being child actor David Colin Jr. starring in parts 1 & 2 (although playing different characters) and all three films being Italian productions.
We’ve touched on Mario Bava in a previous post so I won’t bore you with too much backstory. Directing alongside his son Lamberto, Shock was his final theatrical feature before his death in 1980. Bringing an illustrious career to an end.
Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi) along with her husband Bruno Baldini (John Steiner) and her young son Marco (David Colin Jr.) move into Dora’s former home. One that she shared with her deceased husband Carlo before his untimely death. Carlo, an abusive heroin addict was believed to have committed suicide when his boat was found adrift at sea. That caused a pregnant Dora to have a nervous breakdown, eventually leading to her admittance into psychiatric care. Soon after moving in, Bruno, a commercial airline pilot, heads out of town, leaving Dora and Marco alone in the house. Supernatural things begin to occur bringing up the shattered memories of her husband’s death. Memories she managed to suppress while institutionalized.
Dora begins to notice changes in Marco’s behavior. Finding him talking to an imaginary friend as his personality begins bizarrely shifting. For some unknown reason, Marco is drawn to the locked basement. Completely unnerved by Marco’s behavior and the inexplicable events around the house, Dora pleads with Bruno for them to move. Claiming that Marco is possessed by the spirit of his dead father. Bruno insists it’s all in her head.
Shock is a slow-paced story of demonic possession with hints of Oedipal implications. Yeah you read that right, Oedipal. There are some extremely uncomfortable scenes between the mother and child. Granted, those are few and far between but they were enough to make me do a double-take. The rest of the film featured items moving around the room seemingly without cause, bloody visions of death and tight shots of Daria’s over exaggerated screaming face. All predictably done and not shocking like intended.
I will commend it for one thing though. In the third act, there is a scene of Marco running down the hall toward his mother. As she turns, he disappears off screen and suddenly reappears as the blood-soaked image of his father. That jump scare was executed extremely well and had me repeating it a few times to see exactly how they pulled it off.
One might say, the founding father of Italian horror began to fall off in his later years or maybe I’m just numb to it all. There were flashes of his trademark style. But in the same way an image fades with each copy of a copy, Shock felt like a washed out version of his previous works. The haunted house/possession narrative had been played to death by that time so this just gets lost in a sea of much better attempts at that very same trope.
That doesn’t diminish Bava’s earlier works though. So make sure you check out stuff from his prime. As for Shock? Despite its faults there is probably an audience for it, but you could bypass this and not miss much. If you want to judge for yourself, you can find this on most streaming platforms. I caught it on Tubi at the time of this writing.
2 out of 5
So grab your popcorn, kill the lights and join me again tomorrow as we continue our journey on this strange little trip down the 31 Days of Horror rabbit hole. See you soon…
