Door opens on October 24 exclusively on SCREAMBOX. Never screened outside of its native Japan prior to Fantastic Fest last month, the newly-remastered 1988 home invasion film ratchets tension until its depraved finale.

I remember several months ago when I watched a movie on Shudder called Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell, another Japanese movie that was made back near the end of the twentieth century that was given a release later on in the twenty-first. Door and BMBBIH, in addition to the release similarities, also share an enthusiastic love for third act gore, though with the latter that is because it’s an homage to the Evil Dead series. Door is more of a tense thriller whose climactic action is not played for laughs. Well… not intentional laughs. We’ll get to that.

Door is the story of a housewife, Mrs. Honda–played by Keiko Takahashi–being confronted by a stalker who gets progressively more and more threatening. Her husband is stuck in the office for a few days to deal with a crisis, and while she is alone with her son Takuto, the situation grows increasingly dire as the man out to get her finds out more about her life and vulnerabilities.

Her troubles start early on while, during a stressful day, she continually receives telemarketer calls in her home, and hey! It’s only 1988! She has no idea how ubiquitous those would yet become. Her patience is increasingly tested by these calls, and when a door-to-door salesman comes to her apartment, she accidentally smashes his hand in the doorframe trying to get him to go away.

This action sets off the salesman, and his immediate retaliation includes kicking at her door, writing a perverted message on it while she is asleep, and leaving a tissue with his own semen on it in her mailbox.

So yeah… a bit imbalanced in getting revenge for a lightly injured hand. So we know right away our antagonist is not someone to mess with.

Halfway through the movie, while he is visiting the apartment building again, he sees Mrs. Honda and develops a dangerous obsession with her. Thus starts his stalking of her and her family, and his visits and creepy phone calls increase in intensity and frequency.

Due to the stalking and calls, Honda refuses to ket Takuto go out rollerskating with friends, and this proves to be a terrible decision. Takuto sneaks out of the house, causing his mom to chase after him… forgetting to lock the door. So when she comes back home, guess what? The salesman is inside! This sets up the violent and wildly tense third act to see if she can survive.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+There is one specific shot in the third act that only lasts 90 seconds, but will be very familiar to anyone who watched John Wick Part 4. While Mrs. Honda is being chased by the stalker, we cut to an overhead shot that lasts as a minute-and-a-half uncut single take.

One-cuts are always a way to my heart, and this essentially ceiling-less shot of the enraged salesman trying to get the woman as she darts between rooms of her house is as good as any. I would say it might be neat if it lasted even longer, but then you start straining the believability of the chase. So it likely goes on just as long as it needs to and achieves everything it should.

+The pacing is pretty darn good. The movie is a hair over 90 minutes long, and the salesman gets into her home far earlier than you would suspect: he is there with over thirty minutes left in the film! This sets up an extended third act that sees plenty of twists and turns of its own as she tries to escape his clutches. They start off alone, but then Takuto returns which somehow both ratchets up the stakes, but lowers the immediate stressfulness as the salesman has to start acting as an invited guest. But soon enough his guise is exposed and chaos erupts!

-The acting here is fine enough–I can only judge so much since I don’t speak Japanese–but sometimes the physicality isn’t sold as well as it should be. During the third act, when Mrs. Honda is fighting off her assailant, sometimes the movie almost starts feeling a bit unintentionally silly because the physical performances don’t quite match the mood. She will lightly hit him with something or barely graze him with an attack, and I found myself laughing at the flick, almost certainly not with it.

Additionally, as much of a kick as I got out of Takuto, he really only had one facial expression the whole runtime. But he’s a little kid! What can I really complain about?

-The Mr. Honda character is so irrelevant as to be a worthless inclusion on the movie; you may as well have made the protagonist a single mom instead. He is INFURIATING as a viewer because his wife is telling him she needs help, and he’s just going on about not wanting to come home. He works half an hour away according to the subtitles, but he doesn’t even come home to sleep! I hated this guy, and he never gets anything out of the story. The movie ends without his ever even coming home and finding out what his wife went through.

Down with Mr. Honda!

OVERALL

It looks old, and it gets a bit goofy at points–which can be fun, but is also cutting against the grain of the film’s mood–but everything here works, and the climax is a pretty wild, intense ride with some impressive direction and cinematography.

2.5 out of 5.0