BEYOND THE SEVENTH DOOR (1987) *

Boris (Lazar Rockwood) is a thief fresh out of jail who gets a tip from his ex-girlfriend Wendy (Bonnie Beck) her wealthy employer has a stash of loot hidden in the basement of his castle.  They break into the place and are immediately locked in, thanks to the elaborate security system.  They soon find themselves faced with a life or death predicament as each room in the basement has a particular riddle that needs to be solved or else, they’ll die a horrible fate.  Working together, they solve the riddles, making their way room to room as they eventually reach the dreaded seventh door. 

I guess the nicest thing I can say about Beyond the Seventh Door is that it plays like the prototype of Saw.  Most of the movie is filled with scenes where an ominous voice comes through a speaker and gives the trapped characters clues on how to escape each booby-trapped room.  Beyond that (see what I did there), it sucks. 

I know it’s a low budget movie, but the whole thing is painfully cheap looking.  It looks like a bunch of people stumbled upon a boiler room and decided to make a whole movie around it.  It doesn’t help that it's incredibly boring, and the rooms are nothing more than low budget variations on shit you’d see in Indiana Jones movies.  (There’s a briefcase of cash substituted for the golden idol, a ceiling full of spikes being slowly lowered, and lettered floor tiles.) 

I guess there are some of you out there who will probably hail Lazar Rockwood as your new favorite bad actor as he resembles James Hong dressed as Rambo (or maybe Gollum cosplaying as Sonny Landham.)  His line readings are something else.  Imagine Tommy Wiseau imitating Bela Lugosi.  I can’t fault you for loving his performance.  It just needed to inhabit a better movie.  

Just when you think it can’t get worse, there’s a love scene between Rockwood and Beck.  That might not seem like a bad idea, but did they have to do it while the corpse of an old guy looks on?  Director B.D. Benedikt doesn’t show anything during the love scene, which is odd because in the scene before, he showed Beck use a screwdriver to remove a screw in one long, continuous take.  It’s like he’ll show unscrewing, but not actual screwing.  If that isn’t the tip-off that Beyond the Seventh Door sucks, I don't know what is.