Review: Someone’s Knocking At The Door

Perhaps this review should start with an explicit warning. The film features many scenes of male and female nudity, gore, sexual violence and drug taking. Despite having one or two funny scenes the film really is not a comedy. This film really isn’t for everyone and I’m not even sure at this point if it was for me.

Ray (Jordan Lawson) is sitting in his flat injecting a drug from vial into his vein. Before he can relax and enjoy his buzz he hears someone knocking at the door. He’s delighted when he opens it and there’s naked woman standing there and she tells him she wants to screw him death. They back into the flat and start kissing and touching. Then in the mirror he see he’s kissing a man who still wants to screw him to death. The man tears Ray’s clothes off and rapes him to death with an enormous penis. This film really does not waste any time getting straight to the action.

Ray was a student a medical school. His classmates are all very worried about the brutal way he was killed but they are just as concerned about the consequences of their drug use being put under the spotlight by the police investigation into his death. The other students are the typical five man band of victims you see in many horror films which is not to say that this like other typical horror films but it certainly does have this convention. They are the nerd Joe (Ricardo Gray) who has a bad speech impediment, Sebastian (Jon Budinoff) who is a complete prick, Annie (Sylvia Spross) who is a party girl and there’s Meg (Andrea Rueda ) who doesn’t take illegal drugs or screw around very much. The last of the group Justin (Noah Segan) who is in his flat having strange dream about meeting Ray in the morgue and talking to him. Justin is leader of the group and he has strange ideas of the mind based on the work of a Dr Tolstoy (Vernon Wells) who used psychedelic drugs in treating his patients

The film takes it time to investigate what happened to Ray and two police detectives interview each other five friends and while they get nothing evasion from four of them Justin gives them a frank and full account of the six of them going to a restricted storeroom and looking at the records of Dr Tolstoy’s work with two serial killers in the 60s called John and Wilma Hopper (Ezra Buzzington and Elina Madison) While listening to a therapy with the two killers the students all inject some of an experimental psychedelic drug except Meg who is reading the side effects with increasing horror. This is what seems have allowed the Hoppers into the present to kill again.

This is filmed like an experience of a bad trip with choppy images and a mixture of mundane everyday images with some very bizarre elements. The death scenes were both brutal and hilarious with John’s monster penis and Wilma’s shark-toothed vagina as weapons of death. There is very good use of sound in the film too. There’s a nice little cameo too from Joe Pilato as the ageing hippie Dean of the medical school Dr Ottie giving a bumbling speech to students and press about the murder of Ray

I think I’ve described this film enough to let you make your mind up if you want to watch it. I find it hard to rate this film so I’ll just give it a non-committal score and realise this may go up or down after a second or third viewing

Rating 6/10

• IMDb
• Amazon
• Fangoria