How can a film be scary and funny at the same time? I don't know, but that's what Beyond the Door manages to be. It's an Exorcist rip-off with a bit of Rosemary's baby thrown in for good measure, filtered through some Italian film companies' shattered brain pan. Best example of this is the very beginning of the film, which Satan narrates himself while we watch a writhing naked woman on a plinth, whose face then turns into Jesus. A Jesus with boobs.

Jessica lives in San Francisco with her husband Robert and their two kids, Gail (who talks like a hippy and sounds ten years older than she looks) and Ken (who is about five and swears like a trooper!). Jessica is once again pregnant, and therefore exhibits the usual symptoms of what we used to called Irish Toothache: nausea, eating weird things, in this case a rotten banana off the street, extreme mood swings, murdering a bunch of gold fish, blaming her husband for every single wrong in the world, slapping her kids about.

Vomiting blood isn't the best indication that the pregnancy is going well, and even stranger is that the pregnancy is progressing at an alarming rate. Jessica is concerned and wants to have an abortion as the pregnancy is now causing her to float about the room and leave mud everywhere (don't think about it). When the doctor agrees to the abortion, she goes mental and insists that the baby be born! Women, eh?

I burst out laughing when the kids started begging with their father not to leave them alone with their mother, but then the film did a strange thing by becoming effective and creepy. When the kid brother is alone he starts talking to an invisible thing sitting in a rocking chair, his sister arrives, going on about something or other and totally oblivious to the fact that every doll in the room has turned to stare at her. What's harder to ignore is the room going completely mental, the dolls walking about, and a cake floating up to the ceiling and getting squashed.

The kids are shipped off somewhere and the strange fellow turns out to be Jessica's ex-boyfriend Richard Johnson, who didn't fare to well with the occult way back in The Witch In Love either. He wants the baby to be born and insists he help, whereas the doctor thinks it's probably for the best if the demon spawn of hell be removed. It's like the worst abortion debate in the world, all set to the soundtrack of a woman vomiting, cussing and flying about the room.

I've been looking forward to this film for some time and wasn't disappointed. I thought the really daft period of Italian horror started later in the decade, but here it is, a fully fledged trash classic that ticks all the boxes you need. Or I need, anyway.