SOMEONE BEHIND THE DOOR
The Sesame Street Horror returns...?
When I was a kid, there was an animated Sesame Street vignette that absolutely scared the living crap out of me. I don't really remember much, except that the animation was sparse, it involved a stick drawing turning into a camel, and something called "The Behind-The-Door", which was a big evil-looking face composed of cracks behind some door. I'd run out of the room when it came on. I was terrified of cracks until I was about twelve. I'd pay good money to see this vignette today and see what scared me so much about it.
But it has nothing to do with this movie. So never you mind me.
Anthony Perkins stars as a neurosurgeon with a cheating wife (Jill Ireland). He takes advantage of the appearance of an amnesiac (Charles Bronson) at the hospital and takes him home for "therapy" while the wife's "out of town", if you know what I mean. His real intention is to condition the amnesiac into...well, that's never quite clear, but you'd better believe that the wife ain't gonna like this.
Perkins is great in this movie, a pure heel who we nevertheless sympathize quite a bit with. Ireland is okay, but nothing special - pretty much summing up her whole career, actually. But the biggest surprise is Charles Bronson, in a role he played before Death Wish but well into his established star status. For most of the movie, he's really good as the poor amnesiac, a man who's more frightened and confused than anything else - with all those cheesy Death Wish movies to look back on, all this looks quite striking, actually. Even moreso is how Bronson is much LESS convincing as an angry man in the film's final act.
The movie isn't really that special, but it's diverting enough and worth watching just for Perkins and Bronson. The videotape was a really lousy transfer job with lots of writing on the film stock and this green line runnin' on down the screen.
Box lists running time as 97. This tape ran closer to sixty. Anything more would've been padding. Betcha can't watch the closing credits all the way through - they consist of the camera alternately focusing on two of the leads to the beat of a heartbeat, and it goes on for a long, long time.