(aka: SHOCK or BEYOND THE DOOR II)

In fact, it's a lot better than most of the Italo-horror shot in the late-70s. It's not the best of Bava's films but it ain't no dud, either.

Bruno & Dora Baldini and her son, Marco, move back into a house where Dora and her late husband Carlo used to live. All sorts of ghostly things occur as Marco is slowly being taken over by his late-father's spirit and he winds up doing bad things to his mother. Like sending strange notes, making threats and sticking razor blades between the piano keys so his mother will cut herself.

It also seems that Dora (Daria Nicolodi) also has a bizarre past herself. She was once locked up in a nuthouse and had to undergo electro-shock therapy because she had a mental breakdown after her late-husband's death. It's also been alleged that her late drug-addicted husband Carlo had committed suicide but that's not the case at all. It seems Carlo's corpse is actually buried in the cellar behind a wall and that... (?)

Well...you'll have to see the film for yourself to find out how he got there. It doesn't have very much gore but it makes up for it in well-constructed shocks and scares that should put viewing audiences on edge.

With David Colin playing the 10 year old Marco, and Ivan Rassimov as Dora's psychiatrist, this is well worth seeing. Check it out if you're looking for something along the lines of THE OMEN or John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN.

7 out of 10

A woman on the brink of insanity , Daria Nicolodi , his child : David Colin Jr and her new husband, John Steiner , move back to her old house , after the gruesome death of her previous hubby . Then things go wrong when the couple on the edge of breakdown is terrorized by a cycle of evil that is about to occur again at the old memory-ridden mansion . As an avengeful spectre possesses the young son with fateful consequences . A new look at the face of Evil !.

Nice Mario Bava film including chills , thrills , nail-biting suspense , twisted plot , gory effects, and ghastly happenings about ordinary poltergeister phenomenon with plenty of preternatural evil forces . Terror expert Bava provides his ordinary tricks maintaining interest and intrigue enough. In spite of a few scenarious and its low budget, Bava develops stunning photography, making great use of lighting, set design, and camera positioning to compliment mise-en-scenes bathed in deep primaries . This film was titled Schock, though in some countries pretended to be a sequel titled : ¨Beyond the door II¨ , revolving around the known plot about a haunted house , this time with a revenger ghost who roams here and there, while possessing a little boy, David Colin , who gives a really terrifying acting , despite his short age . Along with the beautiful Daria Nicolodi as the unsettling and at the edge of insanity wife , a plane pilot played by John Steiner as the new husband and brief appearance by Ivan Rassimov as the doctor advising Daria Nicolodi who at the time married Dario Argento , another director especialized in Terror and Giallo.

It displays atmospheric and sinister cinematography from Alberto Spagnoli and Mario Bava himself . As well as eerie synthesizer musical score in Goblin style composed by Libra . Well directed by Mario Bava who is considered to be one of the best Terror filmmakers . His first horror film was ¨Il vampiri¨ (1957) , also known as "The Devil's Commandment" , co-directed by another great filmmaker, Riccardo Freda .While working with Freda in this film , the director left the project after an argument with the producers and the film mostly unfinished . After a similar incident occurred on ¨Freda's Caltiki¨ (1959), and Bava's having been credited with "saving" Tourneur's ¨Battle of Marathon¨ (1959). The following film that emerged, ¨The mask of the demon¨ (1960), is one his most well known as well as one of his best and it inspired a wave of gothic Italian horror films . This widely influential movie also started the horror career of a beautiful but then unknown British actress named Barbara Steele , subsequently become a horror myth . While ¨Black Sunday¨ is a black and white film , it was in the color milieu that the director excelled , as Bava's films took on the look of works of art with the projects which he went on making . Later on , he directed ¨Black Sabbath¨ with the great Boris Karloff and others as ¨Baron Blood¨ with Joseph Cotten , and ¨The whip and the boy¨with Chistopher Lee . Bava along with Riccardo Freda and Dario Argento created Giallo subgenre including films as ¨The girl who knew too much¨ , ¨Five dolls for an August moon¨, ¨A hatchet for honeymoon¨ and ¨Six women for a killer¨ . As Bava created the style and substance of the giallo, a genre which would be perfected in the later films of Dario Argento . But Bava also made other genres as Peplum : ¨Hercules and the haunted world¨ , Western : ¨Roy Colt and Winchester Jack¨ , Viking movie : ¨Knives of the avenger¨, Sci-Fi : ¨Planet of vampires¨, Sex comedy : ¨Four times that night¨, Oriental fantasy : ¨The wonders of Aladdin¨, and the first Slasher movie : ¨Bay of blood¨, among others . Rating : 6.5/10 . Decent terror movie .

Sometimes all you need in horror is a sense of mood in a place. Other times, a warped state of mind can help a great deal by a filmmaker's point of view to get a viewer tapped in. In Shock, we do know for certain that a mother, Dora, her cute little son Marco, and her second husband Bruno, are at a new house they just bought. But what we don't know for certain, perhaps not fully even until the very end, what is really taking the shape of the horror, and that's the key to Mario Bava's success here (actually his last film, quite a feat for any time in his career). We're lead to believe that this is most likely a ghost story - at least at first. It seems straightforward enough: the boy keeps getting weird, sneaking on his mother (even stealing her underwear) and acts generally creepy, and soon get some supernatural mojo with a doll made up of his mom and a swing that can control his stepfather's flight plan as he pilots a plane.

There is that aspect, and Bava does get some good mileage out of the mannerisms and kind eyes of the child actor Colin Jr (his voice on the other hand leaves much more to be desired). But then sometime else happens after a little while: we get to follow Dora more closely, specifically when she has nightmares or can't really tell between what is real and what is dark fantasy. She has a dream where she's trapped in her bedroom, and a box-cutter moves by itself, hovering and threatening her at every turn. She also sees a giant brick wall and screams in agony, for reasons that won't become clear until much later. Again, could still all be the ghost going on - who we also learn soon after could allegedly be her first husband, who died from suicide as a junkie.

But the fact that Dora was a former mental patient, and spent some time in an asylum and got some shock treatments, calls into question her reliability as a character. Her husband doesn't believe her, but who would in this situation (and, naturally, in this kind of semi-ghost sub-horror genre)? What we see is a split between what is expected, and Bava has a gay-old-time showing us imagery that is just downright disturbing. Some of it early on borders on being just wrong (the boy making sight of her mother as she sleeps, perhaps possessed or directed by his dead father... or is he?), and then other times things just get strange, deliberately. It is Italian Horror, after all, but done without the tasteless style of a Fulci. This is more... I don't know if classy is the word, but Bava knows his camera and knows how to create eerie suspense out of nothing, so it's kind of a bridge between being grindhouse and being true Gothic terror.

And sure, some parts the dialog is weak and the actress Nicoldi shrieks so high that you can hear Fay Wray telling her to knock it off. But Bava gets us interested in the plight of this character, what will happen to her as, naturally, she stays in the house because her husband doesn't want to leave (at least not just yet), and what sinister act the husband-cum-son will do next as well. There's are scenes where horror creeps up on a viewer; watch as Dora keeps hearing her boy call out for her from... somewhere, and can't find him, but sees something wicked in the piano room (at one point, I should add, it laughs), and the ambiguity of this scene, among others, drives the tension and madness. While not flawless, it's the work of a master. 9.5/10