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It should have been a rather routine Thanksgiving dinner in a cabin in
the middle of nowhere for six lifelong friends - Luke (Mike Wood) and his
pregnant wife Maria (Deborah Venegas), Isaac (Matt Aidan) and his
girlfriend Angel (Kristina Page), single yet always horny Terrance (George
Troester), and single yet buttoned up Tess (Jessica Sonneborn) - but then
a stranger (Steven Richards) knocks on the door, and when he's admitted
in, the topples over and dies, but not before warning the gang to never
open the door. In the process, Tess got blood splattered all over her,
which leaves her deeply disturbed ... and then she disappears, but
suddenly the others receive a call and it's Tess, announcing she's going
to arrive late for dinner. But if Tess has not yet arrived, who's the
woman who was with the others until just now? And if that was indeed Tess,
whose car has just pulled into the parking lot. Anyways, the friends
decide it's best to tie up new Tess and then investigate the place. But as
they do, the friends get frequently cut off from one another, find plenty
of things to argue about since they're in a situation they've never been
in before and have no idea how to handle it, and Luke receives several
text messages that slowly turn him against the others and push him over
the edge. And to make things worse, suddenly tied up Tess is gone, and
so's Terrance who was supposed to watch her. Plus there are weird men in
black standing outside the cabin, just waiting for ... whatever it is,
really. So naturally, things go on a downward spiral ... Never
Open the Door is a deliciously weird little movie as it cleverly plays
with genre conventions always giving one the illusion one knows where this
will head and then turn a completely different, totally unexpected way -
and thus the film is part old dark house story, part conspiracy thriller,
part psycho horror, part monster movie, part whatnot, and it works
absolutely terrific, also for the fact that the movie never makes the
effort to explain its on-screen goings-on away and making them mundane in
the process. Now add to that a directorial effort that embraces classic
cinema (not only due to it being black and white) over hypermodern
spectacle and makes perfect use of the limited locations, and a very solid
cast, and you've got yourself quite simply a pretty good and unusual film
of genre cinema.
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