At the Devil's Door

It feels like they wanted to do more with the Tommy Wiseau sister but her acting was just so hilariously bad they had to call it early on her, especially since the literal child was acting laps around her. This movie is a great candidate for MST3K! But a boring and lazy watch on its own.

Well, that was. . . disappointing. Had a decent, if thin, plot, great intro, okay acting (mostly, we'll set the discussion of child actors to the side for larger issues). But then. . . it wandered. And kept wandering. Like a brain-bashed fruit fly in a room of scented toys, it would wobble towards a general target, catch another scent and wobble away. Was it a haunted house flick? Demonic possession? Real estate thriller? Tough woman artist holding her own against the dark? Rule 63 Damien? Maybe it was about family, or first love, or fertility? Who knows? It never managed to find its mark, even once the big "hook" was revealed (and note, by "big" I mean "Seriously? THAT'S your gotcha?? You're not serious"). And the entire production deflated like a flan in a cupboard. No, worse, it was all the houseguests coming with a stew ingredient, and things were chopped and added (sometimes with care, even!) and it smelled delicious at first. . . and then folks wandered into the kitchen and stared dumbly at an inch-high layer of wallpaper paste. Two skulls, BARELY, and Nicholas McCarthy is LUCKY to get that. It's not even good enough to be a feature at Bad Movie Night.

ok

A very choppy structure. As soon as you become somewhat interested in a character, the person in question is killed and we're onto the next one. The result is that the viewer, unduly confused by the rapid onslaught of protagonists, never becomes invested in the fates / outcomes of ANY of the characters. And since the theme / plot is so well trodden (demon impregnation!), the movie will live or die on the basis of character development. So, for me, it mostly dies. What delivers the coup de grace are two absolutely implausible scenes, one in which the sister, without any rational reason, unloads on a clearly disturbed young girl (who the sister has acknowledged as such) an exposition dump about the sister's troubled relationship with her sibling, in the process conveniently informing the entity with all that it needs to know. Purpose served? Kill the character! The second is toward the end of the movie when the adopted (foster?) mother of the surviving sister's demon child leaves the kid completely alone with an unknown stranger who desperately demands to sea the hell urchin without explaining why. Not buying that or ANY of it, for that matter. Certainly NOT worth a re-watch and probably not worth a first watch either. For a much better treatment of the idea (and a much better film) check out PRO-LIFE, part of THE MASTERS OF HORROR series (available on Tubi). First, it accomplishes all this film hoped to achieve (and much more!) in about an hour, giving you an extra thirty minutes of life. And secondly, it's directed by JOHN CARPENTER!

Why is this edited like it was made for TV with commercial breaks? It's so disjointed. Some questionable acting and writing. Story is unoriginal. It's a skip for me