Beyond the Doors (1984)

“When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” 

The year is 1984, and we open in a fog-encrusted forest somewhere near Cumberland, Maryland, where a trio of hunters make their way along a well worn game trail. Then, when their dogs roust-up a couple of pheasants, the lead hunter shoots them down, smiles, and hands the shotgun over to one of his companions before climbing over a railed fence to retrieve the game. 

Not counting the dead birds’ perspective, all seems serene enough as we innocently cut to a shot of the dogs sniffing for more targets. But then another gunshot shatters the silence, followed by a distressful scream as we quickly pan back to see the man who had climbed the fence take another shotgun blast to the chest before collapsing into a bloodied heap. Smiling sinisterly at the corpse they just created, the shooter then sneers, saying, “Rock ‘n’ roll is dead, and long live rock ‘n’ roll.”

Now, once that overtly cryptic prologue fades out, we cut to a musical montage tryptic of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison performing live (-- or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, ‘natch). Once that wraps, we immediately cut back to Maryland sometime after the funeral. And as the mourners return to the dead man’s house, we find out the victim was former FBI agent, Alex Stanley (Kenyon). Also of note, something sinister is most certainly afoot when his inconsolable widow bemoans the fact how her husband died in a [quote/] hunting accident [/unquote]. She also begs her son, Frank Stanley (Tice), to stick around -- just in case those strange men come around again. 

When asked to elaborate, Mrs. Stanley (Sawyer) weaves a rather dubious tale of two ‘Men in Black types,’ who first showed up not long after her husband died, forcing their way in, demanding to see all of Stanley’s files and papers. These men then proceeded to clean everything out of the deceased's home office, confiscating everything, without much of an explanation. But! They immediately came right back, looking for something they obviously missed; but they still couldn’t find what they were specifically searching for.

Well, turns out the suspicious surviving spouse knew it must’ve been her late husband’s briefcase those rude weirdos were so desperately after. Seems he left explicit instructions that if anything should ever happen to him, like, say, a close encounter with a [quote/] hunting accident [/unquote], to make sure no one else but Frank got this briefcase and, more importantly, the documents secured inside it.

Later, Frank explains to the audience through his wife, Ellen (Wilde), how his father, with whom he never really got along, used to work as a government spook; and how he would up and disappear for long periods of time on highly classified missions with nary a peep as to where or why. Thus and so, smelling something fishy, Frank finally opens the briefcase and finds a thick manuscript inside, which starts with a rather ominous preamble: 

"If you’re reading this, I’m already dead…" And as Frank continues with his late father’s testimony/posthumous confession, these documents reveal how agent Stanley belonged to a clandestine government organization called The 39 Steps: a network of covert operatives formed "outside the box" by President Nixon himself to neutralize the clear and imminent threat of the Three Pied Pipers of Rock ‘n’ Roll -- Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison, and eliminate them by any means necessary and with extreme prejudice...

Hole. Lee. She. It. Wow! What an outstanding and inspired premise for a film! I mean, just try to get your collective heads around this: the Nixon administration, in another spastic fit of paranoia, authorizes a rogue branch of the FBI to silence the voices of the counter-culture movement through dubious subterfuge and assassination. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? That’s because it was -- all due to who was the mastermind behind this notion from concept to execution: Larry [expletive deleted]’n Buchanan. You know, that Zontar, the Eye Creatures, and those horny Martians in desperate need of Earth women guy?!

Whoa! Hey! Waitaminute!! Don't click off! No. No! Stop! Come back here, dammit. *sigh* Fine. Well, for those of you who stuck around, you obviously have no idea who I'm talking about. And to rectify that, let me begin by saying out of all the gonzo auteurs out there, Larry Buchanan has provided more cinematic Waterloos for Yours Truly than any other filmmaker who ever schlocked a schlock.

Born Marcus Searle Jr. in Lost Prairie, Texas, in 1923, and tragically orphaned not much later, the future schlockmeister was bitten by the film bug early when the local cinema provided some much needed escapism from life at the overcrowded orphanage. When he turned 18, Searle moved to Hollywood and managed to land a job in the props department at 20th Century Fox; and even managed to land a few bit parts as an extra, which eventually led to an acting contract, which in turn led to his studio mandated name change to Larry Buchanan. But while Buchanan failed to break through as an actor, he did manage to pick up the nuts ‘n’ bolts of movie-making during a later stint in the Army Signal Corps.

Putting those skills to use, he honed them further by making several religious documentaries for Oral Roberts, and even served as an assistant director to George Cukor on The Marrying Kind (1952) before heading back to Texas to fulfill his destiny as one of thee worst independent, no-budget film entrepreneurs of all time.

Hitting the ground running, Buchanan quickly stumbled out of the gate, face-planted, and set an unholy precedent with The Naked Witch (1961); a tale of resurrected east Texas witches with grease-paint eyebrows and a roller rink Wurlitzer soundtrack, which also firmly established his modus operandi: a static camera; limited settings; inert plots, with lots of cheap, tell-don't-show inaction; oh, and padding on top of padding -- be it transition or travelogue, where each elapsed minute of screen time feels like twenty. And the cumulative inanity of it all has been known to drive people mad! Mad, I say! MMNMMAAAAAADDDDUH!

*ahem* Yes, well ... Anyhoo, after an uncredited co-directing gig for the Lolita inspired Common Law Wife (1961), Buchanan made his first attempt at social commentary with Free, White and 21 (1963), where the audience got to choose the fate of a colored man accused of raping a white girl. This was followed by a brief exposé phase with the alt-history docudrama, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964), where the title character survived Jack Ruby's assassination attempt and faces 12 of his peers, who must determine both his sanity and if he actually did the deed or not. 

After this was Buchanan's most productive period, when he struck a deal with American International Pictures to do a series of color remakes of their back catalogue for the upstart studio’s fledgling television division. Thus, The Day the World Ended (1955) begat In the Year 2889 (1967), while The She-Creature (1956) and It Conquered the World (1956) became Creature of Destruction (1967) and Zontar: the Thing from Venus (1966) respectively. But perhaps the most well known rehash, thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000, was Buchanan’s remake of Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957) as Attack of the the Eye Creatures (1965 -- and no, that's not a typo). Or perhaps that honor belongs to Mars Needs Women (1967) -- for the title alone if nothing else, which is exactly what happens in that movie: nothing.

When the AIP work eventually dried up, Buchanan got back into the documentary business with the moderately effective The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and took a look at the mating habits of all kinds of critters with Sex and the Animals (1969). Also around this time our boy got his Bergman on something fierce with Strawberries Need Rain (1970), where a girl convinces the Grim Reaper to give her 24-more hours to live so she can lose her virginity. 

After that, when the 1970s rolled around, Buchanan got back to his docudrama roots with a couple of low-brow bio-pics: A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970) -- a profile of notorious gangster Pretty Boy Floyd as interpreted by former teenage heartthrob Fabian, and Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976), where Misty Rowe played a young Marilyn Monroe looking for her big break in the seediest of places, which actually wasn’t that bad and I would consider this as Buchanan’s best film. 

And then came what proved to be my most favorite Buchanan flick, The Loch Ness Horror (1982), where Lake Tahoe stands in for the highlands of Scotland and an inflatable pool-toy subs in for the mythical Nessie. Fabulous movie, and truly awful. Gloriously so. Go. Watch it. NOW!

Which, I guess, finally brings us up to Beyond the Doors (1984); a paranoid, conspiracy fueled bio-pic that's seeded with enough truths and half-truths to make the bullshit seem more plausible. And in almost anyone else's hands, that bullshit could’ve had the potential to be a whole six-pack of awesome, cinematically speaking. But we all know whose hands we got, who then takes the audience by their hands and leads them somewheres else that isn't even in the same hemisphere of awesome. Still, we must persevere! 

Onward, then, as the son keeps reading his father’s dossier as the film jumps back to 1968, where we find Jimi Hendrix (Chapman) finishing his set at some undisclosed venue in New York City. Apparently, Janis Joplin (Meryl) was due to go on next but she arrived so late and so intoxicated the pissed off owner refused to let her go onstage -- until the crowd threatened to riot unless the singer performed. 

After the show, the two singers meet up in Hendrix’s dressing room, where we also get our first gratuitous topless shot. (The first of many gratuitous topless shots, I might add. Larry! Have you no shame?!) And at some point during this impromptu jam session, Joplin boldly asks if all those rumors about the size of Hendrix’s ... *ahem* “Texarkana Dingus” (-- the movie’s euphemism, not mine), were true. The answer, to quote Lili Von Shtupp, It's t'woo! It's t'woo!

Next, we jump to a hotel room in Amsterdam, where a nude woman watches a report about the escalating war in Vietnam. In the same room, a prostrate Jim Morrison (Wolf) is rousted out of bed, I’ll assume by the rest of The Doors, for an impending gig -- but not before he mumbles something about dying for rice paddies and napalm. 

Now hang on, as we abruptly switch locales again and warp ahead to find Hendrix in a studio laying down some new tracks. Enter a group of Black Panthers, who accuse the singer of selling out to the White Man while his people are dying over in Vietnam. Further berated by a female Panther, who claims his music says nothing and does nothing -- except help Whitey get laid, Hendrix promises to do a song that will wake America up. Satisfied, the Panthers leave; but after they're gone, Hendrix smashes his guitar in guilt-ridden anger.

Crash, bang, zoom we go again, and we're suddenly in some sleazy hotel in Oakland, California, where an FBI agent is getting some sexual favors from an informant before he reports in, saying the Black Panthers have moved south to Los Angeles and are spreading their militant doctrine around the college campuses and rock concerts; like the one The Doors are currently performing, where Morrison, still in a melancholy mood, spouts some more bad poetry that impresses his female companion. (I'll assume this is Pamela Courson.) He then talks about the leaders of the world becoming butchers, using 18-pound sledge hammers to get their jollies. (Just sing “Light My Fire” already, jeez.) 

Meanwhile, in one of the film's better scenes, Joplin watches a BBC newscast about her performance at Albert Hall, where she is misquoted by a reporter who claims she said there was absolutely no connection between drugs, music and Vietnam. But as the BBC shifts to news footage of the war, Janis shoots up with heroin; then, the images on the TV dissolve into Hendrix’s scalding rendition of the national anthem he unleashed at Woodstock. (I think this was the song he had promised earlier.) And after finishing this blistering set, he passes out backstage.

Next we move to Washington, DC, where agent Stanley is being recruited for a new assignment by one of Nixon's stooges. Opening with a funny, off-color joke about Nixon being crooked, things quickly get down to business and a discussion on the Commander-in-Chief's growing paranoia. Seems Tricky Dick is hell bent on setting up an independent security force outside of the FBI that will only answer directly to him. Surprised that his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, would allow this to happen, Stanley is told the FBI director fully endorsed this covert action because he thinks they’re still fighting the Communists. 

Here, it's emphasized all Nixon really cares about is his re-election, and that's why he's so worried about the influence of the counterculture movement on younger voters. And so, to help ensure his victory, Nixon wants that perceived threat neutralized -- and that's where Stanley, no stranger to this kind of wet-work, and The 39 Steps comes in.

Later, at the Stanley home, the ringleader briefs his team on the mission at hand and how the voices of the musical revolution must be silenced -- and silenced quickly. When their meeting is interrupted by some loud music coming from young Frank’s room, his father barges in, destroys the record, and warns his son not to play that type of [N-bomb] music in his house. (So, here, we find out that agent Stanley not only hates music, but was a bona fide bigot as well. Neat.)

Setting their sights on Hendrix first, these rogue agents first track down and kill Rainbow Brown -- the guitarist's usual source for drugs, and substitute a bad batch of acid with his new supplier. (Don’t take the brown acid, man.) Thus, all the pieces start to fall into place when we next find Hendrix at The Le George discotheque in New York, where, as fate (or a bad movie script) would have it, Joplin and Morrison are also hanging out. Here, they’re all impressed with the stage show until a bizarre conga-line of transvestites start imitating them, and they bash them pretty good, too, for their self-indulgent lifestyles.

Recognizing one of the drunken performers as the lady Black Panther who visited him earlier, Hendrix gets her alone to talk. Seems she tried to reach out to him before but he was too insulated. Promising things will be different from now on-- no more playing with his teeth, etc, the singer also confides about the bad acid trips he’s been having lately. He’s also wary of the same "gray faces" that have been lingering at every concert, hanging around backstage in the shadows. Warned that somebody has put a mark on him, Hendrix promises to be careful. 

Meantime, in the club's ladies room, Joplin finds Morrison banging some gal in one of the stalls. When Pam catches them, Morrison blames it all on Joplin. This, with good reason, pisses Joplin off enough to break a bottle over the creep's head. After Morrison leaves, Joplin confesses to Pam about how lonely the life of a rock star is. Truth be told, she’s jealous of the "action" Morrison and Hendrix get and, in a scene that is way too good for a Larry Buchanan flick, she confesses there are two Janis Joplins: one that makes love to 25,000 people on stage, and the other who always goes home alone. 

Meanwhile, The 39 Steps continue to tighten their noose on Hendrix, who's back in England, performing somewhere on the Isle of White. Backstage, he meets the infamous Cynthia Albritton; a gal who wants to capture every famous rocker’s “Texarkana Dingus” in dental plaster -- starting with Hendrix. 

This is a true story folks, and she’s still doing it today, amassing a collection of over 50 phalluses. Immortalized later in the KISS song “Plaster Caster” the only thing they got wrong was they made Albritton English, when she’s really from Chicago.

And yes, Hendrix really did get the cast made. And at least according to this movie, it would be one of the last things he ever did. For the very next morning, agent Stanley is assured Hendrix ingested the drugs they slipped into his drink the night before. Inside his flat, Hendrix’s companion wakes up but fails to rouse him before she leaves for some cigarettes. Once she’s gone, another agent sneaks in and plants more pills around the bedroom. Begging for permission to just kill Hendrix now, Stanley orders him to stand down and clear out because what happens next must look like an accident. 

Thus, the stage is set when the girl returns, who goes into a panic when she still can’t wake Hendrix up. Of course, when she tries to summon an ambulance the call is intercepted by Stanley, who sends in some bogus paramedics to haul Hendrix out. And after they get him loaded up in the ambulance, Hendrix starts to come around and begins to vomit. Moving quickly, one of the paramedics gets him in a headlock and forces his victim to [quote/] accidentally choke to death on his own vomit [/unquote]. So that's one down, with two to go.

The mission kinda accelerates from there as Joplin, the next target, finishes a recording session and heads for home. Inside her apartment, agent Stanley is injecting and saturating her oranges with lethal doses of heroin. Hearing her approach, he hides in a closet and waits while she runs the tainted fruit through a juicer, which the girl then mixes with some vodka. Drinking it down quickly, she instantly becomes woozy; and after she passes out cold, her assassin begins doctoring the scene by placing several empty syringes around the body, and then sticks another into her arm just as the phone rings. Ever the cool character, Stanley picks up the receiver, drops it by the singer’s head, gathers up all the evidence, and leaves. That's two down, with one more to go. 

But, as he lays out his plans to bump off Morrison, agent Stanley is told the old Lizard King was already dead. Needing to be sure, Stanley heads to Paris and, posing as a reporter, interviews Pam about the singer's sudden and tragic demise. When her story doesn't ring true, coupled with the fact that no one actually ever saw the body before it was buried, Stanley’s convinced Morrison was still alive. 

The audience, meanwhile, doesn't need any convincing, for we already know the last Pied Piper, with his health failing rapidly, faked his own death and retreated to a monastery hospice somewhere in Spain to recuperate. Why did he fake his own death? In his own words, "Death has one helluva plus -- privacy." 

Agent Stanley then spent the next few months tracking Morrison down, but, by then, he had grown disgruntled with his President and disillusioned with his chosen profession and came to the conclusion to just let this last one go. Years later, Stanley planned to blow the whistle on the whole operation by first going to Europe to see if Morrison was still alive. Alive or dead, he would then finish and publish his book, exposing The 39-Steps and what they had wrought. Well, he was going to do all of that right after a pheasant hunt with some old friends.

A flabbergasted Frank isn’t sure what to make of it all until Ellen suggests he take up his late father's final mission, go to the Spanish monastery, and find out the truth for himself. This he does, but once there Frank is led into the woods by the head monk, where they come upon a cemetery. Here, his guide comments on how happy Morrison became once he settled in; how he felt he'd finally found true peace. Unfortunately, Morrison’s health was too far gone, and when he died in 1974 they buried him here, in this simple plot. When Frank asks which one is the singer’s grave, as they are all designated with an unmarked cross, the monk isn’t sure since they don’t ever mark them, saying, "How else would he be free?" 

So, What do I think? Would Nixon really go this far? Well, as paranoid as that guy was, I’ve no doubt he or his cronies could've tried to pull something like this off. But did he actually do it though? I doubt it. The man was crooked but he and his sycophants just weren’t that clever. Also, there is a fine line between trying to do justice for those you think have been unjustly wronged / and taking a dump on their legacies, troubled though they may be, with this kind of ... conjecture at best and pure lunacy at worst.   

In his book The Films of Larry Buchanan: A Critical Study, author Rob Craig discusses how his subject matter always “decried the label of ‘conspiracy theorist,’ which had been pinned on him by both fans and detractors.” What rankled Buchanan the most about this label, according to Craig, “was its allusion to ‘crank’ theory -- unfounded and weird assertions about unsolved mysteries.” For Buchanan, the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison all happening in less than a calendar year, all at the age of 27, who all died of an overdose -- Hendrix, sleeping pills, Joplin, heroin, Morrison, an alcohol abuse-induced heart attack, in those volatile times, with Nixon running roughshod over everything, declaring nothing he did was illegal because he was the President after all, was too much of a coincidence and made excellent fodder for his latest theory / feature.

All research points to the completed film, then under the title Down On Us, made its one and only limited theatrical showing at the University of Texas in 1984 because Buchanan ultimately failed to find a distributor for his latest opus. From there, it was trimmed down considerably and released on home video in 1989 as Beyond the Doors by Unicorn Video. I couldn’t find any info on the original cut’s runtime but the Unicorn version still came in at nearly two hours, which was about thirty to forty minutes too long by my estimation because, holy hell, does this film tend to meander around, in a meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile sense, as that rambling recap above can attest, even though we keep jumping all over the globe, trying to keep up with our cast of characters, but it can never quite escape that Buchanan inertia.

As for the cast plugged into those characters, Gregory Allen Chatman does an okay Hendrix; and despite the script she’s forced to recite for the majority of her scenes, Riba Meryl is actually quite good as Joplin -- especially when she talks about how lonely she is. Bryan Wolf, however, crashed and burned as the overly morose Morrison, what with his constant comparing everything to hammers and napalm. And I can’t quite decide if they’re all singing on their own or if it’s canned. All the songs used were pretty low on the groups’ hit-lists, too. Cheaper to license, I guess.

From a filmmaking standpoint, all the Buchanan trademarks are present and accounted for: one familiar set, tastefully rearranged in a hope we wouldn't notice the same furniture from scene to scene; static shot after static shot after static shot; and tons of really bad dialogue that somebody sure thought was significant. Like, significant, significant. 

However, and to his credit -- his one credit, I do believe Buchanan did a little homework before knuckling out the screenplay for Beyond the Doors. Some of the incidents and locations portrayed hold true to history, while others are based on folklore and several entrenched urban legends surrounding these musical giants -- including Morrison faking his own death. Unfortunately, Buchanan seemed to be more concerned with shots of topless groupies (and one disturbingly bottomless groupie) than unraveling any great conspiracy here.

Okay, okay, sure, stinker that it is, I freely admit that Beyond the Doors had been a personal Holy Grail of mine for a very long time. Yeah, this was another one of those treasure hunt movies, from the before before time, before torrenting, streaming, and YouTube or the IMDB were a thing, where you only had a title and the vaguest of notions of a plot picked-up through word of mouth or perhaps a cock-eyed blurb in some psychotronic film compendium of yore, which always triggered the "Holy crap, do I gotta see this!" reflex. This time, it was a video blurb by Leonard Maltin discussing offbeat films released on video as part of his Entertainment Tonight segment. No. I am not making that up. 

I missed the title, but had the gist of the conspiracy plot. And while nearly 15-years of searching turned up squat there finally came that fateful day in the fall of 1996 when I was perusing a local video store of the town where I had just landed a job, where, in the Classics Section for Crom’s sake, nestled in between copies of Ben-Hur (1959) and Casablanca (1942) sat, you guessed it, Beyond the Doors. 

Of course, my excitement over this improbable discovery was hampered somewhat when the fine print on the VHS box revealed it was, indeed, the film I had been searching for all that time but also the film's origin and originator. And, well, I had expected the worst with that 'written and directed' by credit and, sadly, the film held few surprises and even fewer flashes of brilliance from there.

Thus, leave it to Larry Buchanan to take such an inspired premise and make it so utterly null and void. But! I'm still glad that I finally managed to track down a copy of Beyond the Doors, and I was happy to cross yet another film off that long ‘gotta see that one’ list. Beyond that, we're just kinda left with a not-so-fleeting feeling that we've just witnessed an air-ball of biblical proportions that easily should’ve been a slam-dunk. And in any other hands? Yeah. 

Originally posted on May 5, 2001, at 3B-Theater.

Beyond the Doors (1984) Omni Leisure International :: Unicorn Video / EP: Murray M. Kaplan / P: Larry Buchanan / D: Larry Buchanan / W: Larry Buchanan / C: Nicholas Josef von Sternberg / E: Larry Randolph / M: Jeffrey Dann, David Shorey / S: Gregory Allen Chatman, Riba Meryl, Bryan Wolf, Sandy Kenyon, Toni Sawyer, Steven Tice, Jennifer Wilde