Dora moves into her old house with her young son, Marco and her new husband, Bruno. This is her first time in the house since her first husband, Carlo, committed suicide. Freaky shit starts to happen.

Shock is Mario Bava’s last film. He would die of a heart attack three years later.

The film is good but not great. All of the elements are here- the synth score (some of it sounds like it was played on a pocket calculator or Speak and Spell), the bad dubbing, the excessive violence and scenes of gore. I never got bored, and it passed the mobile phone test (I didn’t check my phone once). Scream Queen, Dario Nicolodi, is excellent in the lead.

But what prevents me from giving this a higher score is that there isn’t enough variety. If you’re making a film about a haunted house, make sure that there are either sequences that don’t take place there or make sure there are enough diverse scenarios within that one locale. Shock didn’t quite accomplish this.

Another layer to the action is that there seems to be almost an Oedipal element to some of the horror here, with Marco seemingly being possessed by his dead father. Freud would have a field day with events within this movie.

The ending is a shocker. Let’s just say that you’ll never look at a boxcutter/Stanley knife in the same way ever again.

In America, Shock was released as Beyond The Door 2 solely on the basis that the young actor playing Marco here played the young kid drinking tomato soup through a straw in Juliet Mills’ masterpiece.

3 out of 5 stars