Beyond the Door III

The extremely low production-value film follows a group of American students to Yugoslavia. The protagonist, Beverly Putnic (played by Mary Kohnert), travels from Los Angeles with six college classmates to Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to meet up with a professor, Andromolek (Bo Svenson), to bear witness to a sacred pagan ritual. Mary's mother is beheaded by a construction beam as she drives away from the airport after dropping Beverly off, in an apparent accident, but a telegram to notify Beverly of this is intercepted by the professor. The students are all taken by boat to a remote village and are placed in ramshackle rooms that the villagers (old and dressed in dreary black) then nail shut in the night, mark with blood, and set on fire. The doors are rickety, however, so the students all escape except for one who burns up in his bed, and decide to escape from the village by hopping a train. However, the train is possessed and is determined to reunite the young people with their horrifying fates. The evil train thirsts for blood and soon the students begin dying horrible, gruesome deaths, often involving being torn, pierced or the like. Two students who escaped the train are eventually run over by it in a swamp as it jumps off its tracks and then returns to those same tracks undamaged and unslowed. The Yugoslav train authority makes some efforts to stop the train, but these efforts have no effect whatsoever (but it is discovered they are Satanists). The conductor is beheaded (but in another scene half of the possessed train separated itself and came back to pin him), the fireman is levitated screaming into the furnace, the passengers all mysteriously disappear at one point, and the train collides with another train standing in its way causing an explosion but without even scratching its own paint, and proceeds to zoom along until it reaches the profane altar where its own destiny is fulfilled: Beverly has been marked by birth for an eternity as Satan's bride. Beverly, however, manages to have sex with an 11th-century monk named Marius who is also riding the train, making her unfit as Satan's bride. Since Marius is long since dead, he also vanishes, but not before returning to Beverly a book that her mother gave her when she boarded the plane in Los Angeles a few days prior. Beverly then returns alone to America, homesick, after her adventure of about two or three days in a foreign country. The last scene shows her experiencing a dream sequence in which Satan tries to rip out her throat through a window of the plane in flight during a storm. A stewardess wakes Beverly, who tells the airline employee, "I just want to go home".[1]

Ovidio G. Assonitis, who produced the original Beyond the Door, shot the film in Serbia. According to Ovidio, it was not intended to be called "Beyond the Door III" as the original working title was simply "The Train." The distributors retitled the film to make a connection to the success of the previous films.[2]

Shriek Show DVD Cover

Released on VHS and Laserdisc in 1989 by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video.

The film was released on Region 1 DVD by Shriek Show. Though the alternate title Amok Train is present on the box art (see left), the title card on the film itself is still Beyond the Door III. [1]

• Beyond the Door III on IMDb