Don't Open The Door comes from S.F. Brownrigg who made the equally bizarre Don't Look in the Basement which has become a drive-in/grindhouse/cheapie VHS and DVD staple for years. While this film doesn't have exactly the same kind of manic, low budget energy that film has, it has enough charms of its own to make it worth a watch.
Don't Open the Door follows a young woman who returns home to the house where her mother was murdered and begins receiving strange, obscene phone calls from a psycho who wants her dead.
The acting, much like Basement, is enthusiastic but amateur hour. No one is really awful, but no one is exactly brilliant either. You get the feeling that you're watching the area's most competent community theatre actors having a good time. The concept is solid, but the suspense and scares seem to be put on the backburner until towards the end of the film, which gives us a lot of time to watch the leading lady take a bath or go exploring the house, which isn't terribly exciting.
Where Don't Open the Door excels is with the creepy phone calls and the mood. The phone calls are perhaps some of the genre's creepiest and most unsettling. It also manages to produce a fairly haunting ending.
With a little more effort put into the script, pacing, and scares, this one could have been a contender, but as is, it's an interesting regional time capsule. It's worth seeing once.
