Pretty work colleagues Ann and Terry (Eve Reeves and Joyce Danner) attend a wild party at an isolated barn where Ann is almost raped -- saved in the nick of time by voyeur Dr. Bradley (Daniel Garth), who hits Ann's attacker with a pitch fork handle. When the girls decide to leave the party, they discover that their car has no gas, so they walk to a nearby house to ask if they can use the owner's phone.
The girls are surprised to find that the house belongs to Dr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence), but are disappointed to hear that the Bradleys' phone is out of order and that their car is being serviced. The Bradley's invite Ann and Terry to stay for the night, but the girls become worried when they discover that the windows to their room are barred and that their door has been locked from the outside. It turns out that Ann and Terry are just the latest in a long line of female 'guests' at the house, all of whom became unwilling participants in Dr. Bradley's sexual experiments.
If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been made a decade earlier, then the girls in Behind Locked Doors might have been more wary about knocking on the door of a remote house in the country while looking for help. Speaking of Tobe Hooper's '74 classic, there's a chase scene in Behind Locked Doors that gave me serious Texas Chain Saw vibes, while the ending, in which Dr. Bradley's 'human mannequins' come to life for revenge, reminded me of another horror classic... William Lustig's excellent Maniac (1980). I wonder if either Hooper or Lustig were influenced by this film.
Of course, Behind Locked Doors isn't in the same league as either The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Maniac: it's cheap, sleazy trash that suffers from clumsy direction, bad acting and terrible pacing (the first 15 to 20 minutes primarily consists of crap go-go dancing to bad music). Director Charles Romine seems more intent on catering to the dirty raincoat brigade than in delivering tension and scares, missing no opportunity for his female stars to get naked, even having lesbian Terry masturbate under the covers while sharing a bed with Ann.
4.5/10 for the sleaze, rounded down to 4 for the bit where Dr. Bradley covers his body with baby oil -- horrifying!
