Beyond the Seventh Door is a basement budget film with the premise of people trying to escape a dungeon in which every room has a different puzzle or trap. It predates the more famous film Cube, but it certainly was not the first movie with this theme. Writer/director Bozidar D. Benedikt is originally from Yugoslavia, now Croatia, and has a website that calls himself "a grandmaster of literature" who supposedly invented "a brand new literary style" of religious thrillers, or suspense with morals. Right. The film feels like an extended version of a Twilight Zone episode but with fewer production values.
The leading man is someone calling himself Lazar Rockwood. He appears to have chosen his alias like a porn name before realizing that the film was only PG-13. Or, who knows, maybe it originally was going to be X-rated until the actress saw this guy. Lazar is also from Yugoslavia, and we can only speculate about why he was cast as the leading man. He mumbles, he's stumbling into middle age with a '70s hairstyle, and he doesn't seem like he could solve any puzzles. On the other hand, I kind of like that he's a more realistic depiction of low life scum than we normally see in a movie. He's certainly not the typical underwear model-turned actor pretending he can't get any job he wants just by flashing a smile. I can believe that this guy resorts to crime to get by.
The leading woman is Bonnie Beck, and she seems to be the only reason anyone watches this film. She is charismatic, ends up with most of the dialog. And wears a flimsy French maid's costume that starts losing pieces until she is basically just in her underwear. This seems to have been the actress's largest role in a career that otherwise features appearances as Hooker #1 and the victim of the week in episodes of Friday the 13th, the Series... twice! Of course, this is more a reflection of the type of roles available to women at the time, so it's hard to fault her for just doing what most every actress was doing back then.
The end of the movie does much to redeem some of the earlier oddities with the plot by suggesting that they were not mistakes but intentional. It was not so crazy of a plot twist that it felt like cheating, but in many ways it seemed like too little of a pay off for having to sit through everything else. This is one of these films that would have been much better if it were either quite a lot shorter or replaced nonsense content with something far more interesting. They could have added suspense with better traps, side characters that existed to be cannon fodder, more red herrings, or greater focus on the owner of the mysterious castle. Of course, by adding much of any of that it might as well have just been a completely different movie. This is what we ended up with.