The Gate -- 1987 -- PG-13

Sometimes, when someone recommends a movie to watch, you take it with a grain of salt. You decide whether or not it's worth spending time on based on what you know of the person, their tastes, their criticisms, etc. Such is the way I came across this film, and frankly, I feel like strangling the one who recommended and removing from my list everything else he thinks is so good. Really, I think the only thing this one has going for it is obscurity, and that's not such a bad thing in this case.

The Gate is the story of a couple of kids who find a geode is the backyard under a tree that collapsed (under some bizarre and almost dreamlike circumstances), but when they try to dig for more geodes, they come across this deep crevasse like a cave and one really huge geode. One thing leads to another and they find that this cave houses a gateway between our world and the demon world, and they have thus far managed to activate this gate and only the sacrifice of two people can bring the demons into this world to make it their hell (bwa ha ha).

Anyway, this film is wrought with ideas gone wrong beginning with the entire concept of how this gate is to be opened and how it is accomplished. First, the "magic words" were inscribed on a doodle pad when the big geode was broken open. This was early on in the film and where my belief started breaking down. A doodle pad? Come on. Now, said doodle pad (It's hard to say doodle pad without smiling, isn't it? Come now, this is a horror movie.) was originally in the house where the gate is located, but somehow, it found its way to the other kids house, so when he was listening to this satanic record album, he could discover the striking similarities between the writing on the doodle pad (hehe, doodle) and the writing in the sizable insert to this record album.

Turns out this tree was busted at the very time when the constellations aligned and the gate could be opened. It also just so happened to be the weekend when the kids' parents went out of town so the demons could attack without parental involvement. I'll bet you can guess what else happened in this movie...

If you said party with a bunch of irresponsible teenagers, then you would be 100% correct. We get all the good cliches of smoking and drinking and dancing, along with insulting the kid brother and general irritatingness that comes with movie teen parties when the parents are out of town.

It looks like this film was made on a shoestring budget. There were some decent stop motion animation effects that blended fairly well with the live action. However, some of the other effects having to do with some moths imposed on the background image were nothing short of shoddy. Huge black outlines around the whole mess which only served to take away from the experience. Sure, it's 1987, but these things could have been cleaned up back then too.

Finally, let's talk about pacing. It was 45 minutes before anything significant happened. We get a few bouts of weirdness, but nothing exceptional. The main kid levitating and a weird occurrence to the friend is about the limit of this first part of the movie beyond the curiosity of the hole in the backyard. There are some decent setups and payoffs here and there, but it just moves really slowly with no perceived threat beyond the gaping hole in the backyard that only threatens with B-movie proportions. This means we are TOLD what it's for, but we never SEE it do anything besides using up the budget buying more dry ice to keep the steam coming.

In the end, this movie was really nothing exceptional. The threat is barely threatening until it finally shows itself very late in the film. It does have some decent characters, but as soon as one of them says "wait here while I check it out," my eyes roll and they miss out on perfection. The plot was contrived, to say the least, and was difficult to accept given all of the coincidences that had to happen to make it conceivable. The main thing you'll have going for you here is a movie no one has seen so you can recommend it and look like a horror hound for having caught a movie from the 80's that no one else has seen. Gosh, I feel so privileged.

Then again, a horror movie with a zero body count is rather unique...I'll give it that.