THE GATE
It's better than Ishtar!

  Surely the Degrassi Junior High of horror, The Gate is a toweringly cheesy and occasionally endearing bit of Canadian kiddie silliness that's sure to win some off-kilter enjoyment from a few of you.

So a very young (and slightly chubby) Steven Dorff stars as Glen, this kid who, along with his dorky friend Terry (Louis Tripp), discovers in his backyard a Satanic geode (which writes on his etch-a-sketch).   Then they play a really bad heavy metal record backwards (we're supposed to accept Terry as a metalhead because he wears a Killer Dwarfs jacket?), and next thing ya know, the house is crawling with gremlins.

There's also a smattering of Canadian teens (that is, people under 18), one of which has this hilariously stupid-looking hair (and dialogue like "Tres uncool!") which aptly illustrates so much of what was lame about the 80's.  And I suppose Christa Denton is appealing as Glen's sister, though Glen himself spends half of his screen time screaming, making him sound an awful lot like the old hag in Throw Momma From The Train.

As a longtime metalhead, I must repeat my long-held contention that filmmakers generally have absolutely no idea whatsoever about what makes heavy metal listenable to its fans, or unlistenable to its detractors, picking without fail this middle-of-the-road cheese which nobody notices.

Most of what's good about this movie is in the special effects, which occasionally cross the line from well-done to let's-rewind-and-see-that-again (though, if you'll think waaay back, most of them were shown in the ads anyway).  Not bad for a low-budget cheeseball from whatever Ontario suburb this was from, and you even get to see one kid get stabbed in the eye with a Barbie.  How cool is that?

Still, this doesn't change the basic heart of this movie, which is total eye-rolling cheese all the way.  The kids whip out their dad's gun late in the film; filmmakers asking us to cheer along to kids using a gun to solve their problems is an old pet peeve of mine, both because it's creepy (and not in a good way) and because it's just unimaginative.  Then maybe things get a little TOO imaginative; your jaw will drop at the silly way the Big Monster At The End is defeated (oops, did I give away the ending?  Oh, get a life.).

Directed by Tibor Takacs, who also did the sequel.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE G's