[This review is part of the White Elephant Blogathon, run by Paul Clark of Silly Hats Only.]
The Gate may not rank among the most widely remembered films of the ‘80s, nor will you find it on any but the most obscure awards lists, but let it stand proud as the film with the highest ratio of horror-movie tropes to minutes the world has ever seen. Clocking in at a bedtime-friendly 85 minutes, The Gate unleashes blood-red titles, dissonant stringed instruments, ominous mood lighting, a television set with bad reception (“They’re he-re!”), malfunctioning electrical equipment, a healthy abundance of slow zooms, close-ups, and jump-cuts, and a creepy doll. All this and mind you, we’ve barely moved passed the opening credits.
So now that we know where director Tibor Takács spent his modest budget (‘cause it wun’t on the acting), how much bang for his buck, fright for his franc, screams for his sickle did he manage to eek out? (Snap!) Well, that depends—are you the kind of person who is frightened by slow zooms and creepy dolls? A premature childhood viewing of Poltergeist renders that answer “yes” for me, but then again, I have been known to be frightened by my stuffed animals and people sneezing loudly in my vicinity.
Viewers made of sterner stuff might have trouble getting their fear on with this story of real estate development gone terribly awry. In The Gate, a typical suburban family finds, as so many typical suburban families of the ‘80s did, that they have unwittingly purchased a home with a compound interest rate of Evil. Young son Glen (Stephen Dorff, most noted for later providing the enthusiastic “ugh!” in the Lenny Kravitz cover of “American Woman”*) is left alone by his parents** in the care of flaky sister Alexandra (Christa Denton, mistakenly thought by the producers to be someone I should know by now). While Al devotes herself to catching the attention of that cute guy with the mullet who’s in all these films, Glen and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) accidentally open a gateway to Hell in the backyard, unleashing a pint-sized demon horde, some powerful wind machines, and a serious case of the willies. What’s a kid with no last name to do?
Well, for starters, not much more than skulk around his house and jump at small noises. About 45 minutes into the movie I realized that, despite my rapidly developing ulcer, nothing scarier than an overwrought string sonata had actually happened. In the great Chekhovian tradition, Takács devotes most of that time to foreshadowing. There’s the introduction of the model rockets, the family shotgun, the of-course-there’s-no-workman-buried-in-our-walls speech to get through, so that all these things can be used in the second act without any ruinous sense of surprise. And indeed, if someone stubs their toe on it in act one, it will get used in act two, with the exception of the creepy doll, whose presence serves no other apparent purpose than to propel me into the lap of my viewing partner.
Evil, of course, will eventually be let loose through a very specific yet totally unavoidable series of events. These include runic recitation, animal sacrifice, and the levitation of a small child. (And who among us cannot say that we’ve accidentally done those things during a celestial alignment?) When the demons finally do take action, why Takács is so reluctant to do the reveal becomes immediately clear: much to the misfortune of my viewing partner, the creature effects of 1987 burst into full and glorious bloom. Glen and company are terrorized by a horde of ankle-biting mutant voles on whom no amount of zooming in quickly will make scary. Having worked so hard to build such feverous anticipation out of nothing at all, with the appearance of the zombie Lilliputian army, The Gate retains all the dramatic tension of An Evening with Julie Andrews. Don’t even get me started on Godzilla’s runty step-brother, who comes in at the finale to try and finish our heroes off.
Yet in all its hokiness, The Gate retains an endearing charm with its likely completely unwitting defiance of the sluts-die-first, black-people-second commandments of typical horror. Well, yeah, okay, it’s an easy trap to avoid when you’ve forgotten to cast black people in your movie, but when the irresistibly be-mulleted jerk who sends the family dog down the hellmouth receives no further comeuppance than a polite request to go home, it’s actually kind of hard to predict who will be off-ed and who spared.
Perhaps my praise of writer Michael Nankin's gentle touch is misplaced, however, since any subvention of the horror genre in the macro sense is more than vented in the scene-to-scene. When faced with a choice between pursuing logical action to stop the advancing horror and being dumb, characters inevitably go for the latter. Thus, finding that their house is possessed, Glen and Posse decide to escape through the back yard—where the demons came from. At another point, when confronted with an unexpected zombie, is Terry's first instinct a) run screaming; b) get the shotgun so artfully foreshadowed; or c) approach the zombie with open-minded curiosity? Hint: this scene does not end well for Terry.
This, too, has its brand of appeal, in the same way of wooden acting and feathered bangs, both also prominently featured. Ultimately, most of what does entertain in The Gate seems thoroughly unintentional and very likely done in the service of a PG-13 rating. Is the film's ideal audience probably barely pubescent? Yes and, if at all possible, sheltered from the last two decades of developments in special effects. But if you stand with us who are easily manipulated by off-key violin music and know that the stuffed animal revolution is coming, set pride aside and grab a friend with a comfortable lap. You’ll never read Gulliver’s Travels the same way again.
*The reviewer would like to thank IMDB for its excellence in the service of making it look like she knows what she’s talking about.
**Glen’s father, incidentally, is played by Donny Osmond of the Mirror Universe, the one who retired to South Jersey and didn’t win Dancing with the Stars.
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