The great thing about the beginning of the year is I have no compulsion to try and catch up with a load of recently released movies with the intention of including them on my 'best of the year list'. That leaves me free to catch up with some long-time classics, guilty pleasure treats or recommended movies that I've been dubious about watching for one reason or another. However, in this case I'd thought I'd catch up on a bucket load of exploitation films that I've either not seen for decades or have never seen in my life, despite their infamous reputations.
With a remake due later in 2011, I'd thought I'd revisit The Gate. The results?:-
1/ I barely recognised star Stephen Dorff, here a 14 year old boy playing much younger. Considering he grew up to be the bad ass villain of Blade, he's a bit wooden here.
2/ It's small scale (confined to the modern detached estate house), cheap (badly lit with a crappy synth score) and slower than a deceased tri-athlete (bugger all happens for 40 minutes).
3/ The tone is all over the shop. Since the movie's set up concentrates on the antics of two bored children and a fairly responsible 15 year old girl, the assumption is you're watching a kids movie. Later we get heavy gore and zombies wothy of a adult nasty. Unlike this years The Hole, with is essentially a vastly superior remake to this clustercuss, it can't decide a consistent tone to pitch at it's audience.
4/ When the gate, a dirty great mud hole at the bottom of the garden, decides to open it livens up sporadically. The effects are surprisingly good being a mixture of unrestrained gore and ingenious animatronic/stop motion animation demons. If The Gate has a silver lining, it's right here.
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