Hellgate

  The 80s horror barrel-scraping experiment continues with... 1989's Hellgate. Spoiler alert: it's a terrible movie. Just fucking terrible. About as bad as it gets without stooping down to the crappiest reaches of regional productions. Full disclosure: It's so bad, after ten minutes I started abusing the Arrow player's speed up feature, which shaved the running time by 50%. It still sucked.
 As a bonus, I've just found out it was made by Americans in South Africa during the Apartheid. And voilà! What little sympathy it might have got (making movies is hard, they sure went for it, it's got some cool stuff, this might be a fun watch with friends and/or while drunk, etc.) has evaporated.

Piano Perv got a laugh, at least.

 We start in a house in the woods on a dark and stormy night, as a dipshit tells horror stories to two girls. I have no idea if it's the insipid direction (William A. Levey), the witless script (Michael S. O'Rourke, writer/director of the much better Moonstalker), the charisma-free actors, or a perfect storm of all three, but holy hell, the characters in this movie are particularly painful to watch. Wooden, witless and... white? Dammit, I was this close to a WWW dad joke. What a woeful waste.
 The dipshit (Evan Klisser, I think; I'm not watching this again to find his name) is trying to tell horror stories, just spouting the hoariest crap you could imagine, so one of the girls (Petrea Curran or Joanne Ward) tells her own story. In this one (which she swears is 'true') an angelic girl (Abigail Wolcott) gets kidnapped by a gang of grubby, nasty bikers who take her to her nearby home town of Hellgate to have their filthy biker way with her in the middle of town. But they get interrupted by the girl's father (Carel Trichardt) and the girl dies in the fight. You know, your standard tragic story, only really fucking stupid.

 But it gets worse, because that's only half the story. Hellgate becomes a ghost town, but Father stays behind - he's got a poster of his daughter in his studio, a big picture of her looking sultrily at the camera, looking exactly like a Guess jeans ad or something. Just a normal memento dad would have of his dear daughter. And of course he sees footage of his daughter clumsily superimposed on it, because this is a shit movie made by people with no taste.
 And no sense. To wit: in the same scene her father comes into possession of a magical crystal that shoots reviving rays, which also turns things into horrible monsters. This is one of the rare bits of the movie where cool stuff happens - first a goldfish turns mutant and bursts its bowl, then blows up. The second experiment is a stuffed sea turtle, which is revived and attacks dad, and then blows up.
 You know where this is heading: Daughter's gonna get revived. Because no taste, no sense.

 The resurrected daughter, surprisingly enough, doesn't explode. She instead turns into some sort of succubus who inexplicably falls for the protagonist of the movie (Ron Palillo), a friend of the three idiots in the cabin from the beginning and all-round fuckwit who gets lost on his way there. Random shit happens, then they all head to Hellgate, where the dead come to life and attack them and things get even more random. Magicians cut off their fingers, a pretty cool zombie puppet gropes one of the girls,  a head in a fridge starts belting out hoary dad-jokes. Nothing makes sense, but not in a good, dream-logic way; It's more of a "these people couldn't be arsed to make things fit together" way.

 An example: a girl wanders into a weird burlesque show where there's a... supposedly scary can-can dance, which the girl is entranced by. And then someone comes from behind and strangles her with a rope. 
 I mean, I thought one of the can-can girls was going to kick her head off, or squeeze it to mulch between her thighs. Something apropos. But no, that'd require effort to come up with. So we get murderdad and a lousy fucking rope.

 It's lazy, miscalculated shit all the way down, happening to characters that no one could possibly care about and executed with minimum flair or personality.

 There are some good stunts, a couple of cool practical effects, and some decent explosions; you know, the kind of stuff even talentless hacks like the folks involved in this movie could seem to pull off regularly back in the eighties. There are some random bits of weirdness that at least work on paper, like when the succubus roams naked, unnoticed through a ballroom with couples dancing. It's ostensibly a horror-comedy, and that description works in the sense that the comedy works just as well as the horror; However, there are a few involuntary so-bad-it's-almost good moments.
 For the vast majority of its runtime, however, it's just a waste of time.