The Gate

With Imaginary we saw what modern kid's horror looks like - I hope it was aimed at kids, anyhow. It must have put me in the mood for an actual, non-pusillanimous attempt at kid-friendly scares, because here I am, revisiting The Gate for the first time in more (depressingly more) than twenty years.

 It's definitely from a different era. Where Imaginary desperately avoids showing any sort of injury, and spends considerable effort trying to convince us a bear moving in tiny increments is scary, The Gate gives us an eye gouging, some deliciously gooey shots of disintegrating flesh, a truly grotesque use of an animal carcass, and a sprinkling of very imaginative (and disturbing) surrealism. Instead of following a grown-ass woman going through hoary, overtly clichéd family drama, the eighties version features actual kids dealing with their own sibling issues in a comparatively subtle way.

 And this is not a case of comparing a bad movie with an older classic, because I'm not entirely convinced The Gate is... well, good. I find it incredibly hard to be objective about it because it's a well-loved movie I saw as a teen. I still love it, but it's impossible to deny that it's got issues.

The kids ain't one of them. Our protagonist, Glenn (a teeny tiny Stephen Dorff, in his first role) is a remarkably good child actor, and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) and sister Al (Christa Denton)... well, they're enthusiastic, and perfectly acceptable for the sort of film this is. Denton's got the distinction of being the one older kid at the movie who actually looks like a teen, and that's because she was fifteen when this was shot! Definitely a rarity at the time.

 Glenn and Al are latchkey kids, left to fend alone for three days while their parents go off somewhere; Terry is Glenn's misfit friend, who spends most of his time at their house and whose acting out is handled surprisingly empathetically by the film's script (by Michael Nankin).

 The thing is, the parents (unwittingly) left open a mysterious but clearly evil gaping hole in the backyard. Parenting styles were different in the eighties, but come on folks, leaving your kids alone with a gateway to hell was probably frowned upon even back then. Things start going wrong almost immediately, starting with a fairly cheesy/upsetting nightmare and the subsequent death of a beloved family member - but Al won't let Glenn call their parents back because it's her responsibility as a teen to throw non-stop parties with her airhead friends (which include a very young, but still 22, Kelly Rowan).

 There are some mysterious events surrounding the satanic hole which Terry, being a Troubled Kid (tm) manages to spot because he of course listens to weird European metal records with liner notes that include instructions on how to open and close them. Yeah, it's very much a kid's horror film script. There are clever touches, like geodes leaving satanic imprints on a tracing pad... but the cheesy ideas have them vastly outnumbered. It's knowingly campy.

  A more serious problem is that it takes rather a long time for thing to get going - there's some rising weirdness, but it's not until the halfway mark that the pit disgorges troops of tiny demons and other monsters to terrify the household. Once it does, though, it really gets going. The visual and practical effects are an absolute delight, and in House or Poltergeist fashion, the supernatural threat changes form and tactics continuously.

 All this allows director Tibor Takács and his crew throw horror concepts around with abandon, rendering the already creaking plot almost nonsensical, but... I mean, why would I complain about a kid getting an eye implanted on the palm of his hand when I could instead be savouring a very weird slice of tween-friendly body horror? I'd even argue that all the craziness gives the film a welcome fever-dream edge.

 I'd say it's got enough going for it to compensate for its pacing issues and some iffy acting and plotting, but... of course I would. And you know what? Objectivity is overrated.