If anyone remembers Balt, he once gave a list of films he just thought were the greatest of horror films he'd seen, and since it was Balt, I decided to take down this list and put them on my Netflix list to watch. I finally watched recommendations, and my main thought here is that Balt was blowing smoke recommending a bunch of movies he knew no one had seen...especially one that is PG-13 with a 0 (that's a zero) body count.

Sometimes, when someone recommends a movie to watch, you take it with a grain of salt. You decide whether or not it's worth spending time on based on what you know of the person, their tastes, their criticisms, etc. Such is the way I came across this film, and frankly, I feel like strangling the one who recommended and removing from my list everything else he thinks is so good. Really, I think the only thing this one has going for it is obscurity, and that's not such a bad thing in this case.

The Gate is the story of a couple of kids who find a geode is the backyard under a tree that collapsed (under some bizarre and almost dreamlike circumstances), but when they try to dig for more geodes, they come across this deep crevasse like a cave and one really huge geode. One thing leads to another and they find that this cave houses a gateway between our world and the demon world, and they have thus far managed to activate this gate and only the sacrifice of two people can bring the demons into this world to make it their hell (bwa ha ha).

Anyway, this film is wrought with ideas gone wrong beginning with the entire concept of how this gate is to be opened and how it is accomplished. First, the "magic words" were inscribed on a doodle pad when the big geode was broken open. This was early on in the film and where my belief started breaking down. A doodle pad? Come on. Now, said doodle pad (It's hard to say doodle pad without smiling, isn't it? Come now, this is a horror movie.) was originally in the house where the gate is located, but somehow, it found its way to the other kids house, so when he was listening to this satanic record album, he could discover the striking similarities between the writing on the doodle pad (hehe, doodle) and the writing in the sizable insert to this record album.

Turns out this tree was busted at the very time when the constellations aligned and the gate could be opened. It also just so happened to be the weekend when the kids' parents went out of town so the demons could attack without parental involvement. I'll bet you can guess what else happened in this movie...

If you said party with a bunch of irresponsible teenagers, then you would be 100% correct. We get all the good cliches of smoking and drinking and dancing, along with insulting the kid brother and general irritatingness that comes with movie teen parties when the parents are out of town.

It looks like this film was made on a shoestring budget. There were some decent stop motion animation effects that blended fairly well with the live action. However, some of the other effects having to do with some moths imposed on the background image were nothing short of shoddy. Huge black outlines around the whole mess which only served to take away from the experience. Sure, it's 1987, but these things could have been cleaned up back then too.

Finally, let's talk about pacing. It was 45 minutes before anything significant happened. We get a few bouts of weirdness, but nothing exceptional. The main kid levitating and a weird occurrence to the friend is about the limit of this first part of the movie beyond the curiosity of the hole in the backyard. There are some decent setups and payoffs here and there, but it just moves really slowly with no perceived threat beyond the gaping hole in the backyard that only threatens with B-movie proportions. This means we are TOLD what it's for, but we never SEE it do anything besides using up the budget buying more dry ice to keep the steam coming.

In the end, this movie was really nothing exceptional. The threat is barely threatening until it finally shows itself very late in the film. It does have some decent characters, but as soon as one of them says "wait here while I check it out," my eyes roll and they miss out on perfection. The plot was contrived, to say the least, and was difficult to accept given all of the coincidences that had to happen to make it conceivable. The main thing you'll have going for you here is a movie no one has seen so you can recommend it and look like a horror hound for having caught a movie from the 80's that no one else has seen. Gosh, I feel so privileged.

Yes... this is not the best movie... but when you're 8 years old and watching this movie... alone in a dark room... on a stormy night... with your slightly older cousins who you thought were the bravest peole in the world and they're terrified... it'll scare the shit out of you...

...oh, how i was traumatized...

Is this the one with the large demon that rises up in the middle of the house and the kids are on the stairs?

If so, I enjoyed the film as a 10 year old, back in late '87. But since I saw this again a few months back on Scream, I have to agree with everything George said.

This is the one with the demon that rises up in the middle of the house and a model rocket fit into the climactic resolution in some way I still don't understand. I admit I have The Gate 2 waiting to be watched right now as well, so I may post an opinion about that one though it won't be a Balt recommended special.

Quoted from George Willson This is the one with the demon that rises up in the middle of the house and a model rocket fit into the climactic resolution in some way I still don't understand. I admit I have The Gate 2 waiting to be watched right now as well, so I may post an opinion about that one though it won't be a Balt recommended special.

That's right! I had to laugh when they pulled that rocket out of their room.

Is Balt's list still around anywhere? Since I'm a horror buff, I'd like to take a look at the list again and see what he had listed. A quick search found nothing.

I'm not sure. I know it was buried within another thread in one of his little fits. I just took it all down and figured I'd get to it eventually. I know there were a couple of Dario Argento flicks in there: Opera and The Card Player. It had Dead & Breakfast. I can't remember all of them, but there were definitely some obscure movies on that list. One of them was Stagefright, but I found a Stagefright and Stage Fright, so I put both on the list.

I searched as well, but didn't find much. Since Balt deleted his user name, you can't just find a post of his and get a history.

I'll give him credit for Dead & Breakfast - I really like that movie and after I watched it, went out and bought it. It's not a classic horror movie, but something along the lines of Dawn of the Dead and Shawn of the Dead.