Sometimes, life just gets overwhelmingly busy and it’s hard to devote hours to preparing an in depth post investigating deep ideas. When that happens, the only place to turn is the short form movie blurb. It’s baaack!
The Gate (1987)
This is one that somehow didn’t get on my radar until the last couple of years. Here we have a classic 80s kids vs monsters tale as a couple of suburban youngsters inadvertently open a gate to hell and have to turn back the demons that start pouring forth, drawing their instructions from the liner notes of a heavy metal album.
The stand-out thing about it for me was the fact that, for a horror movie targeted at kids, it really has some weight and it really has some horror. Things happen that feel ‘wrong’ and the sadness that attends them (such as the death of the family dog) is not glossed over by scary movie fun. There is mourning, there is revulsion that persists. There is some solid dread in having made such a huge mistake and not knowing how to reverse it.
Beyond that occasional heaviness, it is also a really fun movie. The demonic monsters are all pretty weird and the late 80s practical/optical effects that bring them to life are refreshing in their corporeality. There is some comedy that works and most importantly, there are relationships that can be believed: between the central brother and sister, the best friends, the parents. These relationships, and the feeling of betrayal that sometimes enters into them, really ground this otherwise wild kids’ monster movie.
And the whole thing really does hurtle towards a pretty epic conclusion as all hell literally breaks loose before the kids manage to tamp it all down with, yes, the power of love. So it’s got a bit of everything: childish humor, horror and dread, a couple solid scares, big excitement, emotional self-sacrifice, and rather enjoyable special effects of the era. I don’t know why this one doesn’t have a higher profile out there or how I never really heard about it until quite recently.