The Gate

(1987)**
While looking for geodes in Glen’s backyard, tweens Glen and Terry discover a very dangerous looking hole, which they soon deduce is a gateway to a demon world where the “Demon Lord” has been imprisoned for an unspecified length of time (I’m thinking a long time). When Terry foolishly recites some incantations from the liner notes of a heavy metal album, he unwittingly unleashes the Demon Lord and a gaggle of midget demon minions upon the world. All hell breaks loose (literally) and the boys scramble to come up with a way to defeat the dark and his claymation minions before it’s curtains for humanity.

This is the first time I’ve seen The Gate since I watched it in the theater with Octopunk 21 years ago (check out Octo’s hilarious account of the experience). I figured that 21 years was enough time for me to give it another viewing – perhaps we were too hard on this film at the time? Nope, it turns out that we weren’t hard enough! Octopunk noted in one of his reviews that the 1980s get undeservedly trashed and stereotyped when in reality it’s the late 80s that truly deserve our derision. I couldn’t agree more, especially when it comes to horror. It’s well known among some of you Horrorthonners that I believe horror died when Freddy Kruger wore sunglasses on a beach during the opening sequence of Nightmare on Elm Street IV; this is my jump the shark horror moment. During the late 80s something terrible happened to horror, it devolved into humor and one-liners at the expense of genuine scares. Worse, and this is a big worse, we started getting movies like The Gate and Goonies that focused on young teens in peril. What’s wrong with this, you ask? Plenty. Once you get past the pain of enduring human beings at their most annoying stage of development (I’m talking to you 13-16 year olds) you realize that these kids will never be placed in any real jeopardy because they’re kids and kids don’t die in movies (yeah yeah, I know about the Blob). So you’re left with are protagonists, who look like this,

"Don't you just want to punch me in the face?"

but you know that they’re going to be okay in the end. I’m not advocating the slaughter of tweens, I’m merely noting that if you start watching a horror movie that focuses on tweens just know that they’re going to be just fine. Also, during the late 80s CG was not really an fx tool so any sort of creature was going to be either a puppet or animated clay. It’s virtually impossible to be scared of puppets or animated clay, which also saps the strength of these monster movies. So you have tweens being attacked by puppets and lumps of clay, um, not scary.

Come on, I'm scary!

Okay, it’s not all bad. I must admit that I do get a nostalgic kick out of watching late 80s movies. The parts of The Gate that work for me are not the scenes of mayhem but the scenes that just show the two buddies rapping about stupid things that seem so important at that age. I recall having many, many similar discussions with Octo when we were at that age (e.g., who is the best James Bond? Could Batman really defeat Superman?). Actually, we still discuss such matters.