Consciousness Stream - The Gate

It's time for a little story about a problem with movie ratings. My current appreciation for weird horror movies is something I have in common with my father. Down when I was in the single digit age range, he would watch a lot of the sort of stuff I throw into the Consciousness Stream queue just after I went to bed. You know, before I went to bed. So I would hear all the screaming and splatter effects, but not see the goofy puppets responsible. Not a good system. Some of the tamer stuff would be watched in broad daylight. You know, the PG and PG-13 horror movies, like Monster Squad, and Gremlins 2. Stuff that really isn't scarring at all. Now, somehow or other, I ended up watching The Gate here when I was little, which was JUST released on DVD uh... 2 weeks ago from when I'm tossing this online for the first time. This messed me up for years. It's generally tame as horror movies go, but seriously, there is a scene or two which I will point out that are SO NOT APPROPRIATE for little kids.

We start right off with some credits, which remind us that the main character's sister is called Al. Which is pretty unorthodox. Also, the director is named Tibor, which is just plain great. Anyway, we start off with Kid here coming home in his nice happy 80s way to find that nobody is home and things are kinda weird. There's a half eaten dinner on the table, the door to his really surreally sparse back yard is open, a storm is brewing, and there's some weird sound from his tree house. Plus the TV seems to have turned itself on. So anyway, he climbs up, finds the noise to be a creepy talking doll, in the mundane "Mama!" sense, and then lightning strikes, the tree. At this point he wakes up because, yeah, this kinda had an obvious It's A Dream vibe going on, but the tree actually did come down it seems because here's some dudes chopping it up and hauling it away. Under the roots is this odd coconut shell looking geode. Geodes are awesome, so he calls his Nerdcore friend up to dig around under it and see if there's more. They dig for about a minute or so before uncovering the gates of hell.

No seriously. The actual physical gates to hell are actually in the form of this little cellar door type thing buried under MAYBE a foot of topsoil in this kid's back yard. That's the premise of this movie. Actually, it's a bit further down, but there's kind of a wide open shaft straight down right under where the tree was. Anyway, he pricks his finger on a big splinter, dropping it down in a possibly significant fashion, at which point we hear freaky animal sounds. Then shortly thereafter a huge swarm of insects boils up out of the hole. Nerdcode catches a couple in a jar and ponders how long they can live without air. Kid finds this to be cruel, but doesn't let them out or anything. Seems he keeps the jar on the table.

Anyway, Kid's very 80s parents (come to think of it, the dad looks a bit like the guy from House) are getting ready to go... somewhere or other, leaving the kids alone for the weekend. There's this whole tucking into bed exposition kid basically just establishing that Kid is a bit of a wimp, Nerdcore's screwed up from having a dead mom, and again, trip. Shortly after Dad leaves the room, Something freaky sounding scurries past the now closed door making a fairly freaky sound.

The next day, parents leave, and Al throws a crazy teenager 80s party. People get the big shaggy dog drunk, and hey, it's a good thing these are high school age kids. As we've learned from like, every other light hearted horror movie of the 1980s, college kids would try to summon demons from hell and just make things that much worse. Meanwhile, Kid and Nerdcore are upstairs trying to crack open a second geode they found. They eventually succeed, releasing a gaspy sound, some steam, glowing purple light, and impressing some magic words they of course read aloud on... OK, remember these things from the 80s? Where you had plastic wrap over this metal sheet and you could effectively write on it with a stylus that stuck the plastic down and made it look darker on the sheet, then you could clear it by lifting it up? Yeah, one of those. So they read the resulting klatu verata nikto sorta screed out loud, which is just going to exacerbate things.

Meanwhile, downstairs, those wacky teens aren't QUITE summoning demons, but they ARE trying to do the whole light as a feather stiff as a board thing, and when Kid comes down they actually do manage to flat out levitate him all the way up to the ceiling. He hits his head on a light, comes down, and runs off crying, because again, he's a total crybaby wimp. His sister and friend come to try and talk him out of his room, but he's all "I wanna call mom and dad!" This movie has a weird sort of pacing to it by the way. Usually with this sort of thing, we start the freakiness scale at 0 and slowly ramp it up, but this movie pretty well sarts things off at a consistent 3 or so.

So yeah, bedtime. The swarm of hell moths hitting the bug zapper are freaky, Kid's such a wimp he's freaked out by his own Godzilla toy, and here's Nerdcore getting up in the middle of the night and wandering downstairs to see his sorta-ghosty mom wandering in with a wind machine behind her. Meanwhile back in Kid's room, we've got a wallpaper pushing monster. You know what I mean right? Faces and hands pushing out of the wall? Now, here's a weird one. Nerdcore's downstairs hugging his dead mom right? Then it's suddenly revealed that it isn't his mom at all, but actually... the dog. Who's dead. So yeah, the dog died of quite likely natural causes, and its corpse was then possessed by a demon who impersonated this kid's dead mother to trick him into hugging a dog corpse.

The next day, Kid tries to call Mom and Dad to report that the dog is dead, but Al blocks him. Meanwhile Nerdcore, wandering around his own house, is totally living up to the name I've given him by rocking out to some Lovecraftian metal while wearing a rainbow blanket like an ominous hooded cloak. Rock on Nerdcore. Oh and there's still some random very 80s teens floating about, because Al seriously knows how to throw a party evidently. One teen volunteers to bury the dog, while the rest all go to the mall. Meanwhile, Kid is getting all misty-eyed at his dead dog photo album, and unwraps/tosses at the wall the model rocket he was planning to give Al for her birthday, because #@$% that! You levitate me into the ceiling, no present for you! Then he notices the bug zapper is shorting out and unplugs it, then he notices the hole he was geode hunting in, then filled in, is back, bigger, and full of dry ice.

Nerdcore comes over spontaneously, and having studied his metal band liner notes, is now an expert on demonology. No seriously, this band photocopied "The Dark Book" and included key demon summoning/hell gate opening rituals as liner notes. And basically it sums up the entire movie up to this point... including some rather obscure points, like the levitation bit and the dog dying. The only thing left to do is stick the dog's corpse in the hole as an offering to The Old Gods. You know, what Random Nameless Teen is about to do. Because hey, pre-dug hole! Meanwhile Kid and Nerdcore are playing his metal album backwards because they secretly recorded the ritual to seal the hell gate back up that way. Kid finds the ritual to be rather rude as they, wisely, immediately go through it.

Also, this here, as Al comes home? This is an awesome exchange of dialog. "What are you guys doing? Did you guys dig in that hole again?" "We accidentally summoned demons who used to rule the universe to come and take over the world." "But they're gone now." And... OK, NOW there's a cheap cellar door ceiling the gates to hell, because they stuck one on there. Before it was just blocked by a tree, and that's it. Anyway, while Kid and his sister play with the new model rocket she got at the mall, Nerdcore rereads his liner notes and more or less says "Huh. Says here that ritual only works when performed by someone pure of heart motivated by selfless love." or some such. Well I'm sure a nerdy 12 year old kid doing a favor for a friend works just as well! That night, Al invites more friends over, but for more of a low-key slumber party deal, and Kid has Nerdcore hang out too, with kid reading the liner notes before going to bed. Oh, and there's some freaky stop motion critter's shadow ominously cast on the wall downstairs, and the bug zapper's going crazy out the window again. But really, I'm sure your ritual worked just fine. Oh and there's more hell moths, and your window just shattered letting them all in as a really bad matte painting effect, but hey, you just get big bugs like that in the summer! Really! It's fine!

So some freaking out is done, and Al goes to shake Nerdcore awake to help clean up. Nerdcore comes up from behind to ask what they're doing. Bad sign. Turns out it's the dog corpse in the bed. Also under the dead something shouts "Kid! Kid!" and muppet hands try to drag Al under, and now we get to that first trauma scene I mentioned. Let me just pause the movie here and explain why this scene here should NEVER be in a movie rated less than R. Everyone freaks out at the demons dragging you under the bed bit, justifiably, and run downstairs and frankly straight for the front door. Right outside, oh hey! Here's mom and dad! Apparently they just got home! Kid runs out to greet them, and is grabbed because these are actually demons disguised as his parents, and there's this whole bit with Dad's head caving in on itself as this decaying white goop and maybe some maggots filled husk that falls to the ground. Why is this not appropriate? Is it the goriness? No, that's actually pretty freaking tame when you actually see it. It's that when you're a little kid, as Kid here is, and as I was when I first saw this, you generally tend to be irrationally freaked out by monsters and such, despite being fully aware that they don't actually exist. The mitigating factor is that that same irrational part of your little kid mind declares that your parents can protect you from absolutely anything, and as long as you stick with them, you're safe. So, any time you have a movie where some kid's parents are secretly replaced by monsters, be it a disguise, possession, corruption, whatever? That is going to seriously seriously traumatize any little kid, because you just replaced their always safe thing with something that can potentially kill them. It's like having a typewriter and item box get up and try to kill you in Resident Evil.

So yeah. Back to the movie. Everyone, which is now Kid, Nerdcore, Al, and her random twin girl friends, are now locking things down as best they can and... really, it's weird how not scary the environment is. There's no trees outside to obscure the view, just nice mowed grass, and it's not even all that dark out, it's kind of that sun-JUST-went-down sorta twilight. Anyway, Al wanders outside and almost steps on a couple of these weird little knee-high stop motion homonculi. She freaks and runs inside, slamming one of their little arms in the door. Said arm eventually breaks off, falls to the ground, and turns into a swarm of very fast moving claymation maggots that scurry under the crack to rejoin the body. Phone rings, its another demon screaming "YOU'VE BEEN BAD!" which is kinda their thing they say. The phone then bursts into flames and melts, and at THIS point Al finally realizes the kids weren't kidding about summoning demons.

Everyone has to head down to their nice pleasant furnished basement to find the liner notes and take another stab at their unsummoning. It's less pleasant now, since the demons are demoning things up. For instance, the nice family portrait hanging on the wall now has dead mangled parents in it. Remembering they can burn things, demonic forces torch the liner notes too. Doh! Al says hey, let's look in the bible! That should have something! Nerdcore scores more points by noting that the demons we're dealing with are older than the bible, so that probably won't work. Which is an observation which scores some nerd points on principle, but the logic doesn't hold. The logic does hold though that, to the best of my knowledge, there really aren't any demon banishing rituals in the bible. So they uh, just kinda wing it. Partway through hs improvised little ritual here, Nerdcore notices it seems to be working, what with the dry ice effects all getting sucked back down, and kinda gets overconfident. Then he slips and falls on in. At this point, a bunch of the little homonculi start to swarm all over and bite him. It's this weird mix of really silly and legitimately unnerving. Like watching someone get mauled by fraggles or something. Anyway, he starts crawling up, Kid meanwhile grabs the fallen bible and tries some more improvised exorcism. Nerdcore is pretty much all "Quit trying to close the gates of hell until I finish climbing out! Eventually though, he's out, goes back to trying this out, and eventually just gives up, swears and tosses the bible down the shaft. It explodes, the hole seals up, and hey, everything all seems fine.

We go back inside, the twins are cowering in the closet with knives and garlic, there's a mysteriously open door though in the kitchen! Oh. There were just more jerk teens barging in. So, everyone leaves but our core 3 people, who note that it's almost dawn. Nerdcore says yeah, I'm not sleeping for at least a week. Anyway, we generally are bringing things down. Oh, and then a corpse bursts out of the wall. Specifically, the corpse of the drywaller who was sealed into the wall in a story Nerdcore told forever ago about how there's an evil vibe to the house. Nerdcore is rather shocked by this, because "I just made that up!" Well, apparently this is poetic justice then! Zombie drywaller grabs Nerdcore, and drags him into the wall, which seals behind him. Meanwhile there's some freaky eyes on open hands drawn in blod on the curtains inside, and drywall zombie in the mirror behind Al upstairs. It bursts out they throw stuff at it, it falls over, and we hit traumatic memory #2 for me from this movie.

Drywall zombie falls forward to the grown, instantly shattering into about two dozen homonculi as he hits the ground. There's no real deep psychological impact to this or anything, it's just an AMAZINGLY well done effect. I just went back and watched it frame by frame and it is just a beautiful seamless transition from guy in zombie makeup to a bunch of claymation dudes. Seriously, it's one of the best special effects I've ever seen. Largely because they don't dwell on it, it just happens and we move right on. Speaking of moving on, while I was gushing over that, they run out of the room, Kid goes to grab Dad's shotgun from the closet, which is odd, because you can just freakin' step on the homonculi or something. While grabbing for it, a feral Nerdcore bursts out of the wall and bits his hand. Al comes to the rescue and stabs him in the eye with a barbie, for the goriest scene in the movie honestly. Of course, he then disappears, so this was presumably more phantasm than zombie here. Anyway, they have time to reform into the zombie and drag Al off.

Now, there was this whole bit of needing two human sacrifices before the demons can really go to town, and that was it. So suddenly our hellmouth spreads open, shredding the whole first floor of the house. A whole bunch of homonculi crawl out, and do a cute little dance, to summon their really really big pal, who looks pretty much just like'em, but black, with stubby extra arms and squinty extra eyes. Kid recalls that love and friendship to really kill'em bit was actually properly labelled "love and light" and hey, that means a big flaming rocket bought as a sincere present for his sister should count, right? Heck, says "love" right in the card! He goes to aim it but, frankly, freezes at the sight of the 3 story tall demon in the middle of his house. It... gently grabs his head for a bit, then leaves. Apparently sensing his true innocence or something. Oh. Nope! Infecting him with freaky weirdness that causes an eye to grow out of his palm. At this point, Kid's freaking out as the demons are all kinda retreating into a rising pillar of smoke bursting out of the hell hole. He's all "take me instead!" and "What do you want? Another sacrifice!?!" So he... takes a broken piece of glass and stabs his twitchy new hand-eye. I feel obligated to make a hand-eye coordination joke here, but everything that comes to mind is just a bad pun.

He freaks out a bit more, then goes and gets that rocket ready. Ah, turns out the launch controls just needed batteries. So, he waits for Mr. Big Demon to come back, shouts "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" in honestly surprisingly bad-ass fashion, and shoots the sucker in the chest with it. It's kinda weird how this plays out really, since it just kinda gets absorbed into its chest, then the demon just kinda cowers, and of course, the resulting blast sends Kid flying right the heck out into the yard. So anyway, yeah, house explodes, various homonculi apparently rocket up into the sky and basically turn into fireworks, and... honestly enough of the exterior walls are left intact that the repair bills shouldn't be TOO high. Also, hey, the dog comes back to life! You know, there's another horror movie I saw recently, and I don't want to go into too much detail here, because it's an Actually Good Movie I want people to see without spoiling it for them, where this sorta thing goes down, and eventually a demon coughs up the cute little innocent dead pet, and it DOESN'T come back to life, and there I thought that really just was not fair at all, because, seriously, this was laser-guided evil at someone who deserved it, so the pet really didn't deserve anything that happened to it. Anyway though, yeah, Al and Nerdcore are also to be found alive and well inside the house after all this, and then the dog even goes over to the original hell hole site and digs up the shoe that Nerdcore lost while climbing out. So things are pretty much set to be all well and good when the parents get home, except for all the actual structural damage to the house from the exploding demon bit... which I suppose isn't THAT bad compared to the damage from the big crazy friday night party, which was a freaking lot.

So yeah. That's The Gate. It's actually a pretty neat movie with some really atypical-in-a-good-way pacing going on, and seriously good special effects, but seriously, it's a bad fit to push as a kids' movie. I mean, just getting back to the Mom and Dad are monsters trauma, the movie actually does end before they return home. So, the last time you see them is as rotting monster-folk. So yeah, this is the sort of movie where I'm going to go and check out the special features, which reveals a couple interesting things. First off, this actually was originally intended to be a very adult, unsettling, R-rated horror movie, until the studio came in and went no no no! If you're making a movie staring kids, you have to make it a movie FOR kids! And they kinda rather awkwardly toned things down to achieve that.

The other thing is, holy smurf I have to gush about the special effects here for a bit. All the special effects in this movie are by a guy named Randall William Cook, who was apparently a huge Ray Harryhausen fan and wanted to be him when he grew up. So aside from doing everything himself, he went crazy frelling oldschool with this. OK, the arm turning into little clay maggots bit, that's stop motion, obviously, as is the big final demon. Nerdcore getting bit by homonculi and then tossing them across the room, that's puppetry. And I assume the hand eye was bare bones looking through a hole in picture or some such. Everything else though? Guys in costumes with forced perspective. The dozens of homonculi crawling out of little underground tunnels to swarm over Nerdcore? Guys in costumes with forced perspective. The awesomely effective bit where the zombie shatters into a whole bunch of them? Guys in costumes with forced perspective. They built a huge version of that room, with two tiny little elevated platforms, on which the kids and the zombie dummy stood. On the floor below a whole mess of dudes in demon costumes stand in zombie-fall formation. They push the dummy over, it just plain falls off the ledge and out of frame, and aside from some sound editing and a bit of a cut mid-fall so the dummy slipping through the crack in the forced perspective floor doesn't distract you, tada. That's how to do one of the best looking effects I've ever seen. Give the dude an award someone. Besides all the people who gave him awards for doing special effects on the Lord of the Rings movies I mean.