Horror enthusiasts of a different generation than mine speak highly of the theatrical shockers of the 1980s that set their nerves on edge. I usually disagree, but here’s an exciting horror show that supports their case — it’s packed with spooky, imaginative ideas. Lionsgate’s new Blu-ray displays its visual qualities to optimum advantage.
In the fantasies Gremlins, Explorers, Twilight Zone the Movie and Matinee, Joe Dante established himself as the expert on pre-teen horror and science fiction. But a strong contender for classic status in the adolescent horror stakes is 1987’s The Gate, an endearing thrill ride that goes just about as far into the Shock Zone as a movie for kids should. Although every child is different this show is gentle enough to be suitable for those at or nearing the double digits. Lord knows what irresponsible parents nowadays show kids (a form of child abuse, in my view). But there is a place in wholesome entertainment for fantastic jeopardy, and The Gate fits the bill.
The story by Michael Nankin is your standard tale of kids going nuts when Mom and Dad are away, containing roughly seventy minutes of very non-standard tykes-versus-demons combat. The beautifully cast child actors are young Glen (a very young Stephen Dorff), his cheerful older sister Al (Christa Denton) and neighborhood kid and Heavy Metal fan Terry (Louis Tripp). Al volunteers to babysit her younger brother while the folks are gone, a choice that leads to a lively unscheduled house party. But the strange hole left behind after the demolition of a dead tree convinces occult-fan Terry that a portal to Hell is opening up in Glen’s back yard. Eerie phenomena pile up after Glen finds weird geodes in the tree roots. Other phenomena persuade Terry that the prophecies in a cabalistic record album are coming true — the entire rock group perished in a plane crash. After the family dog dies, the house is overrun with demonoid ‘minions,’ nasty little homunculi prone to biting. The demons in the hole exploit the kids’ adolescent-angst guilt, leading to surreal horrors from their nightmares. A zombie-like ‘Work Man’ (Carl Kraines) rumored to have been buried in the walls when the house was built, emerges to drag victims off into a ghastly parallel dimension. Glen retaliates with Satanic incantations and readings from the Bible, but what will put an end to the supernatural infestation?
The Gate is an amusing and exciting show, executed with considerable imagination and skill. Most of the budget goes into a smorgasbord of marvelous pre-CGI visual effects. Many of the best do not even involve standard optical printing. Director Tibor Takács gets fine performances from his kid actors, steering them away from the irritatingly profane / cute template formed by films like The Goonies. Sixteen year-old Al throws her forbidden unsupervised party, and the worst that happens is that a few kids smoke. Glen and Terry aren’t perfect — they callously jar up some moths to die — but they mean well. Glen is a serious little problem solver, and a tough customer when facing supernatural monsters. The pleasantly geeky Terry has a great scene lip-synching to a Goth cult record album. Both Terry and Glen are confronted with demonic imitations of their absent parents, in Terry’s case, a deceased mother. To the film’s credit, the traumatic encounters are handled with discretion.
Other touches from writer Mike Nankin reflect the anarchic sense of humor he displayed in his wickedly funny 1976 UCLA student film, Gravity. Thirty years down the line, conservative audiences may take exception to the very presence of Satanic references, and reject the script’s dismissal of the Bible as a useful tool against the hell-spawn menace. Actually, the Bible does prove to be partly effective. Other events reverse PC expectations: today’s escapist fare routinely tolerates the slaughter of hundreds of people, but threatening a cute dog is now unacceptable film content. The Gate milks some great laughs out of a teenager searching for a way to dispose of the family mutt, a shaggy sack ‘o rigor mortis. More power, I say.
The effects of The Gate are organized and designed by Randall William Cook and shape up as all-round inspired moviemaking. The job was just big enough to necessitate the outsourcing of some matte vistas and whirlwind effects to Bill Taylor and Syd Dutton’s Illusion Arts. But Cook tackles the tough problems with imagination, designing the creepy minion monsters and performing a number of alarmingly good-looking tricks with in-the-camera techniques. Cook oversaw cleverly designed forced perspective set-ups taht put normal-sized kids in the same frame with a dozen of the cavorting, spastic little minions. An act of production daring requiring the construction of special sets, the forced-perspective technique is rarely used but always a knockout, as seen in Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People from a couple of generations earlier. The illusions are flawless, because the motions are all natural. Aha, somebody knows what a lens nodal point is for, because the camera can even pan and tilt on the forced-perspective action.
These effects are greatly aided by the rubber minion suits fabricated by makeup effects specialist Craig Reardon. Watching the minions in action blurs our receptors, even now. They do things that only stop-motion animation can do, but we know that can’t be the case. The best movie effects are often simple magic tricks, like the clever distract-and-substitute switcheroos in Jean Cocteau’s classic Beauty and the Beast. Drafting something with computer animation tools is relatively risk-free compared to pulling off an elaborate illusion with modest resources. These effects have more gravitas than a bushel of CGI and wire removal.
Cook also contributes an impressive stop-motion animation demon, a multi-eyed, multi-armed horror that looks enormous because it’s sculpted at a very fine level of detail. Cook gives its motions a blur effect for a better match with the live action, concocting some really classy (and difficult looking) stop-motion shots. One of the best is a truck-in to the demon lurching upright in the entranceway of the house, with a line of minions observing from their foreground perch on the second- floor handrail. Fans don’t always realize that effects designers are the de facto directors of major sections of movies like these.
Another Craig Reardon contribution is one of the classier bogeymen of the 1980s, the immured Work Man. This guy looks like a mummified old coot, not a Romero goreshow; Reardon makes him just disturbing enough to be prime nightmare material. When The Work Man drags helpless kids away into gaping holes in the drywall, The Gate achieves the same effect as Poltergeist without the strobe-lit bombast and overkill.
The Gate is to be congratulated for avoiding a cheap nihilistic ending of the kind that pretty much knocked the fun out of horror from the late 1960s on — this is primarily a kid’s show. Its dead dogs and demonic incantations make it too tough to be an afternoon special, yet it’s not so appalling as to turn children into little fatalists. It was marketed as an exploitation feature but is far better than that.
