The Gate (1987)

Director: Tibor Takacs

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Christa Denton, Louis Tripp, Kelly Rowan, Jennifer Irwin, Deborah Grover

More info: IMDb

Tagline: There's a Passageway - A Gate Behind Which the Demons Wait to Take Back What Was Once Theirs...pray it's not too late.

Plot: A young boy (Glen) and his best friend (Terry) accidentally open a gate to hell when a rotten tree is removed from the backyard of Glen's house. When his dog die and a friend of Glen's sister, the teenager Alexandra, buries the animal in the hole, demons from an ancient civilization are released, seeking for two human sacrifices to dominate the world. Glen, Al and Terry, who are spending the weekend alone in the house, fight to save their lives and close the hole.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Probably not.

Nice! I knew absolutely nothing about this going in, therefore I had no idea this was a horror movie about and for kids. But wait, it's really good and it's a lot more adult than you'd think. This has got some grisly moments and it's a lot more mature than any kids horror movie I've ever seen.


The kids do a fine job and the story is good as long as you don't look too deep into it (like how none of the neighbors show up once the shit goes down) but it's the special effects that steal the show. There's A LOT of stop motion animation and it's not just one little demon (see pic above), it's a small army of stop motion animated demons. And the climax features a giant stop motion animated demon that takes the cake. It's so good that it now stands as a huge 'fuck you' to CGI. It's superb and it would be for that reason that I might ever watch this again. I made the mistake of watching it right after RED STATE (2011) and it should have been the other way around but that's what happens when you go in cold to these things. It's an awful lot of fun and it was such a delight to see some truly fantastic special effects.