Worth Your Valuable Time

I caught this over the weekend using The Movie Channel's "On Demand" feature and it's pretty much the best thing I've demanded my television show me, like, ever. What's even cooler? I used to watch this movie with my cousin Jack (who is now my married cousin Jack, gross) on a beat-to-shit VHS tape when we were kids. It still holds up surprisingly well. Or, rather, it freaked me the fuck out when I was eight or nine, and now twenty years later it still gave me prickly chills and at one point even made me go, "ACK!!!"

Now, yes, you could make the argument that this means I'm a total pussy. However, I choose to believe that The Gate is just an effective piece of work that makes a lot of other kid-centric horror films look like old copies of Goosebumps books that got left out in the rain.

Oh, so what's The Gate about? Basically, it's about two kids (one of whom is played by a twelve year old Stephen Dorff) that discover a portal to hell in one of their backyards. But it's so much more than that. Here's what else this movie's got going for it:

-Heavy metal

-Hidden messages in heavy metal

-Demonology

-Model rockets

-Love between siblings

-Geode collecting

-Eyeballs in hands

-A Barbie doll used as a weapon

-A zombie in the walls

-Excellent, day-glo 80s fashion

-Unusually good special effects, given the time it was made

-Fucked up melting faces and phones

-Tiny monsters that showed up in my nightmares for years

And on and on and on. It was directed by this dude named Tibor Takacs, who does a lot of Canadian TV now, but also directed the fine I, Madman which is more of an adult-centric horror movie, but is just as batshit crazy.

So do yourself a favor and check this out. It's not like anything you've seen before or, frankly, ever will see again. They don't make flicks like The Gate anymore, which is fucking lame times a million. Because The Gate is awesome.