Beyond the Gates (Review)
Michael Scott
Remember all that time ago when I reviewed Turbo Kid? I said that it was a great example of low-budget filmmaking. It was a fantasy film that did the most with the least. Mad Max jr.
Well, Beyond the Gates, unfortunately, is the antithesis of that.
It's sluggish, boring, overly graphic, and misses every chance to be cool that gets tossed its way.
The elevator pitch for the movie is something like this: Two brothers meet up for the first time in years to close down their father's video store that has been abandoned for some time. There father went missing and never came back. Along the way they find out that their dad got caught up in a Jumanji-style haunted game, but this time it's a VHS game, not just a regular board game. On the way issues of abandonment, broken marriages, alcoholism, and responsibility abound.
Made by the same guys who did the bizarrely great John Dies at the End, the movie doesn't deal with any with any of the issues mentioned. It just... mentions them. The main character is revealed to have given up drinking after breaking his wife's wrist during an argument that gets physical. But we never seen this come to anything. It's just mentioned for the sake of filling time of the long-feeling, bu actually short movie.
The average scene in Beyond the Gates.
The average scene in John Dies at the End
The acting is OK. As with most bare-bones budget movies these actors aren't A-list, but if the story and dialogue was good enough it wouldn't matter. Unfortunately the script is devoid of charisma and the characters are two dimensional.
The concept is really good, but it fails completely, opting for shlocky violence instead of the cosmic horror it seemed to be aiming for. The movie plays more like a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode than it does an actual feature. The central problem is that the ghost (the entity on the haunted tape) doesn't do ANYTHING. She says "spooky" things and then mugs at the camera.
Even the monsters look straight out of a 2002 tv show.
If there's one nice thing I can say about the movie it's that the soundtrack is decent and the lighting is pretty good. Emphasis on purples and blues whenever the spooky board game is doing spooky things makes for, at the very least, a unique look.
But that's not enough to carry a feature. Skip it.