Gates of Hell

Firstly that title: 'The Hell's Gate' makes no sense gramatically. I can't believe not one person involved with this film from conception to completion actually realised the english translation surely should've been 'The Gate To Hell'? ...On the other hand having now watched it, yes I can believe that.

Lenzi went to a lot of interesting places in his movie career, from the cannibal jungles to the crime ridden streets of Italy, but this detour into 'haunted underground caves' territory could be his all time low point, pun intended. Random guys wandering round a cave for 90 minutes, and occasionally dying. The end. I don't expect David Lynch or Coen Bros levels of complexity and nuance when watching a Lenzi film, but I was amazed at how babyish this was in every way. A ten year old could draft a more sophisticated plot and script in half an hour, guaranteed.

I couldn't find an english dubbed version so no amusement at any bad dubbing could be had, and I'm not a fan of subtitles generally either so that proved an extra chore, making The Hell's Gate a horrible viewing experience all round - but throughout his career Lenzi occasionally created totally mad classics, so I had to see this just in case it was one of them. It wasn't.

The Hell's Gate (1989)

** (out of 4)

A man is doing some sort of isolation test in a cave but when his friends hear him screaming they decide to enter and see what's going on. Pretty soon the new group of people find themselves seeing a variety of strange things and it might be linked to some monks who entered the cave seven hundred years earlier.

Umberto Lenzi made a handful of movies in 1989 and sadly the majority of them were pretty poor. This was due to some rather unoriginal screenplays plus the fact that the Italian horror genre had pretty much dried up and directors weren't given the same time of budgets like they had been in the earlier part of the decade. THE HELL'S GATE isn't a good movie but it's one of those films that mildly hold your attention because you keep expecting something to happen yet it never does and before you know it the movie is over.

Is that a solid recommendation? Probably not but if you're a fan of Italian horror then you might want to check this out because in all honesty it's actually a lot more entertaining than most of the films the genre was pumping out during this period. There's no question that the market fell out for these types of movies so what was released were unoriginal pieces without much of a budget for anything.

What I did enjoy about this movie was the cave setting, which I thought was rather effective. For the most part the cast is decent enough and we even get Paul Muller in a small role at the end. The violence is mostly tame but there are a couple aftermath shots including one eye getting really damaged and there's another sequence with spiders, which will remind people of Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND.

With all of that being said, one shouldn't go into this with high expectations because there's really not much here.

Umberto Lenzi will always have a place on my list of favourite directors. His Eurocrime films are second to none; and the director also delivered a handful of brilliant Giallo's, as well as some classic films in other genres. However, towards the end of his career, it would seem that he stopped caring and thus began putting some of the worst rubbish to come out of Italy. With the exception of Welcome to Spring Break, Lenzi didn't make a single half decent film after Cannibal Ferox; and Gate of Hell does nothing to improve that record! The film fits into that whole 'hell on earth' "genre" which was made popular by Lucio Fulci's The Beyond in 1981. The plot focuses on a bunch of cave explorers that find a gate to hell under the Earth's crust, with disastrous(ly boring) results. Seriously, this has to be one of the very worst films of its kind - there's absolutely NOTHING of interest in the whole film. Not even the special effects offer any entertainment...not that the film is particularly gory anyway. It really does just drone on for the entire torturous running time and there's absolutely no reason to bother tracking this dross down.

The production values for this film which places the doors of hell in a cave must have been extremely low; probably even lower than in Umberto Lenzi's 'Black Demons' (aka Demoni 3) he made two years later.

There is not much going on in the film, and Lenzi doesn't even seem to try to deliver some thrilling atmosphere. At least there are some cheap but effective gore scenes that are strikingly similar to the gore FX in 'Black Demons' (the guy who did those is maybe only capable of faking gouging out eyes and splitting skulls with axes - who knows?).

And yet this mess is quite entertaining. It could be that the German dubbing is reason for my opinion, because the (uncut) German video version boosts such a bad dubbing that it delivers lots of unintended humor to please the viewer. This is pure trash, and people who want to see good films by Umberto Lenzi rather stick to his violent police thrillers of the 1970s.