11-11: Les portes de l'enfer

11:11 a.k.a. Hell's Gate (2004) is another bad horror movie that tries too hard to be something it's not. A young girl has an imaginary play mate. One day whilst out in the fields playing with her friends, a couple of fugitives visit her parents and whack them off for no apparent reason. The young girl runs off and hides from the bad men. Years later, the girl grows up into a woman with problems. Losers at her school (looking like repressed homosexuals) flaunt their manhood in front of her when she rejected one of them. The girls hate her and life in general is miserable for her. A secret from her past returns to visit her. Who or what is it? Why does everyone hate her? What's her Guardian's problem with her? To find out you'll have to watch Hell's Gate.

The new title makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I don't know why people are given money to make such bad movies. This film is not even good enough to make fun of. It's a head ache inducing mess that'l confuse anyone who tries to make some sense out of it. Not worth your time.

Not recommended.

There has always been a big difference between American horror and Asian horror. American horror is mostly very bloody (slice & dice) or about scary monsters, insects etc. and a bunch of shocking effects that will let you jump out of your chair. But what scares me the most of Asian horror is the intensity of it. It grabs you by the throat and makes you sleep very bad... They start very slow and builds op the fear, which keeps you very alert because you are prepared for a shocking effect. The cinematic quality doesn't meet the standards of the American movies (which mostly have a very large budget...), but it is not the ultimate special effects, or the great performance of actors the makes a movie really worth seeing. I've seen low budget movies that are much much better than blockbusters which have costed millions of dollars. OK very bad acting and a lot of movie mistakes or a really unrealistic script can kill a movie. But if a movie is so intense that you can think of nothing else while watching and it stays in your head the hours or even days after seeing it, I think it is a real good movie, despite of some mistakes or bad cinematic quality... Now about this movie, the reason why I started with this introduction is that I think this movie is really intense. It has some horror effects I recognise in the assign horror movies I've seen (the eye, dark water, Ju-On etc). The cinematic quality is not so good, but the intensity makes up for that. For instance the scene at the library was superb !! If you have seen it you know what I am talking about comparing it to Asian horror...

For me this is what horror is about, not a lot of blood and scary monsters (most of these movies are funny instead of scary) , but so intense that you can feel the fear of the character(s) and let you sympathize with them thinking what you would do in that situation.

Was a college acting class exercise filmed and released as a movie? The formulaic posturing and stylized drivel of a "horror" soap opera for people who don't like horror films but wish to be able to tell that friends that, yes, they did see a horror movie. It even features soap opera music.

Do books falling off library shelves scare you? Do doors shutting terrify you? Then this flick is for you. Have you ever been kidnapped? Yeah, most of us have. When you were raped, was it simply ignored, because the rapist was the cool kid? What's scary is not this movie but this filmmaker's view of the world.

And then the little twists aren't even original. This is a film for people who've never seen a horror film before, who don't want to see one now, and who want to see another flick about everyone conspiring against the weird kid.

By the time that this film had reached it's conclusion, I had acquired an almost overpowering urge to scoop my eyes out with a dull, rusty spoon, and through the bloody sockets, gouge at my brain in an effort to excoriate the memory center.

I didn't find the lead actress's performance to be as poor or torporous, as had some others. Rather, it was the story itself. It seemed like the director couldn't make his mind up which way to go with the delivery of the plot. The ending totally sucked. A deal is struck between Sara, the main character, and Raden, her imaginary friend... or is she a demon... or a ghost... or an angel... who knows? In any event, Raden tells Sara that if she shoots Seth, Sara's aide de camp throughout the movie, she can go free. If Sara doesn't shoot Seth, she had to go with Raden. Sara opts not to shoot Seth, and is shown walking off with Raden. Two seconds later, she is shown standing there with the muzzle of a pistol pressed against Seth's forehead, and then she shoots him... and goes off with Raden anyway. Then Raden tells Sara that no one can avoid their fate.

If Sara was doomed to go off with Raden no matter what she did, what was the point of having to shoot Seth or not? The whole sequence diminishes and sort of noble sacrifice that Sara might have made in not shooting Seth. She was doomed either way, whether she shot him or not. This movie was not a complete waste of time; it was only about 98% of a complete waste of time. My brain still hurts from having watched it.

The film starts well enough. It is a truly terrifying scene as a couple of fugitives on the run from the law tear apart an innocent family living in a secluded country cottage by killing the mother and father. The young daughter only manages to escape with the aid of a mysterious spectre, who kills the two aggressors while she covers in a downstairs cupboard. Then, we catch up with her 15 years later as a drug-addled student researching the supernatural, living with her promiscuous aunt and being looked after by a mysterious redhead. She has no real friends, was almost raped at a party and keeps having bizarre visions which no-one else can see. So yep, life is grand. Things get a lot more pleasant when she has a falling out with her mum's sister, who is later found dead in a bathtub under suspicious circumstances with 11 etched into her forehead. Hmm, I wonder who the police's main suspect will be? This is quickly followed by more deaths, all linked by their relation to our heroine having been on bad terms with them before their passing. Could she be the culprit, or perhaps the explanation could be something of a more ethereal nature? Clue: If you think the former, you've picked up the wrong movie from Blockbuster. Go back and get the correct one, short-sighted gimp.

As I said, I was all ready to fast-forward to the good parts, safe in the knowledge that I wasn't missing out on anything but a mediocre suspense potboiler. But the first ten minutes grabbed me, and I decided to give it a chance. I was quite pleasantly surprised: it certainly wasn't a masterpiece but the acting was good enough and the script kept throwing up intriguing situations of which I looked forward to finding the solution to. Alas, 45 minutes in, I realised my attention start to wander during a long sequence where the main character is walking round a library, doing nothing. We then get a cheap scare, followed by quarter of an hour of goddledegook about the paranormal between her and her new hunk of a boyfriend. Things only got worse from there, as the promising beginning is thrown out the window as we get one unconvincing plot twist after another, followed by an ending so anti-climatic it's like being promised the moon and ending up with a teeny weeny meteorite instead. Pathetic.

If it was bad all the way through, it would have been far easier to swallow. The fact that it starts at a canter and barely ends with a whimper is not just disappointing, it is heartbreaking. How can something which began so promisingly end up being so formulaic? I don't know, and I don't particularly care. I'll just give the writer and director a bit of advice for next time: Don't spend 5 weeks writing the first part of your screenplay, then 5 minutes finishing the rest. You tend to notice these things in the final product when you treat your project as sloppily as you have here... 3/10