Cemetery Gates

The B horror movie lives! No, this isn't John Carpenter or Steven Spielberg … or even Tod Browning … but it isn't half bad. 'Cemetery Gates' is a slightly original variation on the traditional B horror theme. One variation is that the main group of protagonists are filming their own horror film when true horror strikes THEM.

Anyone who likes blood and gore will love this one. The plot isn't great shakes, but it holds up as well as any B horror plot. We have brain-dead college kids, including a girl with a bra size bigger than her IQ. One improvement in this film is that at least here the big-chested bimbo isn't pawned off on us as a 'graduate student' or someone who would have to have considerably more brains than she has. These are just friends of a college student wanting to make a zombie movie as his class project. One can imagine that three of the six students would probably have flunked out in another year, had they all lived. Of course one does wonder why he would entrust his film to dope-smoking bums and a bimbo.

The student making the film (Peter Stickles) is the son of an unprincipled scientist (Reggie Bannister) who has mutated a Tasmanian devil, turning it into something akin to the man-eating cartoon creature in Bugs Bunny cartoons. The beast, 'Precious,' is pretty cool and can really put the hurt on its victims, all of whom die much slower than they would like.

The film is not without some interesting background. The old cemetery where the kids are filming their zombie film contains a memorial marker for 200+ miners killed when nearby tunnels were flooded in 1925. Apparently the bodies were never recovered and our teens fall through sinkholes into the labyrinth of tunnels that includes skulls and mummified bodies. Naturally Precious makes this her home after being released in a nearby state park.

Without giving the plot away, you could say 'Many are called; most are eaten.' For B horror fare, this is a pretty satisfying production, with good special effects, plenty of blood shooting, dripping, spurting, flowing, etc. The acting from the no-name cast is solid and the handful of attempts to move the plot away from a stale B horror formula appreciated. This isn't the one to do a major term paper on in a film theory class, but is perfect for relaxing with on a late Friday or Saturday night!

Firstly, this film is not going to win any Oscars for its acting or storyline or best creature of the year, but on the other hand if blood and guts and a little humour thrown in is your thing then this might be the flick for you. we have four young males, two females, one is the intelligent type and the other is the dumb blonde bimbo, out to make a film in a cemetery. nearby we have a couple of animal activists who break into a lab and release an animal who has been experimented on and is now a blood thirsty killer roaming the forest.sure enough what we get is a bad looking animal killing every thing it sees. i have to say the death scenes are very gory, limbs ripped out there sockets, intestines spewing out, decapitations and buckets of blood. as i said the story and acting isn't great but if you love your horror films to be gory then this may be for you.

I had some mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand it's just a simple effort with a pretty dull story, lame characters and bad acting written all over it. The only actor worth mentioning, of course, is Reggie Bannister. He's enjoyable to watch, as always, but that's about it. So story- and acting-wise, I was just expecting a bit too much from it. Wrong bet, so it seemed, because this movie is actually not to be taken serious at all. That's just the way the filmmakers intended it. So when you can keep that in mind, that's when the fun starts. Lots, and I do mean LOTS of gory splatter killings by a grotesque looking creature (a giant mutant Tasmanian Devil) doing all the shredding while tunneling itself a way underneath a cemetery ("The Dark" from 1994 starring Brion James and Neve Campbell, anyone?). When you also consider that this movie was meant to be a throwback at the 80's/early 90's creature features (so no lousy CGI to be found in this one), you just can't help yourself but to roll with it and have a fun time. And that's just what "Cemetery Gates" will do: give you a bit of entertainment (horrific, bloody & silly) with a rather bad movie. So it gets extra credit for that. Or maybe I'm just giving the film some free points for that one blond bimbo babe that loves to show her two naked goodies a lot (nearly every chance she gets).

Environmental wackos release a giant, genetically-enhanced Tasmanian Devil in this would-be comedy horror film. I think the filmmakers were trying to make the next "Army of Darkness" or "Shaun of the Dead," but the humor wasn't strong enough to compensate for the implausible and coincidence-ridden story. I might be giving the plot more consideration than the filmmakers themselves, but isn't it a little far-fetched that the monster would be stolen from the laboratory and released at a cemetery where the son of mad scientist who created it was filming a low budget horror film? And that the son considered the monster his pet until it killed his mother. At least the scientist father is played by Reggie Bannister. His presence gave the film a touch of class. The film also suffers from the fact that the vast majority of victims had no bearing on the plot whatsoever. They were just passerbys. I did enjoy the bit were the new agers take drugs to call forth a spirit animal, only to see the monster as an animation. The Hillbillies, however, were so over the top that they made the cast of "Two Thousand Maniacs" seem restrained by comparison. The main problem, however, is the monster itself. I know this film was essentially a comedy, but the monster was ridiculous -- especially in long shots where it was obviously a man in a suit walking on all fours. The monster was about as scary as the shrews in "The Killer Shrews." Along those same lines, some of the gore effects were good, but it obvious the monster isn't really digging into the people when it is clawing them. I'd take the Tasmanian Devil in the Warner Brothers cartoons over this thing any day.

"Cemetary Gates" is a movie that wants to be like 70's and 80's creature flicks like "Alligator" or "Prophecy". Well, it has a cool monster, and some nice gore effects, so where does it go wrong?

Well, for one thing, the comedy aspects of the movie really fall flat. Jokes such as the recording of a man's diarrhea, poorly done sex gags, and other such things hurt it considerably. Sure, horror and comedy can go together, but not when the jokes suck.

Also, the acting is pretty bad. Everyone seems unenthusiastic, especially Reggie ("Phantasm") Bannister as the scientist father. At least Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero are amusing as two stoner types.

Oh, and there are also the two annoying hillbilly characters that feel like a bad "MadTV" version of "Deliverence."

In the end, the movie is a major missed opportunity. If done with a better script and better characters, it could have been a winner. In the end though, that's all you get: Could have been.