Hellgate (1989)

 

Director: William A. Levey

Screenplay: Michael S. O'Rourke

Cast: Ron Palillo as Matt; Abigail Wolcott as Josie Carlyle; Carel Trichardt as Lucas Carlyle; Petrea Curran as Pam; Evan J. Klisser as Chuck; Joanne Warde as Bobby; Frank Notaro as Buzz; Lance Vaughan as Zonk; Victor Melleney as Jonas

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #182 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

This was my favourite ski...

Fifties by way of eighties chic, by way of South Africa posing as the United States? That is how Hellgate starts, a South African-American co-production where, surrounding a location called Lucas Carlyle's Hellgate, a tale told by the lead protagonist begins, a tragedy happened that turned a former gold prospecting site into a trap for any passing guests. Baring the idea that gold prospecting was still happening in the fifties, unless the location is a tourist site, who names their small Hellgate? Yes, if you were to sell it as a place of supernatural incidents to entice tourists. Also, I am close to the county of Derbyshire, where there is a cave now viewable for tourists that was christened Satan's Arsehole, but no one would even call their community that.

At Hellgate, to get off this tangent into the actual film, a group of gross male bikers attempted to kidnap and molest a girl from that town, taking her from a diner. It is a moment out of place and creepy in what turns into an ultra-silly film, but it does follow suit away from this thankfully into the broader tone when, ending up at Hellgate, she is crushed into a wall by a motorbike in the ensuing chaos when her father tries to rescue her. He becomes a vengeful figure who hates all outsiders, and eventually by way of a special blue crystal found in one of the caves nearby, she becomes a supernatural form who lures victims to this ghost town.

In the midst of this, the eighties managed to be even more eighties, where in one minor character, a young woman who works the diner that has lasted into the new era, you have orange and green eyeliner overlapping each other, pink lipstick, large black hopped earrings worn alongside smaller metal ones, and fingerless gloves. It does show that a decade's culture is not a set thing, taking it time to develop and even having layers; the first time a Friday the 13th film ever started to look like this film, even though it started in at the beginning of this decade, would be at least by Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), with Hellgate in terms of lack of logic and its bright colours shot with industrial halogens reminiscent of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan released the same year. Adding to this curious tone is that this is made in South Africa, where the camera never takes a long shot of the outdoor locations and exposed the actual wilderness outside. Instead, it is at locations meant to evoke Northern American culture, exaggerating it at such a level that alongside its shiny colourful aesthetic it stands out.

It also happens to come from a type of film from this era where logic and plot made way to everything but the kitchen sink being thrown onscreen. Events ramp up when, when we learn of how the father gained the blue crystal, by way of one of his staff finding it and resurrection of a very fake rubber bat, we have an entire sequence just devoted to weird set pieces. All in a scene meant to set up its powers, and with him being disfigured to the point he has to have a Phantom of the Opera metal face appliance, but you have a monster gold fish being created that swells up in its glass bowl (and then explodes), and a resurrected taxidermied turtle, which bites his face (and also explodes). In fact, the explosion budget was sizable as, when not resurrecting his daughter with it, he mainly uses the crystal like a laser weapon. It is from there a frankly ramshackle production, directed by the man who helmed the infamous Blaxploitation horror film Blackenstein (1973), but of that delirious period where horror was more of a cavalcade of weird ideas and having the production team figure out how to pull them off.

In reality, following two heterosexual young couples ended up at Hellgate, the film is a haunted house ride by way of a horror film where the entirety of Hellgate the location is a spectacle. It has the fog, strange figures looming in the background, a graveyard of cars from decades past looking more like an outdoor automobile gathering than a place of ominous intent, even a stage where a stage entertainer with innuendos materialises and introduces ghostly female cancan dancers to perform. It is a film where a talking head, not decayed but merely a man's head separate from his body, is found in a refrigerator barking at someone, and that is the least weird thing they have encountered or will afterwards. It is not the weirdest of this era, such as the truly random production Spookies (1986) whose production itself was a mess and a half, but I have to admire how, whilst I have no interest in eighties nostalgia in the damndest, that something alongside the fact the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise being successful encouraged people more to this goofy, surreal concoctions than much duller horror tropes.

This is why, as a result, I cannot agree with the negative reputation Hellgate actually has, especially as there is a sense of playfulness which helps the film out considerably. Here in its own broad world, everyone is a stereotype, more exaggerated as this, shot in a non-American region territory, not even up North in Canada or in the South of the continent, but an entirely different continent altogether, plays up all the broad iconography of the place it is meant to be set in. Here gold prospectors of the 18th and 19th century clash with fifties greaser bikers, just in the prologue, before the type of heterosexual Caucasian characters from an eighties slasher film take over, goofy young adults who can vary in trying each other for laughs in the worst moments to one of the male leads being crap in bed with his girlfriend. (That admittedly is contrasted with the other, the true lead, in a scene which shows the sense of playfulness in Hellgate as, great in bed, he is able to slide down on his girlfriend and give her enough pleasure to go cross-eyed).

The sense of a madcap haunted house is felt palpably from its intro to even the ending, involving the town's buildings exploding as part of that aforementioned explosions budget, reminiscent to a theme park spectacle show than horror. Even the one lurid aspect, the nudity from Abigail Wolcott as the daughter Josie, playing the siren-like ghost woman in negligee throughout, feels exaggerated. Even if her origins has a very icky history, the one part of the film utterly unnecessary, even Wolcott in how she is shot feels like an archetype, under all the halogen lights a mimic of eighties glamour photography in all its hyper-exaggerated form even if still for lurid reason. Also, to the stunt person who had to go backwards out of a window, playing a female character only wearing underwear bottoms after getting a shotgun blast, that is a brave achievement to have taken the risk for and they come an MVP as a result, all in this film's willingness to have a scene that ridiculous and over-the-top inside itself.

No attempt is really made to make any of the details I have mentioned correlate at all in a comprehensible plot, and neither is it abstract or true surrealism. It is weird, in an appealing way for me, a goofy and charming form of it from an entirely different time. Something which is a reminder that horror as a genre, used as much as a criticism against it, is a form of cheap spectacle too at times. Honestly this can appeal to all genres, drama usually the genre meant to be highbrow arguably worse, especially if you were to dig into the worst of its work even with high budgets for tawdry and poorly done ideas; this at least has innocence, though with some prurient nudity and some gore, of a haunted house, that idea of spooky iconography be it in a movie or otherwise which is meant to take you on a journey through spectacle. Vastly different from action sequences, which for me are usually boring and uncreative, sadly infecting horror cinema eventually in their pacing and plots, each moment in these "rides" is meant to be something inventive or at least someone on the practical effects or production team, like that car graveyard, showing their hard work. Again, Hellgate is a lot of nonsense, even before it is worth reminding ourselves horror should ask to be great storytelling or striving for actual nightmarish imagery too, but no matter how goofy it was, that sense of playfulness won me over.

Abstract Spectrum: Goofy/Psychotronic/Ramshackle/Ridiculous

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None