Hellgate (1989)

	Director: William A. Levey
	Starring: Ron Palillo, Abigail Wolcott, Carel Trichardt, Petrea Curran
	Run Time: 91 mins
	Certificate: 18
	Rating:

Plot
A deserted mining town has become a shrine to the daughter of it's only resident, Lucas. His daughter, Jessie, was brutally murdered years earlier and he became obsessed with her. Finding a powerful crystal which has the ability to bring the dead back to life, Lucas resurrected her and now uses her to lure people to their deaths in the town.

Review
Hellgate is one of those films that is just so bad, you really want to cry if you waste your time watching it. It's just so mind-numbingly shocking from start to finish and there's not a shred of evidence on display to suggest that anyone had a clue what they were doing. It's silly 80s nonsense on the grandest scale with "everything but the kitchen sink" thrown in for good measure. You can't take it as a horror. You can't take it as a comedy, despite my best efforts to laugh at everything stupid. It's goofy and silly but unintentionally so and that's a bad sign.

The plot is extremely confusing. In fact, too confusing to even try and go through as it hurts my brain just trying to work it all out. None of the characters in the film have a clue what is going on so what chance we have of piecing everything together I just don't know. It's as if the writers just watched a load of other films, thought that certain scenes would work well and decided to write them all into a script. As a result, there are no rules in Hellgate. So what causes instant death in one scene will then be pointless in the next. What happens to one character when they do something will not happen the same way again when somebody else does it. It's so hard to sit through because it's bland and boring as well as confusing. Too much of it seems to be pointless as if the script was only half finished - the zombies wander around the ghost town of Hellgate doing little but make faces at the camera and there are a few characters in the film who seem geared up to do something worthwhile towards the finale but just end up being killed off before they have a chance to do anything.

The special effects look really dated and typically 80s. Expect lots of bright, multi-coloured beams of light when the crystal is used and lots of dry ice to blanket the town in fog. There's just no atmosphere or tension at all and the effects just make the film look like some cheap 80s music video at times. The gore is tame and the body count is low. Lest we forget the mutated goldfish and killer turtle that both pop up later in the film or even the cheesy rubber bat that makes an appearance. Yes, despite going out of date back in the 1930s with Bela Lugosi and Dracula, the bat-on-a-string prop makes an appearance here. Abigail Wolcott is the pick of the cast which is saying something as she's a pretty terrible actress and delivers her lines like she's reading them for the first time. But she only had to act with her chest and accomplished that quite well - the people concerned knew this and had her shed her clothes quite a lot. There's a dude who looks like Gomez Addams, some pointless bikers and a 40 year old guy playing a college hero. Casting isn't one of the film's strengths. In fact there aren't many strengths to be found at all here. There aren't too many times when I really regret watching a film. Some films are at least watchable in a "so bad it's good" way but Hellgate isn't. It's almost unwatchable and thankfully has been almost been forgotten about. It's no surprise to see that most of the cast and crew haven't had anything called a career both before and after this. If this were my only entry onto a film CV, I'd forget I ever wanted to be in the business and take up welding instead.

Verdict
Hellgate isn't just bad, it's on the same "utterly terrible" plane of existence as the likes of Troll and Raging Sharks. It's not a film you can even watch if you're curious about how awful it is. Just forget it ever existed.