The Gate (1987)

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Menu Animation & Audio Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1987
Running Time	85:33
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Tibor Takacs
Studio Distributor	New Century Ent Beyond Home Entertainment	Starring	Stephen Dorff Louis Tripp Christa Denton
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$24.95	Music	Michael Hoenig J. Peter Robinson

    B-grade films are an art form unto themselves at times, and many compete with one another to see how ludicrous or inept they can get, which makes for a fun night's viewing at times. The Gate came at a time when Hollywood and filmgoers in the English-speaking world were fascinated with creepy, crawly things that lived in creepy, crawly places or wreaked mayhem upon poor innocent people. Naturally, with the success of a certain Joe Dante film that featured ugly creatures with no respect for civilisation, similar films were bound to pour out of the floodgates, and this is but one of them.

    The problem is that The Gate is not particularly exciting or original, although it does make a good film to commentate about with family and friends. The plot, or rather what passes for a plot, involves a young boy named Greg (Stephen Dorff) who awakens from an awful nightmare to find that the tree in his backyard has fallen down. After the remains of the tree and the treehouse within are cleared away, we find that the tree has left a sizeable hole in the ground, which Greg and his best friend, Terry (Louis Tripp), decide to enlarge. After some bizarre happenings, Greg's parents leave him in the care of his elder sister, Alexandra (Christa Denton), who proceeds to invite all her friends over for a party.

    Unfortunately, while Terry is listening to one of his favourite records, the incantation to open the gate that separates the physical world and the spiritual world is recited. Naturally, a string of events is meant to take place before the demons can take over the world and create hell on earth, so you can guess what is going to happen next. With some remarkably small demons attacking the principal cast, the question is not so much whether the gate can be closed again, but whether the heroes will hurry up and get on with it already.

    All in all, I would have to give The Gate one star out of five, and that's being somewhat generous in my view. If you crave creature effects and bad acting, then look no further, but you'll have to sit through a pretty ordinary transfer in order to discern them.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and it is not 16x9 Enhanced. Judging from what I could see of the scene compositions, I believe that this film has received the Pan & Scan treatment here.

    This transfer is not very sharp at all, or rather, it is acceptably sharp during scenes with little movement and lots of bright light, which is only about a quarter of the feature. For the darker majority of the feature, however the sharpness is distinctly ordinary. The shadow detail of this transfer is quite poor, a problem that is compounded by low-level noise, subtle macro-blocking, and interlacing that renders the majority of the transfer all but unwatchable.

    The colours in this transfer are generally muted and washed out, especially during the night sequences, while they also demonstrate a tendency to bleed past their normal boundaries. One could be forgiven for thinking that they were watching an old VHS cassette from the weekly rental section during the night time sequences. The one saving grace is that there did not appear to be any dot crawl or cross-colouration.

    MPEG artefacts consisted of subtle macro-blocking that was generally confined to the backgrounds, but occasionally made its presence known in the form of foreground pixelization, too. With source material of this quality, macro-blocking is pretty much inevitable regardless of formatting or bitrates, so I won't bother to complain about the one-layer format this time. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some moderate telecine wobble in the opening credits that settled down once the feature got underway. Surprisingly, some aliasing also made its way into the transfer, with wooden doors shimmering at 68:21, and the rooftop adding a contribution at 82:00. A subtle moiré effect was noticed on some empty glasses at 3:06. Film artefacts were noticed in large amounts, although the individual marks were relatively small.

    There are no subtitles present on this disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The audio transfer is of somewhat better quality than the video transfer, but this is faint praise because there is still very little worth commending about it.

    There is but one soundtrack on this DVD: the original English dialogue in Dolby Digital 2.0 with a bitrate of 224 kilobits per second.

    The dialogue was generally clear and easy to make out, more so than viewers might wish. No perceptible problems with audio sync reared their head.

    The only music discernable during this film, and the credits, was a string of contemporary numbers edited by Carl Zittrer and Jim Weidman. Like the rest of the film, it is quite dated. The Internet Movie Database, however, lists four other names as responsible for the music, two of which are uncredited. In order, these are Vincent Carlucci, Michael Hoenig, J. Peter Robinson, and John Paul Young. I am still trying to recall hearing any music in this film that didn't sound canned.

    The surround channels were not engaged by this soundtrack, and there really didn't seem to be any stereo separation, either. The subwoofer was also unused for the duration of this feature.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is animated with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. It is not 16x9 Enhanced.

Theatrical Trailer

    This ninety-eight second trailer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. It gives a good idea of how patently silly the feature is.

    I was unable to find mention of this title being released in Region 1.

    The Gate is one of the more ridiculous films I have ever seen, and the only thing to commend it is the rather interesting creature effects. Bad acting, bad story, bad plot, bad photography, all the elements that make up a bad movie are here for the viewer to be repulsed by. Those who are considering the disc for a Bad Film Night are warned that the disc this film is presented on is not good.

    The video transfer is poor.

    The audio transfer is good.

    There is one extra.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall