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Hollow Gate
(a.k.a. Hollowgate)
(1988)

Director: Ray Di Zazzo
Cast:
Addison Randall, Katrina Alexy, Richard Dry, Patricia Jacques


In most aspects of life, people like to have a kind of routine. They want to keep the same steady job, the same home, and be able to have regular meetings with the same beloved people in their lives. On the other hand, it can be also said that people at times like to change things up slightly in their lives - variety is the spice of life, after all, and change can sometimes be good. But with most changes in life, you have to be a little careful to make sure there won't be any backlash or negative consequences. The motion picture industry is full of people and entities that have made changes to various results. One such example is with actors. For example, take the case of actor Marlon Brando. After a career of almost exclusively playing serious roles in serious movies very seriously, in 1998 Brando decided all of a sudden to try something very silly by acting as a goofball in the Canadian comedy Free Money. However, Brando's performance and antics went so far beyond amusing and instead were so embarrassing to watch that it was likely a big reason why the movie never played in theaters anywhere in the world. Another group of people in the motion picture industry who have on occasion tried to do something different are directors. The legendary Alfred Hitchcock made a career of making thrillers of some vein, but in 1955 he decided to change things up by making the black comedy The Trouble With Harry. However, critics weren't terrible enthusiastic about the end results, and neither were audiences, so Hitchcock subsequently went back to what he was famous for. Decades later there was the case of Wes Craven. After the success of his first mainstream movie The Last House On The Left, he was pigeonholed into a career of directing horror and thriller movies. He wanted very much to direct other kinds of movies, but it was not until 1999 until he was given the chance to direct the biographical music drama movie Music Of The Heart. Unfortunately, it didn't fare well at the box office, and soon Craven was back to doing what he was best known for.

While from those examples that I gave above point out that most changes in pace in the motion picture industry come from individuals, as I also said, there are times where the changes of pace in the industry come from entities. The most obvious example of this is with film studios. While most film studios concentrate on making a variety of product - after all, a successful supermarket will sell more than just cherries - there are some studios that get stuck with making one or two particular kinds of movies and find it hard to make other kinds of movies. And if they do manage to break the trend, the results can be kind of mixed. One example of this is with Republic Pictures. In the golden age of Hollywood, they were best known for making low budget serials and B movies. But occasionally, they would go out to make a prestigious A movie. Some of these, like the John Wayne movies Sands Of Iwo Jima and The Quiet Man were big hits with critics and audiences, but others like the Orson Welles Macbeth flopped critically and commercially. Then there is the case of Roger Corman and his New World Pictures. Corman, believe it or not, was afraid of being considered too schlocky, so he took the time to acquire or make the occasional art movie such as The Personals or Cockfighter. Some of these artistic movies did perform well on the art house circuit (and the drive-in circuit!) at the time... but today, does anyone immediately think of "art" when Corman or New World Pictures are mentioned? Then there is the case of the legendary American-International Pictures. When the 1970s rolled in, studio head Samuel Z. Arkoff started to fear that the drive-in market was beginning to dry up, so he started to make and distribute some A movies such as Kidnapped, A Matter Of Time, and Something Short Of Paradise. However, most of these attempts at getting prestige, as well as healthy box office takes, didn't fare well with critics or on the market.

Then there is the case of the legendary producers Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin. If you are a movie buff worth his or her salt, you'll know that through their companies City Lights Entertainment and (most famously) PM Entertainment that they made a name for themselves by producing fantastic Hollow GateB movie actioners such as Last Man Standing, The Sweeper, The Silencers, Recoil, and The Underground. They were best known for action because, well, that's pretty much all that they put out. After all, appreciation for action can be found in every country on the planet, and that can be very lucrative. But Merhi and Pepin actually did occasionally dabble in different genres, to various results. There was the comedy-drama Heaven Before I Die, which was pretty flat with both its stabs at humor and seriousness. There was also the well-done modern detective noir Living To Die. They also made the comedy-musical Can't Stop Dancing, which I have been desperately searching for for years, but can't find anywhere. And a few years after the Merhi/Pepin partnership started, during their 1987-1988 period, the duo made a few horror movies, Hollow Gate being one of them. After those few horror movies, however, they abandoned the horror genre, though the later and well-done The Art Of Dying did have horror elements (though it wasn't a full-blown horror movie like Hollow Gate promised to me.) I don't know why Merhi and Pepin for a brief period made some effort with making horror movies... but I did know that I had to check out Hollow Gate to see what one of them was like. The events of the movie center around a fellow named Mark. When Mark was a boy (played by Bartholomew Bottoms), one Halloween night he was at a party with some friends when his no-good father both humiliated and almost killed Mark when he proved to be inept at the party game of bobbing for apples. Years later, Mark is grown up and now played by Addison Randall (Chance), and the trauma from that Halloween night has transformed him into an angry - and homicidal - young man. The inept powers that be have transferred custody of him to his grandmother (Pat Shalsant), who lives on a remote sprawling estate known as Hollow Gate. It doesn't take long for Mark to kill his grandmother and get the taste to shed blood again for anyone who will cross his path. He arranges for this to happen by contacting the local costume shop for a home delivery, and the owner of the costume shop gets four young adult customers heading to a rock concert - Allen (Richard Dry), Kim (Katrina Alexy), Mandy (Patricia Jacques), and Billy (J. J. Miller) - to make the delivery for him in exchange for giving Kim a wig she can't afford. Of course, as they head to Hollow Gate, they have no idea of what's in store for them...

The decision of producers Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin to temporarily change pace and make some horror movies wasn't necessarily an instant bad idea, but at least with Hollow Gate, one has to question their decision to the kind of horror movie they decided to make. You see, by 1988, the popularity of slashers had really fallen sharply since the boom in the early 1980s; you have to wonder what made them think another slasher exercise would do well for them. It's possible the answer was they had watched plenty of earlier slashers that did well and thought the same thing would succeed again; it would also explain why this particular slasher seems content to do the same things in the same way as previous slashers. Actually, there's one way that Hollow Gate is a slight improvement over many of those other slashers, and that's with the acting of the cast members who play the intended targets of the mad slasher. Don't get me wrong, these particular cast members are strictly amateurs who understandably never went on to bigger and better things. But they did seem to understand that they should make their characters likable - which you usually don't get in slashers. The character of Billy is a jerk, but not strident in his asshology. And Allen is a nerd, but not overly geeky. All four come across as pretty down to earth, so they earn some sympathy. As for the rest of the players, most their acting is nowhere near nails-on-chalkboard bad, but curiously they almost all perform in the same manner - speaking their dialogue as if they are reading it for the first time, without putting any emotion into their voices. As I said, it could be worse, but yeah, it's flat all the same. The exception to this is Addison Randall as the movie's designated slasher. Randall (who later wrote the scripts to the gawdawful PM Entertainment movies Shotgun and East L.A. Warriors) makes the curious decision to act his psycho character out as if he were a kind of calmer Paul Lynde. He does catch your attention whenever he's onscreen, but his near-goofiness clashes with the relatively serious tone of the rest of the movie. So viewers will remember him, but not in a positive manner.

There is also the problem that in one aspect, Randall was miscast. The opening of Hollow Gate shows the Mark character at about ten years of age, then the movie jumps ahead ten years to when Mark is an adult, but Randall was thirty-nine years old during the filming of this movie, and looked it. While some viewers might be charitable towards the character in this regard, they will likely still not be satisfied by the character due to the poor writing by writer/director Ray Di Zazzo. All we see of Mark's childhood traumas is the aforementioned apple bobbing incident, and there's no mention anywhere else in the movie about any other traumas as a youth. Indeed, when he's an adult, various characters call him a "creep" without telling us why they consider him a creep until much of the movie has run by. But that's not the only issue to be found with the screenplay. Though the movie runs just eighty-four minutes in length, it takes a little over forty percent of the movie before the youthful protagonists arrive at Hollow Gate; much of that forty percent consists of scenes that run much longer than they should, or scenes that are just pure padding, such as one lengthy scene where Mark is a gas station attendant two years before the present day activities. The scene, if you're wondering, just seems to be there in order to help boost Hollow Gate's pretty low body count, and Di Zazzo doesn't seem concerned that once this sequence ends, it's never referred to again, even though after Mark kills two people in a fiery car explosion, he calls 911 in a jovial tone, and the authorities don't think from this to question him subsequently. There are a lot of other examples of head-scratching writing touches in the movie. The fate of Mark's irresponsible parents is never revealed, for one thing, plus Mark happens to own a pair of vicious dogs who do his dirty work in one scene by bloodily mauling a victim... only that these dogs are played by golden retrievers. I knew golden retrievers were ruthless athletes from the endless Air Bud movie series, but this... well...

The most infuriating writing touch to be found in Hollow Gate, however, is the ending. While I would like to start by saying that I don't want to spoil things, the reality is you've seen everything in this final scene in countless other slashers before, including the obligatory set-up for a sequel. But there are also aspects of the movie that I would have liked to have seen but are simply not there. Sex and nudity? Nope - the movie cuts from the one sex scene when it's starting, then cuts back to when it's finished. Gore, blood, and other makeup effects? There's surprisingly not much of this here, though you might have already guessed this by my report that the body count is pretty low. The only way left that could have saved Hollow Gate would have been some good creepy and atmospheric direction by Di Zazzo, but this one-time filmmaker shows why he only made one movie in his lifetime. Di Zazzo was certainly hampered in scare scenes by the absolutely underwhelming musical score provided by John Gonzalez (who scored quite a few other movies for Merhi and Pepin, such as Dance Or Die) that puts an undercurrent of low energy to whatever so-called mayhem is happening onscreen at a particular moment. Though in fairness, Di Zazzo didn't exactly provide horror scenes that by themselves had impact. Just about every scene in the movie, mayhem-filled or not, has no spark or energy to it. The participants in front of the camera just go through the paces, with Di Zazzo apparently unconcerned about encouraging his cast. And aside from two or three okay P.O.V. shots, Di Zazzo seems equally unconcerned to pep up his cameramen or other crew members to beef up the atmosphere. The end result is that Hollow Gate just feels like product, instead of a movie where the director, producers, or anyone else involved cared about making something that the audience would long remember afterwards. Well, actually you will remember the movie long afterwards... but not in a good way.

(Posted February 7, 2024)

Check for availability on Amazon Prime Video (Amazon Prime Video)

See also: The Art Of Dying, Heaven Before I Die, Shotgun

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