Hell's Gate
(2001)
Director: John
Hough
Cast: Patsy Kensit, Patrick Muldoon, Amy Locane
One of the standard scenes found in many psycho stalker
movies is the part not long after the movie starts, where the lunatic
escapes from the asylum they are incarcerated in. The psycho
stalker movie Hell's Gate has such a sequence,
though it does play it out much differently than other psycho stalker
movies have done in the past, and not just that the mental patient in
this case is a woman. After strapped-down mental patient Maureen
Hatcher (Kensit, Lethal Weapon 2) ingeniously kills the
doctor who had been feeding her (shouldn't an orderly have been doing
that?), she frees herself and waits for someone to unlock her door,
which a female security guard eventually does while fulfilling the
administration's request to look for the doctor. Killing the guard in a
surprisingly easy way, she dons the security guard's uniform and
manages to subsequently walk past several doctors and orderlies without
any of them noticing - which doesn't make sense, when you figure out
everyone in an institution like that would know everyone else, and
would especially notice a new security guard that was female,
especially since there aren't that many female security guards anywhere.
Ducking into a room to hide, she then kills a nurse, and then spends
several hours there, judging by the fact it's night when she emerges.
Apparently nobody missed any of those three now-dead people during all
of that time, because the staff at the front desk she walks by are
still casually working, and also do not notice they have a new female
security guard. The asylum staff does subsequently find out she has
escaped and three of their co-workers are dead - but only after sunup
the next morning.
If this sequence was an isolated example of extreme
stupidity to be found in Hell's Gate, it's possible, just
possible, I might be able to forgive the movie for this idiocy and
swallow the entire package whole, bitter part and all. But as you have
probably guessed by the way I worded that last sentence, that isn't the
case. Far from it. In fact, very far from it. To put it
bluntly, Hell's Gate is one of the stupidest horror
movies I have seen, a movie so badly conceived in so many ways that it
becomes insulting to the intelligence of even the most undemanding
viewers. I can accept a little of the implausible - you have to in most
movies anyway, and besides, it can be a fun part of the game to think a
little detail of the movie is silly. However, this is far different
than when you slap the palm of
your hand on your forehead and say, "Oh, come on now!" -
especially when you keep doing it repeatedly throughout the movie
you are watching. By the end of Hell's Gate, I felt like
a member of the Three Stooges. It's hard to believe that the director
of this movie is the same John Hough that directed classics like The
Legend Of Hell House and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry...
until you look at the more recent entries on his resume that include
such works as Howling IV: The Original Nightmare.
The movie is terrible right from the get go, starting by
showing us full-frontal nudity before the opening credits have finished
playing - which, as any bad movie scholar will tell you, is an
unmistakable sign there will be bad times ahead. The naked girl in this
case is a Fresno Catholic schoolgirl named Maureen Hatcher who
apparently makes a habit of taking off her clothes in a gas station
restroom for reasons not made very clear, but don't really matter to
the gas station attendant who looks in via a peephole at her
surprisingly developed adolescent body. On this particular day, after
his peeping he barges into the restroom, chloroforming and abducting
her. At first I though this was some kind of mutual sick sex game they
were playing, considering how unafraid and relatively calm Maureen
sounded just before and after the chloroforming, but sometime into her
being strapped topless on a bed and being given electric jolts, it was
finally made clear that Maureen had indeed been kidnapped, and that the
actress playing her simply had no idea how to act. This
jaw-dropping realization was equal to the subsequent revelation that
the attendant had not kidnapped her for the expected reasons, but for
reasons too ludicrous and laborious to get into here, which also goes
for how Maureen subsequently gets out of the situation.
What's even worse is that the events that subsequently
follow this opening sequence show they are able to stand on their own;
the only reason that the sequence seems to be there is as an excuse to
show some nudity, possibly because the originally cast actress to play
Maureen refused to do so. It stands to reason at the last minute they
wrote this prologue, casting it 10 years in the past so that they could
get away with having another (and younger) actress playing the naked
Maureen. Whatever the explanation might be for the opening sequence,
the rest of the movie not only takes place ten years later, but now
takes place all the way in Rhode Island, no doubt so that the
producers could find a foreign location to shoot in that not only could
be passed off as Rhode Island but offer generous tax credits for
foreign filmmakers (not Vancouver this time around, but Ireland
instead.) In the present time, Maureen is now played by Kensit, and the
explanation given to why she looks so different from the actress who
played her ten years earlier is that she had plastic surgery to alter
her appearance. At least the filmmakers give a somewhat plausible
explanation as to why she altered her appearance; she did so to elude
the authorities after having turned into a certified serial killer by
those electric shocks. Now locked up in an asylum, she is convinced she
is the reincarnation of the squeeze of a serial killer from the 19th
century. Not only that, she is convinced that Trey Campbell (Muldoon,
Melrose Place), the doctor treating her, is the reincarnation of
this guy. One day Campbell tells her he is taking off for a week's
vacation with his wife and daughter on an isolated island, and...
...really, I don't think there is any point into going
into further detail of the plot. Even if I hadn't told you about
Maureen's escape at the beginning of the review, I am sure you would
have guessed that she quickly breaks out of the asylum and starts
stalking Dr. Campbell, and that his wife and daughter will be put in
danger, and there will be a climactic scene where she has his wife and
daughter hostage blah blah blah. Not only is Hell's Gate
filled with stupidity, it is painfully predictable, predictable in ways
that practically slap us on the face. For example, when the Campbell
family arrives on the island and meet the babysitter they hire, they
make special emphasis that although their daughter is a great swimmer
they don't want her to go near the water. Naturally, we immediately
guess that the daughter will at one point be cornered by Maureen and
have to enter the water to escape. That's indeed what happens, though
since the movie is so cheap they don't actually show the daughter
swimming, instead showing her up to her ankles in water, then when we
next see her she is on dry land but wet all over. There are no
surprises in Hell's Gate. Not one. You have seen everything
here before. You'll guess correctly about the twist about the identity
of this 19th century serial killer as soon as this character is brought
up. You'll guess correctly which characters will live and who will die.
You'll always be several steps ahead of everybody and everything in the
movie. None of the plot "twists" are the least bit fresh. If the
no-name brand section of your supermarket had a video shelf, this plot
of this movie would fit in nicely.
Is it then not surprising that none of the cast seems to
stand out, considering this tired material that they have to perform?
To some aspect I can't really blame them for their inadequate
performances, but on the other hand there is little sign that they are
even giving a token effort to rise above the material by adding
something of their own. In Muldoon's case, it could be legitimately
argued that he is completely miscast as both a psychiatric doctor and a
family man. When he's at work, he seems to need to struggle to come up
with the right words or deductions that should be second nature to a
professional like him. At home, there is no feeling of family between
him and his wife and child; he seems like a newcomer in both roles.
It's also unforgivable that Muldoon more or less keeps his voice and
emotions at a monotone throughout, even when a major crisis has his
character blurt out "Please, God" three times in a row. Not any better
than Muldoon is Kensit as his nemesis. Her character is portrayed as a
genius despite her psychotic tendencies (which starts to get silly when
it's revealed she knows how to do things like pilot a police boat
effortlessly), two characteristics when combined that could make a
frightening villain. But even though she commits violent murder several
times in the movie, she never comes across as particularly threatening.
She hides her rage and obsessive feelings for the most part, giving off
shy smiles and speaking in a matter-of-fact tone, even when she's about
to plunge the knife.
Everyone else is merely bland, except for Patrick
Byrnes, who plays the familiar role of the tough cop who complains of
bleeding hearts who don't allow psychos to be put behind bars. Though
there's nothing exceptional about his character, he at least gives some
(seemingly intentional) funny facial expressions with the aid of his
stained crooked teeth, which does add some welcome goofiness. One thing
I couldn't figure out about his role is that after he's established as
a mainland cop, he's later seen as a member of the island's police
station, proved by a nameplate on his desk. I also wondered why his
character requests a DNA test to identify a burnt corpse when checking
dental records would be quicker and easier. While such plot stupidities
like this can be blamed on the screenplay, a lot of the blame for Hell's
Gate's downfall still falls on director John Hough. There are
the typical screw-ups here that you find in other bad movies - bad
photography, cheesy gore effects, cheap sets, etc. - but there are some
screw-ups here that suggest Hough wasn't even trying to make a
good movie. There are shots where people are clearly driving on the
right side of their cars, blatant continuity errors like when Dr.
Campbell enters a music store without his glasses but is wearing them
inside in the next shot, and most insultingly, Hough films several
cases of lesbian smooching at angles where we never actually see the
lips meet. When a movie can't even exploit something as easy as that,
you know something is very wrong.
Check
for availability on Amazon (DVD) -
-
Look
for source novel "Bad Karma" by Douglas Clegg
See also: Death Game, Death Weekend, Seven
Hours To Judgment
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