Skip to main content

Hellgate (1989) - William A. Levey


When I started this project I knew fair well that the horror genre is full of these terrible "Straight-to-Video" or "Schlock" films that were made pretty much to fill space. William Levey is responsible for some real classics. Could you hear the sarcasm? I looked through his catalog and spied such classics as Slumber Party '57 and Blackenstein. Yes. Blackenstein. 


Our antagonist is a deranged old man on a power trip. He had witnessed his daughters vicious murder at the hands of a biker-gang and now terrorized anyone that entered his town. His weapon of choice is a strange magical crystal rock that shoots lasers, reanimates the dead, and blows shit up. Hence the power trip. This guy eventually brings his daughter back to life, essentially as a sexual predator that would help him lure in unsuspecting guys. Enter this group of teenagers that try to survive this picture when curiosity leads them into this hellish town. 


The group is bland and stagnant with little character or emotion in their acting. In fact this movie feels like it had very little effort put into it. Aside from a few scenes of passable gore this movie has very little to keep it going. They show a gratuitous amount of skin and sex but do a horrible job of making it remotely alluring. It's just weird and kinda gross. There is a particular foul massage scene that's just... nasty. 

The direction is the main problem here. William Levey did a horrendous job. I know that he's know for these types of movies but this is just appalling. You can't overlook the major issues this movie has from the sound and editing all the way to the cinematography. Every single aspect of this movie is bad. The jokes are dated and obnoxious as are the soundtrack choices. The soundtrack was not good. It was full of public domain numbers and didn't do anything to help move the movie along. It had some story lines set during the fifties, so you get to hear a lot of generic rock music that all sounds a little too familiar but just off by a bit. It's really strange. 

I'm not saying that a great deal of this movies budget was spent on cocaine but it sure wasn't spent on quality control. I can't, in right mind, suggest that anyone unearth this flick. It serves no purpose. It's not scary. It doesn't illicit any type of emotion other than boredom. These movies came out in droves and this wasn't the last of them. Unfortunately on this journey I am going to run into some drizzling crap. This is one of them. 

Director: William Levey
Starring: Ron Palillo
Country: USA and South Africa

Did ya know...
This movie was filmed in South Africa. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ju-On (2000) - Takashi Shimizu

Watching Japanese horror is similar to watching British comedy. If you enjoy dry whit then you probably enjoy the boys of Monty Python in drag. That's the joke, they're dressed like women. Get it? Well, that's British humor. But if you're like most Americans you probably prefer Adam Sandler farting his way across a football field and hooking up with chicks that are way out of his league. Americans usually prefer this more in your face, crass brand of humor. My point is funny in England is different from funny in the US. The same goes for J-Horror. What the Japanese consider scary is very different from what Americans consider scary and it shows in this horror film. Japanese horror is generally slow (a little too slow sometimes), suspenseful and creepy. Ju-On is a creepy effing film. The movie has almost no soundtrack. It is incredibly suspenseful and the pay-offs are pretty awesome, but I think that it was done better in the American version (cultural t...
Post a Comment
Not scared yet? »

Le Diable au Convent (1899) - George Melies

Le Diable au Convent is longer than the two previous Georges Méliès ventures into short form horror. This particular French short shows the Devil himself running a convent and terrorizing the poor old nuns that live there. However he is finally vanquished by the good of Faith. This is yet another Méliès classic, showcasing the art work that really goes into his short film-making. This is one of the earliest examples of a horror movie that could rely on its elaborate set design and artistic design. Everything in this film, although horribly aged, has been packaged extremely well. If you are a fan of production and set design then I would highly recommend just about anything that Melies has his name on. Though nothing that is considered too extreme actually happens, Satan does have his way with a convent. The satanic imagery itself must have kept this film on the traveling carnival circuit. It certainly wouldn’t fit into the good moral bag that society shoved i...
1 comment
Not scared yet? »

Spookies (1986) - Genie Joseph, Thomas Doran, and Brendan Faulkner

It's impossible to get a decent movie when you take two films and just squash them together. That is essentially the story of how this movie came together. The film started as Twisted Souls. However, according to the financial backer they didn't have enough horror. So they ended up hiring another guy to come in and add a monster in virtually every scene.  This movie started out being directed by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran. It basically is the tale of two sets of teenagers that arrive to a strange building surrounded by a strange cemetery. It was your usual tale of teenagers in a big hows with a few monsters. Then they brought in Genie Joseph and added even more. Like a haunted birthday party, a murderous cat-man, zombies, and an old wizard. It really became a smorgasbord of horror with a very thin plot-line leading it around. This movie is hard to summarize in a conventional way. It just packs so much.  The most interesting part of this movie are ...
2 comments
Not scared yet? »