Roses Have Thoughts

If you think there are bad movies, wait until you see Hellgate. This supernatural oddity is a jumbled mess, and it feels like someone stitched it together in the middle of a séance. Directed by William A. Levey, the film tries to juggle campy horror with ghostly tragedy but ends up lost in translation, offering little for anyone outside of die-hard fans of VHS-era kitsch.

Set in a desolate desert town that looks like it was borrowed from a John Ford set that was left to rot, the movie kicks off with the brutal murder of Josie (Abigail Wolcott), a friendly diner waitress who meets an unfortunate end at the hands of some leering bikers. Her father, portrayed by Carel Trichardt with all the wild-eyed intensity of a community theater Colonel Kurtz, stumbles upon a mysterious crystal in a nearby cave that can bring the dead back to life. Naturally, he decides to resurrect his daughter, but as it often goes with dubious magic, things get out of hand.

Then we meet a group of college students, led by Ron Palillo, who seems to have wandered in from a completely different film or perhaps even a different decade. Their chemistry is nonexistent, their dialogue is puzzling (“That’s not a ghost town, it’s an attitude!”), and their decision-making skills would make the characters in Scooby-Doo look like geniuses.

The resurrected Josie drifts through Hellgate’s eerie cityscape, sometimes seducing visitors and other times going on a killing spree, but it’s never clear if she’s a tragic figure or just plain terrifying. Levey seems to be trying to capture the vibe of classics like Phantasm and The Evil Dead, but what he ends up with is a dull echo of both, too serious to be enjoyable and too silly to be scary.

On a technical level, Hellgate is as uneven as its tone. It seems the camera lens had desert dust on it, which made the cinematography appear washed out. The special effects, especially those involving the glowing resurrection crystal, look like they belong in a bargain-bin planetarium show. The score struggles to find its footing, using cheap synth stings and aimless plucking that sounds borrowed from an early video game.

Yet, despite its many flaws, there’s a certain charm to Hellgate’s clumsiness. There’s something almost admirable about its commitment to weirdness, a resurrection crystal? A zombie father? A ghost town that feels like a time loop? In a different creative world, this could have been a self-aware cult classic. Instead, it stands as the cinematic equivalent of a haunted wax museum, intriguing for a moment but ultimately collapsing under the weight of its own kitsch.

By the time we reach the film’s bewildering conclusion, complete with incoherent explosions and performances so wooden they risk splintering, the only feeling left is one of weary amusement.

Verdict: Hellgate isn’t really a film; it’s more like a relic, a flickering ghost of ‘80s horror excess, doomed to wander through the late-night cable wasteland for all eternity.

IMDB