Video board games were big in the 1990s. I myself had the Atmosfear boardgame (known as Nightmare in some places) and its three VHS expansion packs (Baron Samedi, who even had a music video at the end of his game), Anne de Chantraine and Elizabeth Bathory. they were awesome games and I'm still sad that I was rarely able to get enough people together who were actually willing to play a game that also involved watching a video for an hour at the same time - well, that and the fact that sales had dropped by the fourth expansion so we never got to see the episodes for Gevaudan, Khufu and Hellin. So Beyond the Gates, a horror movie about a video board game that has supernatural effects on the real world, really appealed to me.
Two brothers, Gordon and John Hardesty, come together after a long estrangement to deal with their father's estate. Their father disappeared mysteriously some months ago with no trace; the brothers are there to go through his video store in preparation for selling everything off. In his office, however, they discover a strange video board game that their father appeared to have been playing when he disappeared - Beyond the Gates. Intrigued, the brothers, along with Gordon's girlfriend Margot, decide to play the game themselves, and soon find themselves caught up in the game... whether they want to be or not. The video host is a mysterious woman who seems to know a lot about the brothers and what is going on "outside" of her video world. She tells them that, if they play the game and win, they can save their father... but will Gordon and John be up to the tasks ahead of them?
Remember back in the Hellraiser: Judgment review when I pitched the concept of a cross between the Jumanji game and the Lament Configuration? Well, Beyond the Gates feels a little like that concept. There's the blurring of lines between the game and reality, the increasingly dangerous (and messy) tasks the players have to complete to progress in the game, the body count, the threats to the players' souls... The concept itself is an excellent hook, as it digs straight into the nostalgia part of the brain that so many horror fans my age will have regarding those old video board games (and for those who are too young to remember them, there's the curiosity factor of how things were done at the end of the last millennium).
The movie is also clearly a love letter to the horror movies of the 1980s, from the casting of Barbara Crampton as Evelyn, the mysterious video hostess, to the title and even some of the scenes calling back to the films of Lucio Fulci (his biography is also called Beyond the Gates and I was reminded of films like The Beyond and City of the Living Dead while I was watching). There's even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from director David Bruckner. The filmmakers behind Beyond the Gates clearly know and love their horror.
The film has its fair share of splattery moments - from disembowelled voodoo dolls and their effect on the unlucky guy the doll represents, to a pretty spectacular exploding head - and these effects are executed pretty well on the film's low budget. The filmmakers even manage to write a reason for a few CGI effects that might otherwise look a bit dodgy in the film - it's all part of the game. The two biggest flaws in Beyond the Gates, however, are its rather slow pacing (it takes a fair amount of time for the brothers to even find the game and start playing it, and before that it feels much less like a horror and more like a family drama TV movie) and that many of its plot beats are rather obvious to predict. The movie has a small cast and nearly all of them have a key role to play, which makes it quite easy to predict what's going to happen to some of them, even before the game starts spelling it out for us. Margot, for example, is quite clearly there to be put in danger by the game in the third act and to provide Gordon with some angsty backstory that he'll have to overcome by the film's climax.
Still, these points are by no means dealbreakers. Beyond the Gates would get a recommendation because of its original concept alone, and it is a compelling film. There's only one character I found myself hating with any sort of passion, and he was only in the film for a couple of scenes so the pain of watching the world's most pretentious Goth was lessened considerably. Beyond the Gates is definitely a film to watch, whether you're suffering from a case of 80s/early 90s nostalgia or not.
Comments