The Black Gate: An Uneven Love Letter To Italian Horror
With The Black Gate, French filmmaking duo Fabrice Martin and Guillaume Beylard attempt to resurrect the supernatural horror of late-70s, early-80s Italian films. While their efforts aren’t entirely unsuccessful, the film’s uneven style, narrative incoherence, and overly digital sheen prevent their love letter from ever coming close to the era they try to recollect.
David and Sarah haven’t meet together since the murder of their both parents. When they receive a weird book from her uncle, Sarah and David return to their ancestral home to recount the mysteries surrounding their family’s past. At the same, time three mobsters attempt to escape authorities after a bank robbery, only to wind up at the same estate. As both parties find themselves trapped in a freaky situation which has led them to the depths of Hell, death, and destruction, awakening of the Beast will follow.
The Black Gate plays like a somewhat unintelligible, low-budget hybrid of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (or more pointedly 2017’s The Void) and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s hyper-stylized, Italian influenced genre piece Let the Corpses Tan. Merging Corpses’ “robbers-trapped-with-civilians” framing device with the visual and narrative influences of greats like Fulci, Argento, and Bava, directors Fabrice Martin and Guillaume Beylard create an uneven love letter that’s all style and no substance. Their attempts are noble and ambitious, but they never even come close to grazing the high bar of the influencers they so clearly wear on their sleeve.
The story is very hard to follow. Its broader points can be picked up, but the specifics of its narrative aren’t handled with too much care and will likely lose many viewers who try to follow along with its incoherent meandering. Things are either set up awkwardly (like David and Sarah’s choice to investigate their family’s past that kickstarts the story) or make little to no sense altogether. The story sleepwalks through its first two acts, and it doesn’t kick into a high gear until its third act. The inclusion of the robbers feels like padding built in to stretch things out to feature length, allowing the film’s nonsensical creatures to kill a few nobodies as it pushes our main characters closer to the gate. By the time we make it through the titular black gate and into another realm, we don’t really know what’s going on or what kind of laws govern this enigmatic place they’ve wandered into — but by this point you likely won’t care.
The film incorporates a lot of fun DIY practical effects, but its continual leaning on cheap CG obscures a lot of its potential charm. Unfortunately, the practical effects are only really leveraged in the last third of the film, which makes that 15-20 minute stretch a spatterific blast, but the rest of the film stands in stark contrast. Instead of thinking of a clever way to avoid having to use CGI all the time, Martin and Beylard lean all the way into it, adding on layer after layer of tacky and astonishingly bad computer effects. They also give scenes (or random shots within scenes) a digital color filter, which can be distracting and add to the film’s discord. The colorization is successful in creating an old-timey feel, recalling the style of Bava or Argento, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Although, unlike a film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which masterfully (and iconically) uses its style as a visual extension of its central characters perspective,The Black Gate’s overly-digitized cosmetics lack motivation and are never used to any meaningful ends. This is especially disheartening because Martin and Beylard show a strong visual eye, finding interesting angles that create an effective atmosphere, which give off faint notes of the kind of low-budget bravado illustrated in early Robert Rodriguez films. But, regrettably, the digital face-lift and tacky effects undercut this at every turn, creating an experience loaded with more frustration and annoyance than entertainment value.
The performances undulate between sedation and over exaggeration, further adding to the uneven feel. Worst of all, the film and its performers take things a bit too seriously when they really ought to be dipping their whole body into camp. There’s some moments of unintentional comedy (we’re pretty sure we saw a robber grab a gun that was duct taped to a container of motor oil in a car’s trunk), but the fact that The Black Gate refuses to acknowledge its absurdity and lean into it in a fun way makes things kind of a drag. The film’s gory conclusion (with most zombies all wearing white shirts to obviously emphasis the blood) stands out as high note, but it’ll be too-little-to-late for a lot of viewers.
But don’t just take our word for it, give the film a go! It’s streaming right now on Amazon Prime.
Recommendation: If you like DIY horror with some decent practical effects, feel free to wander through The Black Gate. It’d be a fun film to Mystery Science Theater with a group of friends.
Rating: 1.5 exploding heads outta 5.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!