American born exploitation jack-of-all-trades filmmaker
William A. Levey, a director who likely would’ve had quite a tenure at Cannon
Films, first started out in blaxploitation horror with the 1973 film Blackenstein
before eventually going on to direct sex comedies like The Happy Hooker
Goes to Washington and Slumber Party ’57 and even a porno with Wam
Bam Thank You Spaceman. While not
necessarily an auteur with the strongest track record, the hired gun kept at it
until 1991 culminating with his last film Committed.
Which brings us to his bonkers and messy 1989
South African unfinished business ghost revenge story Hellgate, a movie
that doesn’t always land a home run but does offer up its own subset of innovative
cheap thrills while also being a notable release during the straight-to-video
boom in the United States. While
entrenched in the supernatural and occult, the real reason to see this thing
isn’t for scares so much as cool effects, wild death scenes and its South
African location dressed up to be America, not completely unlike the cultural
disconnect seen in Don’t Panic.
Told in flashback by three stereotypical horny college
students amusing themselves with ghost stories by the campfire, we learn sometime
in the 1950s in the small American town of Hellgate a motorcycle biker gang
known as The Strangers abducted a young waitress named Josie (Abigail
Wolcott) before murdering her. Years
pass and the girl’s father Lucas (Carel Trichardt) discovers a magic crystal that
can revive the dead, prompting a murder spree where Josie seduces people in the
town before her father kills them.
The
madness doesn’t stop there as he repopulates with the crystal the town of Hellgate
with the undead who also act like possessed acolytes. Meanwhile a fourth patron named Matt (Ron
Palillo) who turns out to be our main character stops to pick up a hitchhiker
unaware it is the ghost of Josie, leading him to her abandoned mansion where
her father lies in wait. Then it starts
to really ratchet up the craziness including but not limited to goofy sex
scenes and Josie dancing naked in a dance hall amid several couples.
Wacky and weird, this South African production scripted by
Michael O’Rourke is weak on the storytelling front but fun to watch on the
visual effects front. Shot in a real
abandoned town within South Africa and comprised largely of a South African cast,
the film is best remembered for being rendered by the same effects team that
did Hellraiser, providing wild concoctions like a revived inflated
goldfish monster, faces being ripped off, an emaciated corpse and even a
bat. There’s all off the optical effects
with the crystal, interesting makeup effects on Carel Trichardt’s face with a
kind of metallic muzzle mask and in keeping with the unfinished business themes
the soundtrack when it isn’t lo-fi synth by Barry Fasman and Dana Walden mostly
consists of 1950s needle drops.
On its terms no its not that good but the
nuttiness of the thing and the creature effects from the Hellraiser team make it a mostly passable beer-and-pizza
October flick good to throw on the background at parties. You could do far worse with two hours on the
cusp of Halloween.
--Andrew Kotwicki