Purely Joyful Movie!

Absolutely Fantastic

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Cemetery Gates is set in Los Angeles where two dumb environmentalists named Alex (Stephen Van Dorn) & Ben (Greg McDonald) break into a top secret research laboratory where they find a large crate with some sort of animal inside that they feel compelled to release into the wild rather than let it be experimented on. Unfortunately the animal inside the crate turns out to be a seven foot tall mutated Tasmanian Devil named Precious that likes to kill & eat people & now it's loose in a national park. Student amateur filmmaker Hunter Belmont (Peter Stickles) & some of his buddies drive out to an old cemetery where he intends to shoot some of his low budget zombie horror film 'The Cemetery Gates' but the filmmakers soon find themselves under attack from the mutated creature...Directed by Roy Knyrim this is a fairly decent if unspectacular 'Creature Feature' with slightly more gore than one might expect, if nothing else it's probably better than the majority of the 'Creature Feature' turds that the Sci-Fi Channel show at least. The film is maybe best described as a creature feature mixed with a little teen slasher as the first hour or so of Cemetery Gates consists of various teens being introduced & then killed off by the creature, every excuse is here from people needing to pee to cars breaking down to same random woman on a push bike who all get introduced then killed off within minutes. The main character's are a bit dull except fro blonde bimbo August who gets a few amusing lines, looks good & gets her breasts out a couple of times. The story behind the mutated Tasmanian Devil is poor with vague explanations about trying to reproduce it's immune system or something like that & if I was an animal activist I think I would actually take a look inside the crate to see what was making those loud roaring noises before trying to release it into the wild, you know what I mean? To be fair to Cemtery Gates it never tries to be anything other than a fun 'Creature Feature' with a fast pace & plenty of gory kills but it's nothing new, it's predictable & does get repetitive. It's watchable enough thanks to a fair amount of blood & some nudity but I will have probably forgotten all about it by the end of the week.The highlight of Cemtery gates has to be the blood & gore set-pieces with ripped out spines, torn off limbs, mutilated bodies, decapitations, bit throats, squashed heads, people bitten in half & lots of spurting blood. The creature itself looks poor as it's obviously just some guy in a suit, it's eyes & mouth never move & you can tell it's just a static face mask. There's some very poor physics going on at the end as various people fall down holes & then manage to climb back out again, these scenes don't really work & when the climax in the dark tunnels come & the filmmakers actually try to generate tension it falls apart with bad effects & annoying character's who make stupid decisions, the film works much batter as an out & out splatter gore 'Creature Feature'.With a supposed budget of close to a million Cemtery gates looks alright for a low budget horror, it's professionally made at least even if it does look a little made for telly-ish. Special make-up effects guys Greg Nicotero & Howard Berger makes cameos while a balding & fat Reggie Bannister of Phantasm (1979) & sequels 'fame' turns up here sporting a ridiculous pony tail.Cemetery Gates is a decent enough 'Creature Feature' that spends most of it's time killing off insignificant character's in gory ways & there's nothing wrong with that I say but it does get repetitive & a poor looking creature doesn't help credibility. Not too bad but not that great either, watchable if nothing else.

I imagine it will take me longer to write this comment than it took the creators of Cemetery Gates to come up with the plot for their film, but this being a not-exactly-original, no-frills monster movie doesn't stop it from being a whole lot of fun. It may have been done a thousand times before, but so long as there's plenty of silly creature effects, a ton of blood and gore, and some nudity from a busty girl or two, I'll never get bored of the 'mutant creature on the loose' sub-genre—and Cemetery Gates delivers on all counts.The film's amazingly daft killer creature is a huge, genetically enhanced Tasmanian devil named Precious (yes, you read that correctly—a Tasmanian devil named Precious!!!) that has been released into the wild by a pair of very dumb animal activists. After immediately killing it's liberators, the vicious beast heads for a nearby cemetery, where a group of young film-makers are shooting the opening scenes for a horror movie. Meanwhile, scientist Belmont (Reggie Bannister) and his sexy assistant Dr. Christine Kollar (Aime Wolf) are tracking the monster, hoping to recapture it before it eats too many people. Fat chance!With practically every attack by Precious being accompanied by buckets of blood, and the bits in between deaths made extremely bearable by the presence of a couple of young hotties (including the very cute, giggly August, played by busty blonde Kristin Novak, who regularly removes her top), Cemetery Gates is great entertainment for those not wanting to work their brain cells too hard.Towards the end of the film, things do run out of steam a tad, with a little too much running around in tunnels for my liking, but with so much juicy splatter on display, a fun looking non-CGI beast, some fine breasts, plus a hilarious scene in which a hippie stoned on peyote sees Precious as a cute animated animal, I'm willing to be a little forgiving about the film's few imperfections.

I can't believe this has been rated so high - and average 4/10? This movie was terrible. I love gore and bad horror movies, and this was surely that, but it still sucked. The 'blood' in this movie looked exactly like the blueberry syrup I put on my waffles every morning. And I HATED every single character in this film. These people should never act again. The stupid pot-smoking teenage actors gave the worst most annoying performances ever captured on film. So maybe that is the only thing this movie achieved, because it didn't really do much else. It certainly didn't scare me, and it wasn't funny or amusing, except possibly with the way some of the people were unbelievably killed.

Wow... This one threw me for a loop. With a title like "Cemetery Gates", you kinda start thinking "Zombies" or some other kind of "Undead" folks, but this one fooled me "Hook, Line and what a Stinker". I like to watch the "Making Of" segments first, because it kinda lets you in on what the producers were trying to accomplish. No zombies, no creepy kids, no mortuary, in fact nothing of the "Undead" persuasion at all... A mutant "Tasmaniun Devil" would try to scare us this time around. Well, maybe it would have scared me if IT weren't a guy in a Disneyland costume gone wrong. I mean... Come on! Did the producers honestly think this was going to scare someone? I understand it was supposed to be half comedy, but don't call it "Cemetery Gates" and then insult us with this crap. The scariest part of this film was the fact that the producers actually sought after director Roy Knyrim, so that they could add a real creepy feel to the film. "Sorry Roy" your film sucks! The saddest part is that they suckered Reggie "Phantasim" Bannister to partake in the idiocy. Say it ain't so Reggie... Say it ain't so. The film is a model case for "False Advertising", and I hope "Horror" fans aren't fooled the way that I was.