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After Sarah (Jean Dessart) has received a mysterious book from her
uncle Simon (Michel Coste), she and her brother David (Nicolas Couchet)
decide to pay the good uncle a visit - to find his castle-like mansion
empty ... safe for some mysterious beings that creep them out, and soon
they have to realize they're in the front row of a fight against the
supernatural.
In the meantime, gangsters Jeff (Jonathan Raffin), Diego (Benjamin
Combettes) and Franck (Antony Cinturino) arrive at uncle Simon's mansion
with the intention of using it as their hideout, but soon enough Diego and
Franck are wiped out by the monsters roaming the castle, and Jeff teams up
with Sarah and David in a mere effort to survive. Thing is, Sarah and
David have by now found out the creatures must come from a "Black
Gate" that links our world to another, dark, dimension, and they have
to enter that dimension to close the gate to see that our world isn't
overrun by zombies and taken over by the Devil Gods. Thing is, the dark
dimension holds just about every threat imaginable, and the mission
they're on might just be too big for our heroes to handle ...
Now I won't for a minute claim that The Black Gate's plot as
such is highly original or even all that well-structured - but it's based
on a nightmare logic that just really works for a movie like this. In many
ways, this movie's very much reminiscent of Lucio
Fulci's Gothic Trilogy and other movies from a bygone era when
the prime raison d'être of a horror movie was still to scare the pants
off the audience and keep them on the edge of their seats as long as
possible, using all techniques at hand rather than relying too heavily on
story alone and trying to explain everything away. And in that respect, The
Black Gate works quite beautifully, really, it's full of impressive
and creepy imagery, it doesn't shy away from gruesomeness, gets gory in
all the right places, keeps its tension throughout, and has just the
necessary air of mystery to it as well.
A really cool piece of genre cinema, actually.
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