User Reviews

Umberto Lenzi reaches deep and scrapes the bottom of the barrel thoroughly with this low-to-no budget horror set in caverns beneath an ancient church. With only a minimum of gore and absolutely no technical merit, this dreadful movie will test the patience of even the most dedicated horror completist.

A man who has recently broken the world isolation record in a labyrinthine cave encounters seven ghostly monks who, seven hundred years after their execution during the inquisition, attempt to free themselves from damnation by killing seven heretics—the record-breaker and his would-be rescuers.

With a mind-numbingly awful script, leaden acting, bargain-basement effects and an ending ripped off from Lenzi's own Nightmare City (the whole film is a portent imagined by the heroine), this little-seen film is a chore to sit through.

Two early deaths—a skull smashing and an eye gouging—show some promise, but what follows is tedious in the extreme. Arachnophobes may find several scenes featuring tarantula attacks difficult to watch, but considering this movie is from the man who gave us the legendary (and extremely violent) Cannibal Ferox, Hell's Gate is a real let down.

Dr. Johns (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Emanuelle in Bangkok, War of the Planets) has spent 78 days in a hole and set a record, but now he's claiming that everyone will die if they come down to rescue him.

Umberto Lenzi directed five movies in 1989 and of those, this is the weakest (in case you want to know, I'd rank the others in this order: Nightmare Beach, Hitcher In the Dark, House of Witchcraft AKA Ghosthouse 4 and House of Lost Souls/AKA Ghosthouse 3). Maybe he was beyond busy, so busy that he thought no one would noticed if this movie was endless cave exploration and the end from Nightmare City.

Maybe he really loved his wife Olga Pehar and wanted to encourage her as this was her first script. She'd go on to write Hitcher In the Dark, After the Condor, Karate Rock, Black Demons, Hunt for the Golden Scorpion, Navigators of the Space and Karate Warrior 3 - 5.

I really wanted to love this movie. It has caves, it has gore, it has Lenzi. That said, he made some other movies that I'd totally recommend, such as Orgasmo, So Sweet...So Perverse, A Quiet Place to Kill, Spasmo, Ghosthouse, Cannibal Ferox, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Oasis of Fear.

Well - HELL'S GATE is no CANNIBAL FEROX, that much is for sure. It is entertaining in a turn-your-brain-off-and-laugh sort of way - so it may be of interest to Italian horror fans...just don't expect a FEROX-style bloodbath.

A group of spelunkers go down to help out their buddy who's been hanging out in a cave for 78 days as part of some sort of record. During the last hour of his underground incarceration, the record-setter freaks out and starts screaming that someone/thing is trying to kill him - so his buddies decide to try to get him out. A pair of meddling college kids looking for an underground tomb join the group and they all go in search of the missing cave-dweller. They find him and he starts talking about being stalked by some sort of force. Meanwhile the college kids find the tomb they're looking for, and they find that the area is cursed by the souls of seven monks who have to murder seven heretics in order to free themselves of the curse. Of course, the spelunkers start getting picked-off by the vengeful spirits - or so you think...

HELL'S GATE is fun on a few levels - there's some OK gore in one or two scenes, and there's a few unintentionally hilarious scenes - one of the group actually asks one of the others what year it is when trying to calculate the 700 year cycle of the curse. At another point, when one of the group is killed by spiders and the gang is trying to figure out what killed him - the "doctor" says that it looks like insect bites, maybe of the kind that would come from bugs FROM THE AMAZON??!!!??? I'm not even gonna try to figure out the reasoning where Amazonian bugs would travel to a cave in Italy just to attack someone - but who knows. Anyway - not a total flop of a film, but definitely nothing extremely notable. It kept my interest for the most part so I'll give it a slightly better-than-average rating. The ending is a bit stupid and cliché - but I'm used to that as well...6/10