1988’s Hollow Gate begins with a Halloween party that almost goes terribly wrong. When he feels that his son Mark is not properly bobbing for apples, a drunken father (Richard London) shoves Mark’s face into the water and yells at him for embarrassing the family. Mark nearly drowns, and hopefully the family learns an important lesson about being overly competitive.
Ten years later, Mark (Addison Randall) is working at a gas station on Halloween night. An obnoxious man drives up with his girlfriend. The man wants some gas put in his car and he hands Mark his girlfriend’s panties. (I guess that’s how you tip in New Jersey.) Mark proceeds to stuff the panties into the car’s gas tank and then set them on fire. The man laughs as he drives away. However, he’s not laughing when the car blows up.
Two years after that, Mark harasses a woman at a Halloween shop. Everyone in town agrees that Mark has obviously been driven mad by the incident at the Halloween party, but nothing can be done about it because Mark’s wealthy grandmother (Pat Shalsant) owns the entire town. Mark is released to her care.
The next Halloween, four teenagers are invited to a party at Mark’s mansion. They discover that Grandma has been murdered and that Mark wants them all to put on some costumes that he ordered. When they are understandably reluctant to play Mark’s game, Mark decides that he’ll just wear each costume and kill his guests, one by one….
As far as SOV horror films are concerned, Hollow Gate is not a bad one. Director Ray Di Zazzo is able to capture a few memorable images. If none of the performances are exactly convincing, a few of them are so over-the-top that they’re entertaining. The gore is splattery enough to be effective, even if it’s not particularly realistic. The plot is not particularly original, but there are still enough scenes of lawyers and police officers discussing how Mark would be in prison if not for his wealthy family that you can at least argue that the film pretended to have something more on its mind than just cheap kills.
What truly makes this film memorable is the flamboyant killer. Mark not only changes costumes, but his methods are a bit more original than the typical hack-and-slash killer. Yes, he can use a knife and an axe, and he does just that in one scene. But he can also run you over with a thresher while dressed as a cowboy. Or he can dress up like an English gentleman and have two golden retrievers maul you to death. The dog scene is probably the most memorable one in the film, if only because the dogs themselves are very cute and seem to be having great fun as they lick their unfortunate victim to death. They’re the adorable canines of doom!
It’s a cheap movie with a predictable plot, but it also appears to be a film that is truly in love with Halloween and all of the customs that go along with it. The owner of the local costume store is ultimately just as important as the killer. In the true Halloween tradition, the story ends on an ambiguous note. Was that the boogeyman? Perhaps he was.
