It sure would be much easier to write a review of a movie if I had some idea what actually happened in it. Now, almost two hours since I finished Hellgate, I’m still baffled what to actually make of it.

The movie starts out like a horror anthology with one of the leads starting to tell a story from the past of of a motorcycle gang kidnapping a young woman and riding to Hellgate, a desolate ghost town where they get killed by a knife wielding father of the girl, who gets killed after a wall collapses on her. Later a miner finds a piece of crystal in a mine that can revive dead things or bloat living things up to the point of an explosion. Cut to present time where the fourth protagonist runs into the same roadside bar where the girl was kidnapped from, confronts a violent mechanic – and it was at this point where it started to become painfully obvious the movie is going nowhere fast.

But, the movie continues to lead you on, offering glimpses of hope of some kind of coherence, but it just gets more and more abstract as it goes along; there’s some older dude with metal pieces glued to his face attacking the protagonists as well as some corpses raising up from graves, ghost pianists playing pianos and can can dancers dancing.

Hellgate isn’t categorized as a comedy, but I’ve got a funny feeling that we’re all been had and the movie is just one big deliberate joke on the viewer. This would make the movie something of an art piece and a statement, but unless someone has a proof of this, I have no choice but the rate the movie at face value.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 17%