To tell you the truth, I am not very familiar with South American horror movies. Of course I watched a couple of Santo flicks, read about Coffin Joe and recently enjoyed two different movies from "down there" - vampire piece "Eternal Blood" and a gothic Mexico classic "The Curse of the Crying Woman". As this is pretty much it, I was very interested in getting a screener copy of this Argentinean fright flick called "The Last Gateway".
As you can see from my introduction, the idea surrounding "The Last Gateway" sounds very interesting. Accompanied by his better half Marianne, Michael just moves into a new house. The first night he begins getting seizures and unbearable pain makes him drop a late visit to his doctor neighbour. Very soon we find out that Michael became a gateway from hell and within moments strange creatures start appearing from his inside. I adored the monsters in the movie as they looked so old school - nowadays all indie horrors deploy cheapo prosthetics in 5% of cases and all the rest have shoddy CGI effects. The crew behind "The Last Gateway" definitely had some good ideas and with a really small budget, (I will talk about this later), managed to create slimy abstract monsters. While they looked great, in my opinion they should have been a bit more aggressive. Majority of them, not including the main ghoul and an "Evil Dead" inspired old hag, were just there to build atmosphere (successfully), but they weren't a real threat.
 
The movie centers around Michael and his escape from his assailants, a mysterious bunch including the doctor, a priest and some random weirdos. After running away for some time, he stops at Pleasentville and there we get a series of conflicts. The story started out pretty good and everything was just perfect until the middle part of the movie which was rather slow paced and didn't do justice to the movie. In this period we get introduced to some new characters which are clearly soon to be cannon fodder. The running time is around 105 minutes, so maybe 10 minutes could have been cut from this middle part which would ensure a better overall dynamics of the movie. As expected, approximately half an hour before the end, things start moving up and we are once again filled with some good action while Michael and the love of his life try to survive in this rather gloomy situation.
Regarding the budget, Demian Rugna, the mastermind (director/writer/editor) behind the movie mentioned in an e-mail communication that the budget of the movie was just $50,000 and that they had 25 days for shooting it. If I didn't know this piece of information, after finishing watching the movie I would never say that the budget was so low. I was really impressed by the visual look of the movie, everything looked perfect - from camera work, direction, special effects and even the physical locations smelled of true horror. Majority of actors were also very good and I just had some smaller problems with some dubbing (the movie runs an English audio track).
"The Last Gateway" is a very refreshing indie horror movie which clearly shows that even with a really low budget, people with ideas, skills and enthusiasm can forge a very good horror flick. Surely, the movie isn't perfect, it has its downsides, but it was very enjoyable, with a good cast and great overall look.
I am rating the movie with 6/10, but I need to mention if I would just rate it in the pool of indie horror movies I've seen in the past couple of years, it would be among the cream of the crop.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2007
DIRECTOR: Demián Rugna
WRITING CREDITS: Demián Rugna
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Rodrigo Aragón, Salomé Boustani, Jackie Kruguer
COUNTRY: Argentina
RUNTIME: 105 min
RATING: 6/10
Last Gateway, The Website/IMDB Click here
Last Gateway, The Trailer Click here
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