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Codex Atanicus
Codex Atanicus is a three story anthology by Spanish director Carlos Atanes. Before watching the movie I never heard of the guy, but the introduction video on the DVD by one of his regular actresses Arantxa Peņa made me realize that I'm in for a hell of a ride. Experimental, bizarre, sick, strange - these are some of the words that describe the stories contained in Codex Atanicus. The anthology is opened by a 20 minute short from 1995 called Metaminds & Metabodies. I am really not into this kind of experimental videos, but I will try to summarize. It opens with a girl singing in the club. Everything looks ultra underground and the girl is connected with some wires to the walls. Strange people are watching her...
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Movie Review: Cemetery Gates

Story
A mutated Tasmanian Devil is stolen from a lab by two activists, and when they later set it free by an old cemetery in the woods, the creature kills them both and starts killing other people around the woods as well. At the same time, a group of college students are heading for the same cemetery to shoot a zombie film that is supposed to be called Cemetery Gates. Meanwhile, two scientists, one of them being the father of one of the college students, discovers that their hideous creature that they call Precious is missing, and starts seaching the countryside for it. It doesn't take long before they see all the carnage, and now the question is, will they be able to stop the beast before it kills again? Well, probably not..

Comments
I started watching Cemetery Gates without knowing absolutely nothing about it, and now after having seen the whole thing, I would have to say that the title of the movie was somewhat misleading. What are your thoughts when you hear Cemetery Gates? Maybe that it would be about a cemetery, and maybe something about the dead rising from their graves or something like that.. am I getting warm? So I was a bit surprised when the film turned out to be sort of a creature feature instead about a mutated Tasmanian Devil that is killing people around a forest that just happens to have a cemetery close by. Ok, so there are some college students in the film that are supposed to shoot their own little zombie film that is called Cemetery Gates, but you only got to see that for what - maybe 5 minutes of them actually shooting the film. So now I've been complaining for a while and none of it really matters, I just woke up and am in desperate need for some coffee, but still, it's not a good title.

While I found Cemetery Gates being entertaining enough to sit through, I still found a lot of faults that it had to it as well as I found some stuff that worked quite well in the film. I think that it was a pretty hard movie to put a rating on since some of the stuff to be found within the film were really good, while some other stuff were totally pointless and just made the movie look stupid. I ended up giving it a 5 which means that it's a decent flick, but I believe that the film had no real balance and went from being really crappy to being really good, going back to being stupid and after that back to being all right again. And so it went on, all the way through. In the end I guess it worked out all right, but the ride there was a bit irritating.

Cemetery Gates Cemetery Gates

Basically it goes like this; some scientists have been working on mutating a Tasmanian Devil. Two activists steals it without knowing what it really is in order to release it into the wild, but with both of the activists ending up dead. Some college students travels to a cemetery to shoot a zombie film, but soon runs into trouble with some local hicks as well as the monsterous beast that is out there in the woods, killing everything it comes in contact with. The scientists responsible for the mutated creature eventually discovers that their beast is missing and starts searching for it, and it doesn't take long before they find trails of blood and carnage that the beast has left out there in the woods.

I believe that the movie looked totally all right, only problem was when you sometimes got to see the beast up-close, or when it was running away, it looked like some dude wearing a monster costume. But the film makes up for it when it comes to blood and gore, and delivers truck loads of that. I'm not kidding here, and if you love to watch splatter and carnage, Cemetery Gates actually has a helluva lot to offer. Then it comes to the humour, and even though I can admit that I have a really low sense of humour most of the time, most stuff here comes of as just totally childish and it's just the stuff that idiotic teens could appreciate, if even that. There's a lot of humour in regards to this bimbo that is part of the zombie film crew, and that was just all so stupid it almost made me sick. None-inventive and just there for no good reason whatsoever. The film itself had a lot of these pretty negative things that brought it down, but at the same time, it made up for some of those crappy things along the way.

Final Comments
I would recommend Cemetery Gates to horror fans that just wants to have a good time and not wants to overthink thing. If not taken seriously, the film is actually not all that bad and sure has some all right stuff to offer, with the gore and splatter being the highlights. Acting-wise, you can expect your normal low-budget horror film type of acting, not all bad, but not a 100 percent convincing either, but it works for this type of movie though. Look out for one scene in the forest featuring two stoners with one of them seeing the beast in a cuddly stoned type of way..hilarious indeed. Even if I'm not a big fan of the flick now, I'll definitely save the film to later re-watch it again, because I have a feeling that this might be the type of film that'll grow on ya.

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Cemetery Gates

ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Roy Knyrim
WRITING CREDITS: Pat Coburn, Brian Patrick O'Toole
GENRE: Horror, Comedy
CAST: Reggie Bannister, Peter Stickles, Aime Wolf
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 92 min

RATING: 5/10

Cemetery Gates Website/IMDB Click here
Cemetery Gates Trailer Click here

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