Devil's Gate

Fallen Angel

Devil's Gate
Canada 2017
Directed by Clay Staub
Ace Entertainment FIlms

Warning: Some spoilers regarding the story set up over the first half an hour.

Devil’s Gate is a nice little entry into the horror genre and is the directorial debut of Clay Staub (who has been AD on a number of high profile Hollywood films, especially for Zack Snyder). This one is, like another film I saw a little while ago, one of those stories (and titles) which deliberately sets up expectations of where the plot is going... and then taking you somewhere slightly different. This movie hits one of my scare spots in terms of where it’s going so I was always going to have a fairly good time with this one.

The story involves main protagonist FBI Agent Daria Francis, played by Amanda Schull, who has been sent to the county of Devil’s Gate in order to help out with a case of two missing persons, the wife and son of a farmer in a remote farmhouse in the midst of the desert land (13 miles away from everywhere else). We’ve already seen, in the opening sequence, what grisly fate happens to someone who trespasses on this farmer’s land if they’re silly enough to ignore his ‘No Trespassing’ signs so audience tensions are set up fairly early. 

When Daria gets there, after a brief interview with the local, red neck sheriff (played in a nice cameo at the start and end of the movie by actor/director Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek The Next Generation fame), she hooks up with a young deputy called Colt (played by Shawn Ashmore) to question local people. She starts with the sister of the missing woman and it’s obvious that the main suspect here is the husband, Jackson Pritchard (played by Milo Ventimiglia), who didn’t even report them missing (it was the sister who did that). So, against the wishes of the sherif, Daria has Colt drive her to the Pritchard property to take the investigation forward. Pritchard is a profoundly religious man whose family have been living on the ranch for generations and the locals all know he wouldn’t do anything to his family.

When they get there, they find the property laden with traps and the wife’s car still in the garage. However, the power has gone from their phones and vehicle etc. After she arrests and cuffs Pritchard for suspected homicide, she investigates the house and finds... something in the basement, locked in a cage. Is it some kind of rural breeding science project that the husband has been working on? Yeah... nope.

So that’s when we get the big revelation that, according to Pritchard, the farm house has been watched over by ‘angels’ for over a century and that, when the angels took his wife and son a few nights ago, he realised they were ‘fallen angels’ or ‘demons’ and so he captured one of them to hold as ransom in his basement. At this point, it becomes clear that we’re not really dealing with a religious horror movie at all... but a sci-fi horror and, yeah, when the wife is returned, as played by Bridget Regan (who played 1940s Black Widow Dottie Underwood in Agent Carter, reviewed here) it basically becomes a siege movie as the four of them try to survive the attack of the ‘demons’ who are trying to get one of their number back. 

And it’s really not a bad slice of modestly budgeted horror with, frankly, some amazingly well done special effects (which seem to me to be a well realised blend of practical and CGI) and a lot of tension between the human characters. It’s incredibly well shot too... nothing too flashy in terms of the compositions but still very nice to look at. The opening shot, for instance, of a lone care driving through the desert towards camera with an absolutely gorgeous, cloud filled sky, indicates the sense of eye candy you will get throughout the film. There’s also an amazingly gruesome kill at one point and the special effects for this shot do not let it down... it’s something you might expect to see in a 1980s era Romero zombie movie but, yeah, it looks quite spectacular if you are into that kind of thing.

The actors are all fine too, with a special shout out to Amanda Schull, who plays the character with a ‘failure is not an option and I don’t have to be a nice person about it’ kind of chip on her shoulder, which the actor just runs with and then deliberately softens down as she realises that her assumptions about the situation are pretty much wrong at every level. She tries to instill calm in characters as Ventimiglia portray’s Pritchard as the angry, revenge seeking human. 

Now, if there aren’t enough twists for you in the main set up, there is another little twist coming later on in the movie. Now, I kind of saw it coming but I totally didn’t... which is a hard one to explain without giving it away but let’s just say, I saw a twist coming with one of the characters but it was a deliberate misdirection and two other characters were the ‘recipients’ of that specific reveal. And I’ll say no more about that.

The film ends fairly satisfyingly but, immediately after what was obviously supposed to be the closing shot of Schull riding a police car off out of camera the way the first car of the movie came into shot, there’s a curious epilogue involving two of the other characters. This, I would imagine, was originally intended to be on the film as a post credits scene but then I suspect the producers lost confidence in anyone knowing they would need to stick around for one. There’s a sequence at the end which certainly confirms that there’s more than enough for a bigger budgeted sequel at some point but, I dunno, I don’t think this film is on many people’s radar so I suspect that won’t happen. Which is a shame because, I have to say, Devil’s Gate is a pretty good movie and I’d certainly recommend it to lovers of horror and sci-fi, especially those who enjoy the siege scenario where a small location is threatened by a bunch of monsters. A nice surprise of a movie... it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close.