Werewolf Massacre at Hell’s Gate kicks off with an odd music video for a song called “The Ballad of Straws” about a vengeance-seeking pumpkinhead scarecrow. It uses some admittedly cool vintage horror images and old-timey Halloween photos and video (including footage from Begotten!), although most of the photos are just Google search images of Halloween costumes. It’s a pretty awful song though. It’s like, really shitty blues with a riff that sounds like a slightly reworked version of “Midnight Rider”.
Then (Spoiler Alert), it just turns out to be a commercial for a book written by the filmmakers! I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie that started out with a music video that’s also a trailer for a book before, so there’s that.
Even after all that, we STILL don’t get to the movie! Nope, we have to sit through a horror host intro by “Lord Victor Fleming”. Then, there’s a long title scene filled with even more Google images and a long textbook definition of werewolves. (Did we really need this? I mean, you’re watching a movie called “Werewolf Massacre at Hell’s Gate”. I’d think you’d know what a werewolf was before you pulled the trigger on watching it.) After that, we get ANOTHER long text scene, this one a crawl that’s used to set up the plot. That’s right folks, nine minutes (NINE) into the movie, and the movie hasn’t even started yet.
This movie plumbs new depths of padding, I’ll tell you that.
A woman named Frankenstein is accused of being a witch and is burned alive at the stake. With her dying breath, she curses the village and vows to return four hundred years later. Although this scene resembles the opening of Black Sunday remade with local public access TV equipment and talent, it’s at least… well… something. Unfortunately, from there we get more text on-screen (reading is fundamental, kids) before switching gears to a Found Footage sequence of some bozos in the South American jungle. Then, we cut back to shit that happened ten years ago… and three years ago… and all sorts of other shit. There’s red tinted POV shots of a cameraman running after little kids, black and white dreams of paint ballers shooting a guy in an ape mask, etc. The mind boggles.
Folks, I’ve never been so dumbfounded from finding something so dumb.
That’s kid stuff though. Wait till you get to the scene where a priest calls an old redneck guy for help. Folks… it’s just a guy wearing an old man mask and using an overly exaggerated old timey prospector voice! You won’t fucking believe it.
I thought things were looking up for the movie when this redneck and his cronies (affectionately known as “The Brotherhood of Guns, Jesus, and Pick-Up Trucks”) started to hunt (and then get killed by) werewolves (and by “werewolves”, I mean, “guys in Halloween masks”). Then. the story shifts focus YET AGAIN and turns its attention to an annoying couple. When her husband is killed by werewolves, the wife grabs a machine gun and fights for her life.
Werewolf Massacre at Hell’s Gate is one of the weirdest fucking things I’ve seen in a while. It’s really fucking bad for 90% of the running time, but that redneck section is pure Bad Movie Gold. The rest, unfortunately, is the pits. Then again, it does feature werewolves being massacred at a place called Hell’s Gate, so it’s got that going for it.
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