Gatekeeper is not very good, but it's pretty hard to hate entirely. It's clearly a very, very cheap independent film, and it has the feel of a group of friends saying "hey guys, let's make a movie!" Ignoring the fact that they may not have the resources to make it happen. While it's pretty bad all the way around, there is a certain charm to it, and it doesn't feel like anyone involved is treating it like a joke. But that still doesn't make it worth watching. And honestly, it could have just been the accents (it's a Welsh film) that made me *kind of* want to give it a pass. Something of this caliber in American English may have left me with a very different impression. Also, I can't figure out why there is picture of what seems to be the Gingerdead Man on the box art on Amazon...
Anyways, it's mainly about a group of hockey players traveling through the Welsh countryside. (Other than the fact that they have hockey sticks, their profession has no bearing on things whatsoever.) They get in a car crash - maybe the worst I've ever seen on film - with a couple of military types who happen to be escorting an ultra badass soldier who went AWOL. (Of course, from that car only AWOL guy survives - luckily for the hockey team, he's actually a good guy.) One dude who lives in town is trying to help, and gets run down and injured by *another* car, driven by a douchey guy and a girl on their first date.
Once the townie wakes up at the scene of the accident, he kind of starts freaking out, saying how they need to get to shelter. Apparently, this small town has a bit of a zombie problem... which our 8 or so survivors find out about first hand shortly thereafter. From here on out, it's pretty standard story-wise, the group must work together to survive and escape, and so on and so on.
What's not so standard? The zombies look really, really, bad - as in store-bought Halloween mask bad. They are pretty hard to take seriously and are never really scary or intimidating in the least. Not only are they visually weak - the way they are presented is pretty terrible too. The townie guy half-ass explains that they are from some Haitian voodoo curse left over from the days of slavery. But don't worry, lest you think Gatekeeper would try any sort of social commentary - it doesn't. And that whole theory is put to rest when our heroes realize that some of the zombies are white. So you never really get to find out just what the deal with the zombies is. Plus, the lighting is so bad that you don't really see them until they are right there on our heroes and ready to attack, so you don't get any lurking tension either.
Our characters are okay - some of the hockey team kind of blends together, bit otherwise most of them have some kind of obvious hook to set them apart from each other (soldier guy, asshole, townie, female). While saying you care about the characters would be a bit of a stretch, at least writer-director Darren Ripley made some effort to distinguish them from one another.
The overall tone of the film is never overtly comedic, but there is the occasional good line/legitimate laugh. And honestly, this semi-serious tone in the right one for this film. If it was too jokey or self-aware, it would have probably been insufferable. While most of the serious stuff falls flat (they simply don't have the resources to make the military stuff anything other than laughable), the fact that Gatekeeper mostly plays it straight keeps it from being unwatchable. I mean, it's still pretty bad, but it could have been a lot worse.
I would not recommend this film.
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