Night has fallen around this cabin in the countryside, and inside three friends are telling each other scary stories, though Chuck (Evan J. Klisser) is not impressing his girlfriend Bobby (Joanne Warde) and his best pal's girl Pam (Petrea Curran) with his gory yarn. Bobby decides to go him one better, and begins to spin a tale that she claims is an urban legend about a ghostly, female hitchhiker who leads male drivers to their doom, and the other two are immediately intrigued. According to her, there was back in the nineteen-fifties a diner near here that had been afflicted by the arrival of a biker gang called The Strangers, and they kidnapped Josie (Abigail Wolcott) from the establishment - but what they thought were hijinks turned very serious indeed.
Hellgate is not a horror movie often mentioned when discussing the best shockers of the eighties, and there was a good reason for that: it was utter garbage. But even the worst of the worst can have points of interest, and perhaps the most important element of this was not necessarily what ended up in the final product, it was the circumstances of its creation, for this was a film made in South Africa while apartheid was holding the nation in the grip of a fascist state. This outright racism and oppressive violence inherent in the system not unreasonably led many both inside and outside the nation to argue it should be stopped, but at the point this was made it had been in place for forty years.
Long enough that anyone coming from outside to say, make a crappy movie should have been well aware of what they were not simply getting involved with, but also what they were supporting, however indirectly they thought that responsibility could be levelled at them. Director William A. Levey, whose career was successful without being notable, concentrating on exploitation more or less, was convinced to show up because of that old cliché about not knowing what he was talking about in relation to the protests across the planet when he had not actually been there to find out for himself. Whether he was any the wiser after Hellgate was a matter for his conscience, but he assuredly did not contribute to the benefits of cinema with this.
The script had an offputting, smug tone that suggested everyone involved were in on a joke they were unwilling to share with the audience, packed with references to events that may have been connected with the plot, or were little asides for the cast and crew, or their friends and families. In America, the most glaring aspect was the leading man, Ron Palillo playing Matt, for he had made his name as a sitcom nerd of the kind that would become prevalent as the genre progressed, always the butt of the jokes - The Big Bang Theory was Palillo's shtick from Welcome Back, Kotter writ large. That show was most celebrated for giving John Travolta his big break, but even he, with his notorious career lows, did not end up appearing in a South African cheapo horror flick, and Palillo was coaxed into a nude scene to boot.
Choosing the American sitcom stars, whatever the era, you would most like to see naked would not have included Mr Palillo, it was safe to say, yet there he was, straddling a hapless actress and sharing sweet nothings - no, this was not the frightening bit, as he was our everyman hero who in something so straining for acceptance and missing it by miles came across as either aggravating or weird, or both if he was really rubbing you up the wrong way. Wolcott, in her only film, was the ghost, sporting a pair of breast implants which did not exactly scream the fifties, and once the four mates had arrived at the titular ghost town, they were faced with a load of near-incomprehensible nonsense orchestrated by Josie’s insane with grief father (John Astin looky-likey Carel Trichardt). Part of this was thanks to a monster-creating crystal found in a local mine, unleashing rubbery special effects like a mutant exploding goldfish and an actual plastic bat on an obvious string. Alas, this was not so bad it was good, it was so bad it was insulting. Music by Barry Fasman and Dana Walden.
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