Beyond the Gates (2016)

Beyond the Gates is pretty self-explanatory: it’s quasi-horror Jumanji but with VCR board games instead of, you know, Jumanji. Two estranged brothers, blah blah blah, missing father, blah blah, find this game in dad’s office and decide to play it, blah, things get weird. Even if you’ve never heard of this movie, you could write the plot of it right now and at least hit 60% of the marks. It’s not a bad movie if you switch your brain off: it’s got an awesome synth heavy 80s soundtrack (clearly capitalising on the popularity of nostalgia media like Stranger Things and It Follows), and it’s pretty heavily derivative visually as well, but not in a way that is unsatisfactory. And honestly, everyone loved Jumanji. Heck, I even watched Zathura twice as a kid on two separate occasions with different people in two separate dark closets. It’s hard to fuck it up. And director Jackson Stewart didn’t fuck it up! I just…I don’t know that he added anything that necessarily needed to be added. 
When I first watched this movie, I was so warmed by the post-glow (nostalgia trickery) that I gave it a pretty good score. It's a bit of parody style trickery where a derivative piece of media fools you into thinking you're watching the better pieces of media this one is shamelessly pulling from. The longer I've gone since watching it, the more I can separate that feeling from the knowledge that objectively, this is a pretty weak movie.
Rating: 3.5/10 - A banging soundtrack with a few cool ideas for execution does not make for a good movie, sadly. This one is going back into the halls of decidedly below average horror.

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