Bad Karma aka Hell’s Gate.
Regular visitors to this site may have read the recent article about Roger Corman’s production company which was set up in the West of Ireland in the late 1990’s and ran until the early 2000’s. I am making it my mission to seek out as many of these disastrous movies as possible, watch them and summarise them so that you don’t have to put yourselves through the torment (unless you really want to). Recently ‘Moving Target’ demonstrated just how you can make a movie about a stolen six pack of Irish Stout that contains a thermonuclear device, which also includes lots of kickboxing. They even managed to pull out a star for that one, Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson of ‘Bloodfist’ fame.
For ‘Bad Karma’ AKA ‘Hell’s Gate’ they weren’t quite so lucky. Patsy Kensit and Patrick Muldoon were the best that they could get. When I see Patsy Kensit appear in anything, I always ask myself the same question: ‘From Lethal Weapon 2 to a provincial evening soap opera about farming? What happened?’ This helps to explain a lot, but we will return to the acting talents of Ms Kensit momentarily, first of all there was one thing that the producers didn’t quite pull off.
For a movie set in Rhode Island NY and a fictitious holiday destination off the coast known only as ‘The Island’, you are immediately taken by how much of ‘The Island’ looks like Ireland. That’s because it is, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but the filmmakers are constantly trying to convince you that this is America. This is usually done by the unsubtle placing of an American flag on top of any surface that will hold one. An American flag outside a rural Irish shop, on the tiny ferry marked ‘Island Ferries’, on a sheep passing by a cobblestone wall, it felt like I was watching a surreal Michael Bay film for a while. All the characters are supposedly American and even the lack of any sort of modern car in the film cannot dissuade the movie from trying to convince us otherwise.
‘Your Local American Corner Store – Yesterday‘
There are several shots in Irish towns such as Loughrea and Galway and the hilarity of watching supposed high octane antics unfurl in the rural locations are unintentionally hilarious. There is even a climax in the exact same church as ‘Moving Target’s finale. They also seemed to have acquired permission to shoot only on the Docks in Galway, as the ‘inner city’ action takes place there as it did in the aforementioned Don ‘The Dragon’ classic. My old art college was used as the Mental Hospital in the movie and several people that I knew at the time were drafted on board to play minor characters. Local (and horrible) club De Burgos is also used as a seedy pickup bar in the movie, one of the few settings that work surprisingly well.
There is a plot, of sorts. Patsy Kensit is the immortal/reincarnated/badly explained ex lover of Jack the Ripper who believes that her departed lover’s soul resides in her therapist (Muldoon). Then it’s all Cape Fear for the rest of it when she escapes after seducing another doctor (eeew). Her escape is one of the most ludicrous situations in the whole feature. This is the movies though, so suspension of disbelief is necessary, I personally used mine to imagine that I was watching a good movie and had a wonderful time.
‘Patsy didn’t like Marmite‘
In short, this is awful, but I urge you to see it, for it was one of the funniest terrible movies that I have seen in a long time. Its Troma quality and that can’t be a bad thing. It was held up after filming due to the release of ‘From Hell’, Alan Moore’s fantastic graphic novel which was inexplicably given over to the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society) to destroy. The two shared similar plots (but only just) and this also accounts for the title change, which depends on the distributor and country of purchase. If you are looking for a good start to a trashy triple bill, you could do a lot worse than this.
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