It’s funny! It’s blasphemous! It’s got comic book geeks and egomaniacal hand puppets! It’s a Gate to Hell, Cecilstein!
And past the gate to Hell is a horror movie / comic book geek who secretly wants to be a superhero (you know, like most of us!) who’s sleeping above a portal to Hell (unlike most of us). And to prevent the world from going up in a fireball of Satanic horror and assorted unpleasant whatnot, Cecil the comic book geek must don a Frankenstein mask and abduct infants to feed to the portal to Hell underneath his bed. Meanwhile, a company that sells Bibles and similar religious trinketry–that’s actually being run by what I can only guess is a Jesus hand puppet–is planning to take advantage of the “Frankenstein baby-napper” to spike their sales.
Okay, sure…it’s blasphemous. It’s going to offend a lot of people. It’s a gate to Hell, after all!
But let’s be frank–this movie has its tongue wedged so far into its cheek that it’s coming out the other side of its head. And it’s got its funny moments besides. A Jesus hand puppet running a Bible / religious trinketry corporation? Sure, why not. All we needed was the Satan puppet on the other hand to do the accounting and things would be nice and full-circle.
Perhaps the only real problem with “It’s A Gate To Hell, Cecilstein!” is what it didn’t do and where it didn’t go. It’s a twenty minute movie. Even if you don’t like it, you’re not going to come away feeling all that disappointed because you didn’t waste half the afternoon watching it. You blew all the time it took to heat up a frozen meal in the oven. There were plenty of other things this movie could have done, and by not doing them, it cheated itself out of a good chunk of potential. Which isn’t to say what’s there isn’t good, only that what wasn’t there could have been great.
All in all, it’s at least good for a laugh, even if it’s a slightly uncomfortable laugh.
