This is a quirky, independent comedy masquerading as a surreal horror film. It gets the surreal part right but the rest of the staging and execution is so cheap as to make this feel like a Troma movie. It doesn't do much for a film's realism when you have actors in support who go around mugging for all their worth, actors linked to a storyline which is so slight as to be not worth bothering with in the first place. Basically, a frightened young woman discovers that her shower curtain is hiding a portal to another dimension. That's it; that's the set up, although not much is done with it.

One of the most arresting parts of the film are the weird dream visions that the protagonist experiences. These are a mish mash of similar bits in THE EVIL DEAD and THE RING, and quite weird, although not as just plain bizarre as other elements in the film. At times I felt that I really should like it, and perhaps with better resources the writer/director could have done something truly special here, but sadly the acting is just too poor and the script so sub par that I couldn't stand it. It feels like nothing more than one of those "make it up as you go along" type movies.

An independent film which has an original sort of story but isn't able to deliver much for its audience. This doesn't look as cheap as a Troma movie or a Hammer house movie but by the same token it's not glitzy and glamorous either, not by a long way. A struggling nurse moves into a new flat, strange things begin to happen and she finds a space/time portal in her bathroom. There are some really surreal parts to the film, random dreams and flashbacks, crazy confrontations with weirdos. I found myself wondering what the hell I was watching and having a dilemma trying to figure out if I was enjoying the film or not. Decent pace, interesting enough characters, an original idea... I wish I could have liked this more but unfortunately it felt like something was missing. Whatever it was that was missing really stopped me from really enjoying this, which is a pity really. Close, but no cigar.

I would never be able to say that "The Gateway" is a "good movie", at least not with a straight face and a clean conscience. But neither is it truly terrible.

"The Gateway" seems to operate at about the level of an underfunded student movie and then rises a few percentage points above that by sheer dint of the enthusiasm of the actors and director, but only a few percentage points; it does not soar. It does have its moments and some of the acting is satisfactory, but for the most part it suffers the predictable maladies of movies coming from such origins.

It occasionally happens that a movie coming from such mean circumstances actually serves to highlight the exceptional innate talent of some actor or director shining like a beacon in contrast to the surrounding collection of amateurs and you can predict an eventual bright future, like Steve McQueen in the classic "The Blob". But that is not the case here. All we see is a competent effort by mostly-committed but just average actors and an inexperienced director that has only three directorial efforts under his belt since 2004. Major plot elements "just happen" without explanation or rationale which are rather telling blunders in even a novice director.

The logic behind the rating of 6 stars is that it is just slightly higher than what you would expect for the average of movies from such origins, but there wasn't enough of an inspired effort to raise "The Gateway" higher than that.

Not every movie can be a blockbuster or a work of art, however. Sometimes there is entertainment value in seeing the local yokels put on a show in the barn and allowing their enthusiasm and inventiveness to be contagious and carry you away into the story. And so it is here; you will not be wowed but you can expect at least sufficient entertainment to compensate you for the 74 minutes from your life. Just don't expect to remember the movie or its name a week later.