Hide your wives, hide your ouija boards, hide your moms, because demons are Poltergeist-ing everybody in Harley Wallen’s supernatural thriller, Agramon’s Gate. It is a cautionary tale about contacting those from beyond the mortal realm, and has been nominated for and won many Best Feature and Best Horror festival awards since its release in 2018. Somehow.

The movie is definitely rough around the edges — at nearly 2 hours long the movie could use a lot more editing as far as selecting scenes that are necessary. At times it felt as though scenes should have been left out as they did not move the story forward and they took away from a movie that already struggles with coherency. Furthermore, the transitions between the scenes were abrupt, many times it felt like a new scene began in the middle of someone’s dialogue and this was very off-putting while watching the film.

In Agramon’s Gate, a party with close friends gets supernatural when the hostess, Cassidy (Kaiti Wallen), invites a psychic medium Vesna (Aphrodite Nikolovski) to give readings. When her husband, Richie (Kris Reilly), begrudgingly submits to a session with Vesna, Vesna channels an evil spirit claiming to be Richie’s father. Having killed his father to protect his mother as a child, Richie is noticeably shaken up and calls an end to the evening. But it is only the beginning, as the evil spirit sticks around to torment Richie, his friends, and even the psychic. Vesna calls in her old partner Zeb (Harley Wallen), a powerful colleague, for reinforcement, and together, they each overcome their fear to stop the demon that is trying to kill them.

I would like to say that Agramon’s Gate is a diamond in the rough. For one, the acting is solid, particularly Laurene Landon as the mentally ill mother and Aphrodite Nikolovski as the gypsie medium, who both stole every scene and gave powerful femme performances. Also, I was initially excited by its premise of the protagonist being haunted by his father’s demon, but that plotline was sadly muddled by the introduction of a more religious demon named Agramon, and it is unclear what exactly was causing the paranormal activity. Harley Wallen created an interesting universe for Agramon’s Gate, but it is unfortunate that the editing is problematic, that the movie does not have any discernible style to make it feel unique, refreshing, or memorable in any way, and because of its low-budget its ending suffers the fate of many other low-budget indie movies where the ending is lackluster and fizzles out.

In this film’s universe, someone goes around putting heavy makeup on psych patients, people age in the afterlife, and demons give up after the first knife swipe. I suppose it is a pretty badass looking demon-slaying knife. There is a difference between unresolved and unfinished though, and the ending for Agramon’s Gate is unfinished. Maybe it was the budget, maybe Harley was wanting to force a sequel, but instead of having a fully realized ending and leaving the audience wanting more it just vaguely and hastily ends. But it is not without its merits, as a few strong acting performances make it watchable, and I feel like viewers who appreciated The Mummy (1999) would like this movie for some reason. To catch one of Harley Wallen’s latest thrillers, Agramon’s Gate was released on February 11th and can be found on all VOD platforms.

MOVIE RATING — 5.5 out of 10 ☠️