I have sympathy for the (Tasmanian) Devil! The Apple Isle’s most famous celebrity aside from Sir Edmund Hillary (who was less belligerently endearing and not as inclined to devour an entire rotting wallaby at one sitting) has been getting a hard time of it of late. A virulent strain of infectious facial cancers is decimating Tassie Devil numbers and threatening the species with extinction. Tourists keep expecting them to run around in a whirlwind and be outsmarted by a sarcastic bunny. And just when they were starting to get some good press and be seen as sweet in a stomach-churning, Antipodean way (much like Russell Crowe, they’re almost cute at a safe distance) the Tasmanian Devil comes home after a long day of avoiding extinction and devouring smart-alecky talking rabbits, switches on the Sci-Fi channel – and finds it has been cast as the mutated monster du jour in a gloriously campy American horror movie! The belligerent little beasts need to find a better publicist – I mean, Britney Spears is more popular than your average Tasmanian Devil, and she eats far more rotting carrion a week than they do and makes less appealing growling noises! So whilst we’re trying to stop Taz from eating Skippy long enough to take a cute glamour shot, let’s put on some splatter-proof clothing, pitch a tent and camp it up with the gloriously gory, camper-than-Baden-Powell’s-woggle and surprisingly Gay horror movie CEMETERY GATES (Sat Aug 30, Sci-Fi Channel – 1:30pm & 10:50pm).

CEMETERY GATES is a gleefully unapologetic 2005 B-movie which is simultaneously awash with so much gore that y’all are lucky it’s airing on a Cable Channel – the truncated free-to-air version would probably only run for 7 minutes (Director Ray Knyrim: ‘This film needs to be soaked with blood – if someone gets a flat tyre, I want 8 gallons of blood to gush out of it!’) – and enough high-camp to drown Ru Paul, 7-inch heels and all. Knyrim and crew achieve an almost mystical balance between the gross-out and the laugh-in, so chances are you’ll be snorting through your nose off-screen whilst someone gets their liver pulled out through theirs on-screen.

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The film introduces us to ‘Precious’, a Tasmanian Devil sow whom has been tinkered with by ‘Big-assed Monster Horror Movie’ genre-staple, brilliant yet myopic geneticists, until she has reverted to the proportions of her Megafauna ancestors (Australian mainland’s now-extinct Thylacoleo or Marsupial lion). Precious is now about the size of a Grizzly Bear and has a temper- and an appetite- to match. She escapes from her scientific compound with the aid of some well-meaning (and soon well-eviscerated) animal rights activists and proceeds to stake a territorial claim over the local cemetery and its surrounding acreage (Tasmanian Devils are attracted to stinky, rotting carrion), where she proceeds to turn everyone who visits said cemetery into stinky, rotten carrion- and so many people show up at the cemetery for no obvious reason (most don’t even have names or last more than a minute!) that it must have been having some kind of bulk plot sale or something. Certainly by the end of the film the graveyard will be doing a brisk business- Precious manages to chomp her way through an average of around about one cast-member every five to six minutes, for a grand total of seventeen human hotdogs. Eat that, Bugs-Bunny!

The great thing about CEMETERY GATES is that it doesn’t have a serious bone in its body (much like the bulk of the cast at the end). Heads are ripped off, hearts are ripped out, spinal columns are flung through the air and internal organs are rendered external with lovingly graphic abandon, (kill number 4, in which Precious flays a hitch-hiker, used so much fake blood that the actor involved actually thought he was in danger of *drowning* during filming!) but the film remains a campy, fun ride- witness the scene in which a hippy high on peyote and searching for his ‘Spirit Animal’ sees Precious as a hilariously cute and cuddly animated cartoon care-bear before getting his larynx handed to him (literally!) and one of the scientists pursuing their creation wondering why Precious hasn’t eaten the bodies interred in the cemetery; Other Scientist (PHANTASM’s Reggie Bannister)- ‘I don’t blame her…why eat the Jerky when there are cheeseburgers freely available?’

Adding to the camp value is the presence of gorgeous, openly Gay scream king/horror-buff Peter Stickles (currently vamping it up in more ways than one on the Gay blood-and-other-bodily-fluids-sucker series THE LAIR) as the film’s hero, Hunter. Stickles didn’t come out professionally until 2007, and yet the film is chock-full of homoerotic situations and dialogue for his hero- so many, in fact, that I suspect that Stickles may have suggested them as input for his character so that he didn’t have to snog the heroine too often- and a good thing too- she’s the worst actor in the picture. I was praying for Precious to show up and put her out of our misery.

Graphic dismemberment with gushing limbs aplenty, a hot Gay actor in the lead, lots of gratuitous male and female nudity and a house-sized, angry mutant marsupial on the prowl. How could any self respecting Happy Camper not have a blast with this film?!

Unlock the GATES and enjoy yourself! (just bring a mop!)