"The Gate"

Today I'll be summarizing a wonderful little film from 1987 called "The Gate".
We open on a cheesy late 80's suburban housing development full of faux fancy homes that predate the McMansions of modern day Amurica. Young Glen, Stephen Dorff, has a nightmare about being in his tree house when it's struck by lighting and wakes up to find a crew of landscapers removing the fallen tree. When he goes to investigate he finds a geode lodged in a hole in the trunk. He calls his friend Terry over to see it and Terry insists that they can get rich ($100!!!) if they find more geodes. Since the first geode was discovered in the tree trunk, there must be more below the ground where the tree once stood. Of course this logic makes perfect sense, so the duo dig a hole and actually do find a geode much large than the first.
At dinner that night Terry's parents tell him he's grounded for digging the hole and and make him promise to fill it back in. They also say that they're (conveniently) going out of town for the weekend and Glen's older sister Al will be in charge. The second her parents are out the door she hosts a huge party. Glen has Terry over also and the two crack open the geode they found. When they're finally able to open it a puff of smoke and flash of light are released and some mysterious writing is scrawled on Glen's etch-a-sketch. The two read the words, and all hell breaks loose. They run downstairs and they party has turned into a round of light as a feather stiff as a board. The radical party goers ask Glen to join in and he floats up above their hands and can't seem to get down. He grabs onto a light and rips it out of the wall, falling to the floor.
Once everyone's gone Terry and Glen go to bed. Terry wakes up in the night to go the bathroom and finds his dead mother calling to him in the foyer, backlit with a smoke machine stuffed up her dress. When he goes and hugs her, she turns out to be the family dog, who's now dead. Glen wakes up in his room while Terry's gone and sees that his walls are moving and have apparently turned to thin sheets of rubber with a bunch of hands trying to play touchy feely from behind them. They scream and wake up Al, who doesn't believe their stories and passes off the death of Angus the dog to old age.
The next day Al's friends come over during breakfast and plead with her to go with them to the beach leaving Glen behind alone. Glen insists that Al can't go because of the spooky goings on of the previous night but her friends say otherwise. Glen calls one of Al's friends a fag (gasp!) and runs out of the room, leaving another of her friends to unenthusiastically proclaim, "Trez uncool", and they leave Glen to fend for himself.
Meanwhile Terry is back at home listing to some delightful 80's death metal. The music stops and the singer tells a tale of a gate in the earth behind which evil demons are trapped waiting to be released. When he looks at the album art he sees the same inscription as the one they read the night before. Terry runs off to tell Glen, summing it up with the simple and concise phrase, "You got demons."
That night Al invites two of her girlfriends over and some demons break in through Glen's window and start to terrorize the house. When the kids run out of the house they find their parents have come home. Glen runs to his father who screams, "you've been baaaaad" and tries to choke him. Glen squeezes his fathers face, which breaks apart and was apparently filled with milk. Then a hoard of cute lil' 18 inch tall claymation monsters tries tor rush the house, but Al closes the door- stopping them in their tracks. The kids find a bible in the house and go out to the hole in the ground to read from it. The hole actually begins to close but before he finishes reading Terry falls in and drops the book (because he's an idiot). Down in the hole he's surrounded by the adorable demons who start biting him. Al and Glen throw a rope down to him and succeed in pulling him up. They read a bit more from the bible but eventually get bored with it and throw the whole book into the hole which bursts into flames and closes up. Believing the worst to be over Al's friends go home and the other kids go about their business like nothing ever happened. While watching a movie in the basement a dead man bursts from the wall, takes Terry, and disappears back into the wall. The cute lil' demons come back and try to get Al and Glen but again are unsuccessful because Al closes the door on them. While trying to find their fathers gun, the dead man bursts through the wall again taking Al. With two human sacrifices under their belt, the demons are able to summon their master. This guy, while rather large, is actually pretty adorable as well. The big daddy demon picks Glen up and looks at him like a fresh baked cookie but for some reason puts him back down and leaves the house. Glen notices though that the demon leaves a fun eyeball in the palm of his hand. Glen goes and gets a toy rocket launcher from Al's room and stabs his hand eyeball with a piece of glass to summon the papa demon back. He fires the rocket into the demons chest, which for some reason actually does the trick. There is a pretty pretty fireworks display in the sky above the house and Terry, Al, and Angus the dog return from the unknown. The family home still destroyed however, and the film ends with the three children gleefully hugging one another on the steps of the smoldering house.
I learned two important messages from this film. I believe that you could call them the morals of the story. 1) Don't leave children home alone for the weekend because they'll accidentally release evil demons to destroy the earth. 2) You won't find a solution to life's problems in the bible, toy rockets are the only sure fire answer.