'The Gates,'
enter at your own risk
ABC suburban horror series mines the usual cliches
By Tom Conroy
Jun 16, 2010
Is it just me, or is there something a little creepy — a little too perfect and safe — about those gated communities?
Obviously, it’s not just me. Dozens of TV shows and movies in the last three decades have been based on that unoriginal observation. Usually, newcomers move into their shiny dream home only to discover that the photogenic residents of the community turn out to be hiding a dark secret. The safe haven turns out to be not very safe at all!
ABC’s drama “The Gates,” premiering this Sunday at 10 p.m., adds almost nothing new to the suburban-horror genre and seizes almost every opportunity for cliché. The decent acting and production values, however, will make it tolerable viewing for people whose thirst for blood is somehow unsatisfied in these vampire-heavy times.
In the premiere, Nick Monohan (Frank Grillo) has just left his job in the Chicago police department under a cloud. (Do former urban cops in this type of show ever leave their jobs otherwise?). He has been hired as the new police chief in a hypersecure community called the Gates, which is so big that it has its own fancy high school and cute downtown.
But appearances can be deceptive! It turns out that some of the residents are vampires; others, evidently, are werewolves or witches. While living in the Gates, they are bound by a code not to commit the usual vampiric or lycanthropic acts so they won’t arouse the suspicions of the normal folks around them.
But at the start of the first episode, a bored housewife named Claire Radcliff (Rhona Mitra) violates the code when a contractor crosses her path with a slight injury. Her hungry gaze at his dripping blood could be charitably described as an homage to the first “Dracula” movie.
When Chief Monohan starts investigating the contractor’s disappearance, which somehow escaped the gaze of the town’s ubiquitous security cameras, it becomes clear that neither Claire’s yuppie husband, Dylan (Luke Mably), nor the developer who built the Gates, Frank Buckley (Brett Cullen), want him to try too hard.
Meanwhile, at the local high school, Nick’s sensitive, intelligent son, Charlie (Travis Caldwell), has attracted the attention of a pretty girl (Skyler Samuels) who has a violently jealous football-star boyfriend (Colton Haynes).
This cliché is so blatant that one begins to think the creators are going for parody or camp. A scene in which Claire bottles the contractor’s blood in her fancy wine room also suggests that trace amounts of humor may remain from earlier drafts of the script.
When Dylan berates Claire for having broken the rules and threatened their comfortable life, she says that her restlessness isn’t just about her blood addiction: “It’s about the carpools and the school committees and the dinner parties and the book clubs.”
Two witches (Chandra West and Victoria Platt) with rival herbal shops have a vaguely “Desperate Housewives”-“Dynasty” vibe, but their scenes have a tired, subplotty feel.
If “The Gates” is meant to double as a satiric look at life among the affluent, it’s poorly timed. Whether or not the economy as a whole is currently growing, more people are still moving out of those gated communities than moving in.
As horror, it pales in comparison to HBO’s “True Blood,” which also has a far more timely setting in the working-class South and is creating far more original variations on vampire mythology. Still, it’s too early to count “The Gates” out. Let’s just say it’s undead on arrival.
|
|
|
