Portal starts as two musicians make their way to a gig, Hooke (Chris Condrad) & His mate Gibbs (Alexander Martin) have been driving for hours in a thick fog that seems never ending when they are nearly run off the road by a truck. Stopping & getting out the friends decide to head to a nearby motel to spend the night & wait for the dense fog to burn away, the motel has a creepy owner named Benedict (Kevin Dobson) & the other guest's seem sort of weird too. Hookes decides not to eat the meat & veg which turns out to be a good move since it's full of mind altering ash that makes you forget that you have been stuck in the same motel for months repeating the same thing over & over again. Benedict is part of a coven of Witches who want to breed & use the guest's for that purpose, Hookes has to convince his friend & the other guest's to remember & fight back or they will never leave there alive...
Directed by Geoffrey Schaaf this is a rather confused supernatural horror thriller that had the potential to be a decent twisty turny thriller but a really bad script & bad editing sinks it, basically it's not very good although it could have been. The script is a mess that has a few half decent ideas but wastes them & there's not enough explanation for what's going on. We never find out what the portal is or how it works, the script never elaborates on why these Witches want to have a baby or why they are using strangers, there's no reason given as to why they keep these few guest's alive & just repeating the same day for months on end & unless I missed something where did Hooke get a girlfriend from? I mean he ended up at the motel with just his mate Gibbs but about halfway through he suddenly has a girlfriend, poor writing again I feel. If Benedict is the only one who can exit the portal how does Hooke manage it? Why is it always so foggy? It's meant to be ash I think but it doesn't look like ash. The Witches are given no background, I don't even understand why they are trapped there since they keep saying they will be free soon but free of what? At almost 90 minutes it's a bit too long & the confusing narrative just makes for a frustrating viewing experience & quite simply is difficult to enjoy despite the potential to be something different.
The film is quite dark, even inside the motel the lighting is very subdued & the pitch black foggy exterior adds little. There's a blatant reference to John Carpenter's classic horror film The Fog (1980) which Portal obviously takes some of it's inspiration. The gore isn't great, there's a stabbing, a bit of blood & a scene in which a load of maggots burst out of some woman's love tunnel. The film is otherwise generally unremarkable, there's no real atmosphere or tension or scares & the confusing plot doesn't help things.
Apparently filmed at the La Crescenta Motel in California this has low budget production values which are alright but nothing special. The acting isn't great, again it's alright but nothing special.
Portal is a low budget supernatural themed horror film that has a mess of a script & is badly edited as well, it has a few decent ideas but they are lost in the rubbish.
