"To initiate your fate, roll the dice."

The 1980s are alive and well on Netflix. I'm not saying there are a lot of 1980s movies on there, but stylistic throwbacks have become something of a trend. You've got the series Stranger Things, as well as movies like Turbo Kid and Kung Fury, which pay homage to and poke fun at all the tropes of the Reagan era. 

The movie I want to talk about does a little of that with its cool synth wave soundtrack, but is rather more a reckoning with the dead technology that brought so much entertainment into our homes. 

This week's Thursday Thriller is Beyond the Gates. 

This 2016 Jackson Stewart film is about two brothers named Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) whose father has gone missing, so they have to pack up the video store he ran when they were kids. In the process, they stumble onto a VCR game called "Beyond the Gates."

You remember VCR tapes, right? Of course, everyone knows about those, and some fetishists even collect the useless things, but do you remember VCR games? That's a little tougher to explain. You have a board, dice, cards, and player pieces, then a VCR tape to watch, rewind and fast forward while you're dealing with all that other shit. 

When Gordon and John play the tape Barbara Crampton appears on the screen, says a lot of creepy things, then screams, the screen flickers screeches so intensely, they have to turn it off.

John decides he wants the game, so they take it back to dad's house and try to play it after dinner with Gordon's girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant). In starting the game, Crampton tells them playing is the only way to save their father's soul. Weird, huh?

So to save their dad, they have to collect four keys, the finding of which seems to cause the explosively gory deaths of their friends.

Or something. I never really understand the rules to board games til I can play a practice round.

Beyond the Gates is a jumanji of death and bittersweet nostalgia with a cool synthwave score and a lot of purple smoke toward the end. It's worth a watch and it streams on Netflix.