I'm a huge fan of Demián Rugna's Terrified & When Evil Lurks, plus his work on Satanic Hispanics, so I was excited to check out his first full-length move.
In anyone else's hands, a stomach portal to hell would be a black comedy but Rugna writes & directs the whole thing completely seriously, with very little humor. You can also see him playing with ideas that would show up later in the far superior Terrified & When Evil Lurks.
The acting and screenplay are actually fairly decent. And the gore & practical effects are appropriately gnarly & squelchy, although used very sparingly (probably due to budgetary constraints). It also feels much more like a Lovecraftian story than religious horror. I think his stomach portal to hell could be a gateway to an indescribable eldritch landscape & it wouldn't have changed much.
But Rugna hasn't latched onto the unrelenting suspense and scary storytelling he's known for yet, so the pacing is awful & it feels so much longer than it actually is. I think it also suffers from being shot in English instead of Spanish...Some of the actors apparently couldn't hack it and are dubbed over with atrocious voice acting. It's also shot in those desaturated and blue filters that used to be popular so ymmv with that.
Sadly, I can't recommend The Last Gateway unless you're curious about Rugna's beginnings or Argentinian horror. It's not awful but the experience is more like an overlong cable horror anthology series episode than the polished terror of his later films.
