I’ve never understood movie drinking games. If you want to get wasted by the end of a movie, just turn on something bad — something as bad as “The Gate” — because even if you don’t have rules and party cups, your survival instinct will order you to empty even the bottle of $6 Triple Sec you meant to make fruitcake with last Christmas. (For my mother-in-law, I’m kidding, and I’m still planning on making it.)

Directed by Tibor Takács (“Metal Messiah,” “Mansquito,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”) and written by Michael Nankin (“Midnight Madness,” the TV show “Life Goes On” — apologies for now getting that song stuck in your head) “The Gate” contains forgivably bad components. The 80s setup of parents going out of town for the weekend, drawing a houseful of partying, ghost story-telling teens. A stormy confrontation between the magic of heavy metal and the Bible, and this somehow relating to a half-baked legend cooked up by the son’s weirdo proto-Chuck Klosterman friend. The family dog that has a premonition about everything well before the humans. Snotty kids in horrible clothing, with bad bangs.

You’d think girls modeling the latest fashions from Century Village would dial back the bitch-faces.

Also noted: spider plant, parrot calendar, red wall phone and cool sunglasses-inside photobomber.

The budget constraints — the movie was made for just $4 million — can also cause an audience to get a little grumpy. The titular gate, uncovered in a one-day tree-removal project (orchestrated by a father who can get a stump removed and the hole re-sodded in one day, but hasn’t gotten around to fixing the scorching on his roof from when his son’s rockets nearly burnt down the home) shakes and makes noise and enough purple light and smoke you’d think Prince was recording down there, but we never get to see what’s on the other side.

“Look, guys, it’s our futures in cinema down there!”

And poor Glen (Stephen Dorff, in his first movie appearance, looking as brooding as a pre-teen as he does today) and pal Terry thought they were going to make $100 off the giant geode they found. They never should have read the demonic incantation that their chipping away at the geode left on their Magic Slate toy (remember those peel-back self-erasing poor kids’ Etch-A-Sketches?). Is that the lesson? That even the most innocent ideas of a child will lead to death and destruction and ridiculous homeowners’ insurance claims if said child digs Sabbath?

Maybe it is. At one point, Terry actually explains: “We accidentally summoned demons who used to rule the universe to come and take over the world.”

It’s the relentless lack of charm, coupled with a dumping-ground of every nightmare idea, that takes “The Gate” beyond so-bad-it’s-good back to bad again. You can sort of see it in little Glen’s almost war-weary eyes in the opening scene, walking through an empty house, just waiting for something awful (or maybe it’s the vertical blinds and huge pottery filled with cattails, post-traumatic design disorder if ever it was). And after the family dog gets killed, just 30 minutes into the movie, so that the plot can have its “sacrifice” to fully activate the gate, his body shows up in a pretty creepy nightmare sequence later, with monsters clawing out from behind the walls as though they were thin white vinyl instead of stucco. This isn’t the last abuse of the poor dog’s corpse we see, a rather infuriating bit of killing of the one character the audience finds most lovable when there are so many irritating teenagers (including some with huge, multi-layered strands of garlic around their necks — because all suburban homes like to keep 400 heads of garlic on hand just in case) that could have met delicious demises.

Not that I’m suggesting you shouldn’t watch it, if only for its promotion of kids with rockets and guns, and a scene where someone gets stabbed with a Barbie. Thanks to the magic of technology, you can rewind and watch that scene five times just so your tears of laughter don’t obscure it.

At the end, though, there might just be too many varieties of madness, mixed together, burbling into a hot acid of bad movie vomit. In addition to the small, stop-motion monsters that look like roided out moles who initially scamp-lumbered out of the hole, new threats — glass-shattering moths, undead construction workers, fake demon parents, eyeballs growing out Glen’s palm after a monster pets him on the head — manifest themselves, are defeated, and just as a minute of calm (and possible conclusion?) descends, another one is taking its shot at the kids. You might just need to stumble into the bushes and vomit your memories of “The Gate,” refresh your palate with another movie, and start from a clean Magic Slate.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.