Hell Fest (2018)
Dir. Gregory Plotkin
Written by Seth M.
Sherwood, Blair Butler, Akela Cooper, “Story by” William Penick, Christopher
Sey, Stephen Succo. Yes, you read all that right.
Starring Amy Forsyth,
Reign Edwards, Bex Taylor-Klaus
HELL FEST is an absolutely by-the-numbers, low-concept,
meat-and-potatoes slasher flick, distinguished only by two minor details. The
most immediately obvious of these details is that it’s set in a gigantic,
spectacularly elaborate Halloween-themed amusement park from whence the film
takes its name. But the more startling detail is that it is an absolutely
by-the-numbers, low-concept, meat-and-potatoes slasher flick which hit
theaters in 2018. There was a time (the 80’s) where you could just count on
this stuff getting churned out like clockwork, but these days it’s almost a
high concept in itself to have a film this simple. Just a normal old slasher,
where there’s some young women in a place and a stabby guy kills them off one
by one in colorful ways. By law must contain at least 50% fun. HELL FEST meets
that modest goal efficiently, and seems pretty content with that. And why not?
Little enough needs to be said about the setup: a
straight-laced young woman named Natalie (Amy Forsyth, A CHRISTMAS HORROR
STORY, BEAUTIFUL BOY) returns to her hometown to visit her slightly estranged
best friend (Reign Edwards, The Bold and the Beautiful, Snowfall) and,
to her obvious annoyance, an obnoxious old classmate (Bex Taylor-Klaus, THE
LAST WITCH HUNTER, Scream: The Series) who she would clearly have
preferred to leave safely in her past, but who is inconveniently her BFF’s
roommate. In order to avoid talking to one another, the trio heads to
Hell Fest, a sprawling horror-themed amusement park that we’re told travels
across the country during Halloween season, which --given the immense scale and
functional complexity of the park-- seems like a questionable business
proposition at best. But that’s a thread best left unpulled, especially when we
begin to consider how remarkably blaise they appear to be about the possible
legal ramifications of their extreme caveat emptor philosophy of park
attendee safety. At any rate, the girls also drag along some body count boys
including one for Natalie to shyly flirt with.
Alas, any burgeoning
relationship is going to have to remain unconsummated, for you see --and sit
down, because this is going to come as a real shock-- there is a masked killer
on the loose. And this is a particularly appealing hunting ground for a masked
killer, because, of course, in Hell Fest, everyone is wearing a mask,
and everyone is acting creepy and vaguely threatening. So even though
our heroine is starting to suspect that some creep is stalking her and her
friends, of course no one is going to believer her. This is the basic gimmick
of this almost gimmick-free movie, and it allows for a light dusting of
(spoilers for the 1944 movie GASLIGHT) gaslighting plot on top of our normal
stalk-and-slash mechanic. It’s not strictly necessary, and HELL FEST is content
to pursue this line of thinking only in the most casual sort of way, but it
really doesn’t matter, because the movie’s real gimmick is the park itself, a
genuinely magnificent creation (A+ work, production designer Michael Perry [THE WILLIES, IT FOLLOWS] and art director Mark Dillon
[BLOOD MONEY]) absolutely stuffed with loving detail and grand scope, and
rapturously photographed by José David Montero (THE HOLLOW POINT) with an altogether pornographic eye for gaudy monochromatic lighting. Ripping off
SUSPIRIA’s signature look has gotten to be a bit of a cliché in recent years
for low-budget horror films hoping to see artsier than they actually are (to
the extent that the actual SUSPIRIA remake avoided it altogether) but
hey, repetition has not made it any less pretty, or any less apt to evoke a
surreal, slightly dreamlike vibe which makes a slasher’s sudden outbursts of visceral violence more potent.
Which is good, because
HELL FEST does not exactly have an overwhelming abundance of violence to fall
back on. It’s rated R, and it’s not exactly averse to bloodshed, but it seems
like between the six (yes, six) credited screen and story writers, not
everybody was on the same page about what the point of a gimmick slasher is.
Because we get two agreeably over-the-top gorey kills (including a bravura “how
have I never seen this before?” kill where a guy gets his head smashed in on
one of those “test your strength” hammer games) and then after that, the kills
completely fall off the radar. The only remaining characters to die get
obliquely stabbed in one confusingly shot rampage, and after that’s it’s on to
the final girl chase. Which is fine, I suppose; lots of those slasher movies I
loved from the 80s were a lot of fun, but abandoned the sublime
cat-and-mouse adrenaline rush of HALLOWEEN in favor of silly splatter. HELL
FEST is no HALLOWEEN, but it is just barely competent and imaginative enough to
make a suitable meal of a final chase sequence through an intricately curated haunted house (that plays like a walking tour through virtually every distinct horror cliché the genre has accrued in its century of life, from cannibal butcher shops to creepy doll rooms),
and eventually settles on that goal. We get a handful of beats that play off
the colorful setting, a handful of neat-looking images, a few effective
stalk-and-shock moments. It’s as by-the-book as these things come, but I like
the book it’s by, and this is a perfectly adequate rendition. Tony Todd has a
cameo, anyway, so that’s good.
Of course, six credited
writers does not exactly speak to an overwhelming abundance of laser-focused artistic vision, and while the movie overall is generally competent (and let’s
face it, technical competence has gotten so easy in the decades between 1980
and 2018 that this is not the pleasant surprise it once was), there are a few
real obvious blunders that remind you that in 2018, even a movie this unambitious and
conventional can’t quite escape being overthought and re-written into an
inelegant kludge of half-scrapped ideas and malformed detrietus from various
early drafts that fit into the final product so awkwardly and uncomfortably as
to stand out. The most obvious to me is the (SPOILERS) final fate of Bex
Taylor-Klaus’ obnoxious, attention-craving character, who is clearly set up to
die in the big, elaborate set piece which would have been the movie’s third big
gimmick kill. But then, obviously, some later screenwriter came along and
decided she should actually be around for the final act, maybe even get a shot
at redemption, and so inexplicably she ends up surviving this laboriously
set-up death machine, and realizing that Natalie was right all along about the
crazed killer. But then, apparently, some other screenwriter came alone
and decided, no, the last act should really just focus on the core two friends,
and so Taylor-Klaus needs to die after all. But instead of going back and
re-writing the script so she just dies where she obviously should, he kept both
previous revisions and just wrote a new scene where she gets randomly
stabbed in a crowd two minutes later along with all the other remaining
characters that the finale has no use for but the script has not yet disposed of.
An effective slasher has
no real need for good writing in most of the traditional senses of that phrase
(which suits HELL FEST just fine), but good structure is another matter,
and the way the movie sets up and pays off this character is bad
structure, a failure to properly capitalize on the things that it invests in.
It’s not the kind of problem people usually have in mind when they use the
phrase “bad writing”; they're thinking of clichéd characters, unrealistic situations, tin-eared
dialogue. All of which HELL FEST has in abundance, of course, but that's not the problem. It’s just bad economy of storytelling. What’s the point of so
carefully cultivating us to hate this character and setting her up for a
spectacular death scene if she’s just going to get knifed off screen and never
mentioned again? You can insult my intelligence all you want, but don’t waste
my time.
Likewise, the movie has
a curious little coda that I kind of like, but also demonstrates that they
didn’t really think this through very carefully.
(SPOILERS FOR THE VERY END) Natalie defeats the killer, of course, but he, equally of course, manages to sneak off into the sequel night before the cops can bring him
in. Completely standard-issue, taken directly from the HALLOWEEN playbook. But the movie doesn't end right there; instead, it cuts to an unassuming, upper-class house in the suburbs that we've never seen before. We see
the killer casually enter, and we realize this is his house as he walks into what is clearly his serial-killer hidey-hole,
where he takes off his mask and places it in a cupboard with a dozen others,
like Mr. Rogers changing into his friendly lounging sweater after a hard
day at the office. Honey, we got any beer in the ‘fridge? You won’t believe
the day I had at work. But then, he walks into a nicely-appointed living
room, where a cute little girl is sleeping on the couch, and he stands menacing
over her for a moment until she awakes, and greets him with a hug and a 'daddy,
you’re home!' Cut to credits.
(Spoilers continue) Now,
this is, in a way, a kind of provocative ending to a nasty little slasher,
no? The movie has steadfastly told us nothing whatsoever about this killer (we
never even see his face) but this puts to bed the idea he’s some kind of
mythical boogeyman, and instead tells us something arguably even more
disconcerting: this is just a normal, everyday citizen, someone no one would
suspect, someone even his own family doesn’t suspect. It makes the killer retroactively more grounded in reality, but also even more frighteningly unknowable. It's an
interesting and suggestive detail... but it’s also a damn strange note upon which to end
this studiously unambitious gimmick slasher flick. It’d be like ending Skid
Row’s 1989 debut album with a tender rendition of Judy Sill’s Enchanted Sky
Machines. Nice, but, uh, what does this have to do with anything?
I’m not asking for the film to make some kind of sweeping
thematic statement of course, but I am asking it to stick to its established central
conflict. The way it plays, the last beat of the film suddenly introduces a
completely different conflict totally absent anywhere else in the film. It
wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t the very last shot, but
ending it that way makes it the thing we leave the film thinking about. Again,
bad structure.
(Incidentally, even
something as simple as reversing those two beats in the coda would go a long
way towards making it land more gracefully; since we see him go to his murder
closet first, we understand immediately that this is his house, and therefore
this is likely his daughter. Since he’s obviously been doing this for awhile
and living a successful double life, it makes the idea that he’s any threat to
this girl sleeping in his own living room seem unlikely, so the final shot is
robbed of both tension and purpose. Better, I think, to introduce the killer
standing in this unknown living room. Oh shit, he’s escaped, and now he’s
gonna take out his revenge on this poor girl! Oh wait, no, this is his
daughter, holy shit, he’s been living a double life! Maybe he’s rethinking his
evil ways now that we see him in a tender domestic situation? Nope, look at
his closet of murder, not only has he done this before, he’s done it far more
than we ever suspected and is surely going to do it again, setting up a sequel!
THEN you smash cut to title, back on message.)
Not that any of this is movie-killing,
it just kind of irks me when a movie which obviously has plenty of resources fumbles such easy
material. I often reference Vern’s “Blues Theory Of Slashers” which holds that "slasher movies
are a classic American artform not equal to but similar to the blues. There are
simple, familiar tunes that you follow, and you put your own spin on it, but
you don’t have to get too fancy, you still want it to be recognizable."
But to that, I like to add George Carlin’s line about the blues: “it’s not
enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be
played.” Imitation will get you most of the way there, but sooner or later
you’re gonna have to improvise at least a little, and if you haven’t really
considered why you’re playing these notes in the first place, it’s probably
gonna come off a little bit muddled. Not enough to ruin something with such a
solid and familiar structure, but enough that you notice a few errant notes
that jar you out of it for a second.
Anyway, not really that big a deal, and certainly not
worth devoting half a review to these small bumps in a mostly enjoyable road,
but what’s done is done. Mostly HELL FEST is a perfectly serviceable genre
movie with an ingratiating cast, some stellar production design, and the bare
minimum amount of effort and imagination necessary to pull off its modest
goals. There’s about 40,000 slashers which are easily superior, but at least twice
as many which are substantially worse, and frankly in this crazy world of found
footage anti-cinema and
“post-horror” po-faced gloomfests, just being a normal, mildly entertaining genre outing
with a few good parts and a run time of less than 90 minutes is something worth
applauding. Or at least enjoying. I’d be up for a sequel, anyway.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2018 CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
|
Fun Going In. Hell
Coming Out.
|
TITLE ACCURACY
|
Sure, it’s the name of
the theme park, which is without a doubt the most important thing in the
movie.
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
No
|
SEQUEL?
|
None as of yet. Not a
huge box-office money-maker, but surely made enough of a profit to justify a
DTV sequel, no?
|
REMAKE?
|
None
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
|
USA
|
HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Slasher
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
None
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
Tony Todd
|
NUDITY?
|
None
|
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
No
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
No
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
No
|
POSSESSION?
|
No
|
CREEPY DOLLS?
|
Totally.
|
EVIL CULT?
|
None
|
MADNESS?
|
No
|
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
No
|
VOYEURISM?
|
Standard stalker
stuff, but no POV shit.
|
MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Someone needs to take
this same premise and set it in Disney World with a killer Mickey.
|
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