Well, I know it’s among the new Shudder movies and Shudder and I have memories of each other! Hell Hole, directed by the Adams Family movie directors, Toby Poser and John Adams, describes a parasitic monster which occupies other hosts bodies until it can act independently.
The movie opens in the time of Napoleon, in the region that is now known as Serbia. Two lost soldiers are offered a horse by some wandering stranger. As when the prepare to butcher the gift in order to feed themselves and their platoon, a beast emerges and attacks them!
What a great start to the war! We then go back to the present day and the same place, where an American fracking team is working in the field. Two conservationists accompany them on the field with an intention of protecting any flora or fauna. One of the fracking teams recuperates one of the soldiers from the movie’s prologue, and to everybody’s shock, he is still alive after all those centuries! Yes, he is alive and has such a creature within him that their appendages can be seen at times sprouting from all orifices of this man out of time.
From there, the drillers and the conservationists experience some conflict where they argue on what to do with the man and how to solve their problem. But the strange, parasitic behavior is just beginning.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
- In this effort, the actors who play the characters are great and the acting itself is great.
Much to my disappointment, not all of the actors are listed on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m struggling to gather the names of everyone I want to thank. In particular the actor who plays Nikolai, who is one of the environmentalists who goes to the digging site, and later he is protective towards the parasitic creature they discover. He was my favourite figure in the entire movie due to his fantastic line delivery and facial expression.
Besides him, Poser plays Emily who is practically the central character of this movie as she is leading the dig and is placed in the middle of everyone else so she tries to remain calm and ensure that there are cooler heads that prevail. OIlvera Perunicic as Sofija is also worth mentioning, she is one of the characters who tries to be on Nikolai’s side at first but later she recognizes the danger and joins the rest in the camp. Like Nikolai, she is also rather gullible in the beginning, and her attitude and expressions are a delight to watch.
Truly, everyone performs their duty to perfection here, and the characters are so well crafted that they are believable (some might say no one would behave in the way Nikolai does, but come on, he is such a joy that I can’t even complain about that). Great job by all actors.
- The sets, the sound, the light… everything is done in a very quality and professional manner. Many low budget indie movies may…
Well, look like low budget indie movies. But, Hell Hole has a good film shine to it, and is also of good construction.
Moreover, the score/soundtrack, is good as well. During some of the more out there moments of the movie – there’s more of those in a second the score hit’s you with some seriously good heart stabbing music, just before it escalates. It’s really beautiful and a perfect musical choice.
After the opening scene, the audience is told that the movie would easily be exploiting the audience with blood and depictions of internal organs paired with absolutely absurd moments. At least that much has to be said, they provide more than enough gore and guts. But after that cold open, almost straight in, the movie literally comes to a standstill, and the chaotic supposed comedy ish rhythm that I thought I would be treated to never comes.
It is, however, focusing more on the storyline and the problem that is being developed through people talking and trying to figure out how to deal with it. Which is acceptable; there are movies which should be like that and which the movie should do. But once again it pains me to say that after the insane conclusion to the first eye of the motion picture I am anticipating a non stop thrill of the film.
Once I figured out this film was directed by the same family that was behind the far calmer The Deeper You Dig, I should have never expected for it to be the wildest flick I witnessed in my life and yet… I feel like this film had a better movie in it somewhere. In fact, that is even suitable within the context of the film!
There are some directorial effects that may have worked as a stylistic element but for me they seemed rather superfluous with what was happening in real-time. More like “What is the family that is behind the camera to do? Anything we have plenty of ideas”
Where there is a cut, there is a hard pounding of rock beats and the xits of the camera together with the beat of the music would rock zoom in and out and probably in unison with the beat of the music. I think that was a poor decision (as far as the scoring selections in those scenes, once again, was quite outstanding), and it does not help anything, except, stress the background music. If you are going to have some kind of a gimmick, even but one you do not want to use a great deal, I would prefer that it is as a means to enhance what we are observing, or what we are supposed to be feeling. It was in this context that I felt most of those decisions were made.
OVERALL
There were two directions Hell Hole should have picked, for the benefit of the audience, as the mood was quite flaky and bewildering.
Perhaps they hoped to film the more violent visuals again but this time with a softer or scarier touch. Or it could be that they wanted the rest of the film to be less talkative and for the body disgust and the funny ideas of it all to be overdone. As it stands, I was somehow expecting a complete turn in tone that did not happen. Other than that, everything here is all right; I thought that the opening hour of the movie gave me an assurance that there will be more exciting parts in the movie than the last one in actuality.
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