Mark Reviews Movies: HELL FEST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 27, 2018

According to Hell Fest, the best place to get away with murder would be a location where everyone is screaming bloody murder and expecting to see grisly, if fake, sights of mutilated bodies. Here, it's a festival made up of a series of haunted houses and mazes. It's a clever conceit for a slasher movie, because, in theory, the killer's prospective victims might not even have a clue about the real horror that's in store for them. Once they figure it out, it's not as if they can go calling for help. Everyone at the festival would simply think the running and the screaming and the stabbing are parts of the production.

It is here, though, that anything worth praising about the movie ends. It's a smart premise with some potential, but the screenplay by Seth M. Sherwood, Blair Butler, and Akela Cooper simply uses it to set up a series of routine stalking scenes, followed by gruesome killing or two. Actually, there are only two such killings within the story proper. At a certain point, it seems as if the masked killer gets bored with his murderous antics, so he just stabs two of the inevitable victims in front of a bunch of festival-goers on the main grounds. It's probably not a good sign when the meticulous killer wants to get the show wrapped up as quickly as possible.

The main characters consist of a group of college friends, who have VIP tickets on Halloween night to the traveling horror show known as Hell Fest. Natalie (Amy Forsyth) and Brooke (Reign Edwards) are best friends, while Taylor (Bex Taylor-Klaus) is Brooke's new roommate.

Taylor and Natalie don't get along too well, and that's about the extent of any conflict or development for these characters. OK, to be fair, Natalie and Gavin (Roby Attal), who got the tickets for the group, secretly like each other, too. To be certain that there are no third wheels (until the characters start being killed off one by one) and more potential bodies, Brooke brings her boyfriend Quinn (Christian James), while Taylor is accompanied by her beau Ahser (Matt Mercurio). They're a tolerable bunch, which is something for which to be grateful.

There's a killer at the festival, too, who has killed before in a similar location. We see that in a mostly useless prologue, in which three different friends are separated in a haunted maze, before one of them is stabbed and hanged. It's unnecessary, primarily because the rest of the movie is essentially a lengthier version of that scene. The prologue also ruins the mystique of the premise, since we're pretty much prepared for everything that's about to unfold.

The screenwriters and director Gregory Plotkin mainly try to recreate the experience of what it would be like to watch six strangers wander around a festival and a couple of haunted houses for a while. It's about as dull as you might expect, although Natalie and Gavin's flirtations seem natural enough. The rest of the actors get to take tours of the attractions, where the movie uses up its quotient of acceptable jump-scares that don't amount to anything in about two minutes.

As clever as the setup may be, we quickly realize that the filmmakers aren't interested in taking advantage of it. The tours of the haunted houses aren't intended to scare the audience, but it is strange that the attempts of intentional scares follow the same pattern as the festival's phony ones. The killer suddenly appears in frame, either entering from a corner or showing up whenever the movie cuts to a different angle.

At one point, Natalie starts figuring out the pattern of the rides, which essentially amounts to a sort of self-referential commentary on the predictability of scares in horror movies. At least, you'd think that's case, yet Plotkin basically follows the well-worn pattern of horror movies.

We know when something real is coming, because Plotkin follows the masked killer as he prepares for the hunt. Someone's head is bashed with an oversized mallet. Another has a syringe plunged into an eyeball in close-up. There's a potentially devious scene involving a stage guillotine, but by that point, the movie, realizing that it's running out of characters to kill, rushes into a game of cat-and-mouse inside one of the attractions. There's no real suspense here, because the movie telegraphs just about every move by the killer (except one moment where it simply cheats to make us momentarily lose track of him).

Hell Fest is a generic horror show that happens to be set at a horror show. You'd think the filmmakers would realize how redundant that idea could be. Instead, they embrace and double down on the redundancy.

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