HELL HOLE - Mark Reviews Movies

Hell Hole, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

Even when the practical side of the Adams Family's filmmaking gets more expansive, they still keep their film admirably limited. Hell Hole, the team's newest horror tale, is an international production, filmed on location in Serbia and featuring a mix of American (mostly the filmmakers) and local actors, but the entirety of the story is set in and around a single location. It's an old, derelict Soviet-era building of an unspecified nature, because the main concern for the characters is what's happening underground.

A prologue set during the Napoleonic era explains all we need to know about the threat. A group of soldiers has become separated from their platoon and lost, and silently, they wander and try to find food before starvation kills them. The soldiers are offered a horse by a local woman, who also offers them a twisted grin as the military men walk away, too hungry to wonder why someone would simply give them a horse. It's no ordinary horse, though—a fact the soldiers learn too late, just before a slimy monster attacks them and appears to violate one poor guy.

This is, at its core, an old-fashioned creature feature, and co-writers/co-directors/stars John Adams and Toby Poser, the married half of the Adams Family crew, embrace the spirit of such movies, not only in terms of what happens, but also in the way they make their film. Yes, some of the effect of the filmmaking is on account of budgetary restrictions, but consider something. Some of that budget went toward traveling to Serbia, which is mostly unnecessary for a story that could have been set or filmed in any remote place, and navigating the assorted complications that must have arisen from making the film in another country.

Adams and Poser probably could have found a less expensive and simpler means to achieve the same background for their film, and that money could have been used toward creating more and/or better visual/practical effects. This isn't to say those effects are bad. When we do get a good look at the monster, it's pretty and convincingly gross, creepy, and worthy of some amount of discomfort. The filmmakers made a clear choice, though, to ensure the legitimacy of the setting and to make this creature look exactly the way it does, accomplished by the precise methods that are used.

Those methods are old-fashioned: puppetry and what appears to be in-camera trickery that sometimes makes the monster look separate from reality. We get the sense that, even if the filmmakers could have put more money toward the special effects, they wouldn't do so. This is the film they wanted to make, and this is the way they wanted to make it. You have to admire that attitude.

It comes through here in more ways than the effects. The story, written by the co-directors and their daughter Lulu Adams, is also limited, as a team of drillers accidentally release the creature—or, more specifically, the human vessel housing it—while determining if this land is worth fracking. From there, though, the ideas expand, speaking to humanity's impact on nature—not to mention what happens when nature resists such interference—and a subversive reversal of the ongoing debate over reproductive health and bodily autonomy. The film's humor is just cheeky enough that one could label it a satire, and while it works on that level, it's also a neat thriller about paranoia, how far people are willing to go to survive, and, yes, a slimy monster that invades human bodies.

The more basic setup introduces us to Emily (Poser), an American working for a fracking enterprise, and her nephew Teddy (Max Portman), who need a job and isn't complaining about taking this one. Also in the mix are Emily's right-hand man John (Adams) and a pair of local scientists, Nikola (Aleksandar Trmčić) and Sofija (Olivera Peruničić). The last two don't approve of Emily's work. If the land is going to be devastated, however, they're going to make certain the environmental impact is as minimal as possible, starting with ensuring that the drilling operation isn't going to kill a colony of an endangered species of rabbit.

The rabbits quickly become the least of the team's concerns when they dig up one of those French soldiers (played by Marko Filipović) from the prologue, who has somehow survived underground for more than two centuries in a gooey, cocoon-like shell. He insists that someone kill him, and after the scientists do some tests, they determine the soldier isn't entirely human. John figures that out, by the way, when the creature emerges from the soldier right in front of him and finds a new host.

The rest of the plot has the monster moving from body to body—sometimes just sliding out of one host and other times exiting in more violent ways—and the survivors debating what, if anything, is to be done about the entity. It's cleverly funny, especially since the monster only appears to want shelter inside the bodies of men who suddenly have to deal with the idea of pregnancy as more than a concept, and filled with gruesome and/or gory moments of shock. There's also some fine character work on the part of Poser, playing someone whose pragmatism is established early and carries through as her worksite becomes a bloodbath, and Trmčić, whose scientist can't hide how giddy he is to be part of such a unique scientific discovery.

Hell Hole is a familiar sort of tale, of course, but it contains a few twists, primarily involving those underlying ideas, that make it distinct and surprisingly relevant. It's also additional proof that the Adams Family is a group of filmmakers dedicated to making crafty movies exactly how they want to make them.

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