I can get on board with a horror movie set inside a fictional amusement park. Unfortunately, Hell Fest follows through on that premise with a movie that has all the depth of an amusement park ride.
It’s never a good sign when a movie’s marketing prominently features the words “From the Producer of…”. That is the last refuge of a film that doesn’t really believe in its hook and doesn’t have a director or actors with any name recognition at all. I mean, no one really knows what a producer even does, do they? Assuming you do have some vague concept, have you ever been like “Wes Craven and Robert Englund are ok, I guess, but I think A Nightmare on Elm Street is great because of how the financing was secured and the way international distribution was handled!”? I’ll save you some time from commenting below, you have not. Yet, Hell Fest goes a step further with it’s pointless recommendation-by-association. Every poster or thumbnail I could find was proudly emblazoned with “From an executive producer of The Walking Dead“. Now, The Walking Dead is certainly a bankable brand, probably more so if Hell Fest were concerned with zombies in any way, but a household name in horror circles regardless. That “an” is really deflating though, isn’t it? This is not a passion project from the team behind America’s most successful horror-themed television show, it is a side gig for somebody that was once associated with the show during it’s approximately 139 seasons. For the hell of it, I looked it up, and the show has had a dozen EPs, but I guess “From 8% of the executive producers of The Walking Dead” didn’t have the same ring to it.
Haunted houses have been around forever. I’m talking about the pretend kind where teenagers spend money to have other teenagers in rubber masks jump scare them, by the way, which are not actually haunted and are not actually houses of course. I frequented them as a youth, and now that my children are old enough, we frequent them together. Horror movies set in pretend haunted houses are also a sturdy tradition, and the premise of a real killer operating under the guise of being a fake killer who stalks you with your permission until it is too late is a solid enough way to set up a slasher movie. Where I will give Hell Fest credit for a modicum of originality is that I’ve never seen a slasher set in the modern amusement park equivalent, where a normal theme park gets a spooky makeover each October night and features a whole series of haunted mazes and houses. My local version is called Halloween Haunt at King’s Dominion, and I can attest it is great fun to attend. I can also attest that it would be pretty easy for a masked murderer to accost you without arousing too much attention, since you are essentially paying to be accosted by a variety of masked non-murderers throughout the evening. This is the scenario our six college-aged protagonists find themselves in during Hell Fest, and as you might imagine, it takes a long time for the danger to set in amongst the group and even longer for anyone else to recognize it.
If I can give some credit to an anonymous executive producer of The Walking Dead, this set up is brilliant from a production cost perspective. Hell Fest simultaneously looks like the coolest, most extravagant haunted amusement park, and is very clearly an inexpensive movie to make. It is a pretty clever trick to give your horror movie the production value of a theme park attraction and have that be a positive thing. Other strengths include the movie’s pacing and a base level of likeability from the cast, as well as some solid, gory, on-theme kills. Where the film struggles is that it feels like a sketch of a movie, or perhaps a short film, and not a feature-length presentation. The character motivations are as surface-level as they get. Basically, the friends are looking for a chance to blow off some steam and two of them have a budding romance. All of the dialogue is centered on those two things to an almost absurdist degree. I know that friend groups like to set up their single friends, and that they are invested in the outcome of the potential pairing – this is a thing that happens all the time in real life. Yet the singular obsession that the two established couples have towards seeing even a shred of flirtation between the fifth and sixth members of their group is laughable. Unfortunately, since none of these folks seem to have personal histories or lives outside the frame of the movie, they literally don’t have anything else to talk about. That is until they are being picked off by a generic stalker with a knife.
Which brings me to my biggest gripe. I never want to see another slasher lick featuring a masked stalker with a knife.* It is so lazy, so cliché, so contemptuous of an audience that has obviously seen this a hundred times before if they are seeking out a movie like Hell Fest. At least the slasher movies of the early 80’s had the decency to tack on some half-assed motive to their villain and sprinkle in a healthy dose of red herrings. No one seems to think that there is time for that here, despite the fact that the movie doesn’t have anything else to spend its abundant amount of time on at all. That lack of imagination is the most frustrating thing about modern, low-budget horror to me, and completely misses the point of what makes low-budget horror worth creating.
* I mean, I’m reviewing one for my final entry this year, but at least he is an established character – the uber masked stabber, if you will.
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