Hellbent

APRIL 30, 2007

GENRE: INDEPENDENT, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Does it count as a coincidence if both Hellbent and yesterday’s movie both had a gimmick that doesn’t even come close to sustaining itself throughout the running time?

Probably not.

Both were set on Halloween too, for the record.

Anyway, this barely feature-length film (75 minutes without credits) is commonly known (to someone, I am sure) as the “Gay slasher movie”. And while you might think that’s a bit homophobic, it is sadly the ONLY way to describe it. You couldn’t say anything else about Hellbent to set it apart from the laziest Friday the 13th sequel. Apparently, the creators assumed that by making everyone in the film a homosexual, he wouldn’t have to bother adding much else to the proceedings. Even the killings kind of suck (the killer cuts all their heads off, which gets old after… one time).

Not helping matters is the movie’s insistence on saying that Joseph Wolf co-created (or at times, on the overlong featurette, simply ‘created’) Halloween (it's also claimed as much on the DVD cover). Fuck him. He didn’t create a goddamn thing. He was partnered with Irwin Yablans, who ran the company that distributed the film (and Yablans was the one who actually did that) AFTER it was completed, and he exec produced Halloween II and III, and that’s his only tie to the series. John Carpenter and Debra Hill created Halloween. Bob Clark co-created Halloween when he discussed doing a Black Christmas sequel set on Halloween with John Carpenter. They were the creators. So he can shut the fuck up (actually he’s dead now, so I guess he’s already doing that). I have no respect for anyone taking credit for someone else’s work, especially my beloved ‘ween.

And if I were a rich man, I would buy every digital camera in the world and break it in half. If this led to one less movie being shot on DV, it would all be worth it. Jesus asschristing fuck, when will people learn that DV looks like shit? Let’s list every movie ever made (not counting documentaries) that benefited from being shot on DV:

1. Blair Witch Project
2. N/A

(Note - I am not in any way against digital FILM. Robert Rodriguez (everything he’s done in the past 4-5 years) and David Fincher (Zodiac) use digital film, and it looks beautiful. But digital VIDEO always looks like ass.)

But in the end, none of that would matter if the script had more meat to it. I was expecting that the movie would have something new to offer besides simply having an all male cast. Like, if the guys WEREN'T gay, and two of the four main characters were females, what would this movie have going for it? Not much that I could see (though to be fair, I seem to be in the minority - the film has a decent enough rating for a modern slasher on the IMDb). Apart from the DV, it's technically proficient and all that, and the opening sequence is terrific (it involves a car overflowing with balloons), but I've simply seen too many slashers at this point for one as standard as this to really resonate.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a pitch meeting at Dimension concerning my script SWEET TOOTH, which is a complete rip-off of My Bloody Valentine, but every character is diabetic.

What say you?