Hell Fest (2018)

To be honest, judging on premise alone, I thought Hell Fest had a fair chance at being a pretty decent horror film. I mean, a serial killer running… well… walking kinda fast… around a horror-themed amusement park and dishing out carnage everywhere with people just admiring his handy-work as they take it to be part of the show… Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, maybe not…

Director Gregory Plotkin (Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension) does a good enough job in the technical and visual departments. The film is shot well and the practical effects are on point. However, taking a lacklustre script (which apparently needed three writers to come up with the story and two others to write the script) and simply inserting it into the horror-slasher sub-genre template, pretty much eliminates any originality the premise may have had. After the film ends, if you think about it for a few seconds, you realize that this film could have been set anywhere with different circumstances and characters and it would have been EXACTLY like any of what seems to be a million other Slasher films. This takes away the surprise element. We already know the tropes, tricks, turns and even kills, it is all so darn predictable. This leads to us not really caring about the characters, who lives and who dies, and even prevents us from rooting for a pretty bland killer. On top of that, all the scares are predictable and have no real effect. We’ve seen it all before.

With several impressive credits as editor (Happy Death Day, Get Out, several Paranormal Activity films), Plotkin is well aware of how a film should look and the pace required to keep the tension going. Had you never seen a slasher film before, that should keep you in it. The way the film is shot and looks, as well as the speed at which it progresses, keeps it from being completely boring. In addition, some of the kills, though not terribly original, are somewhat entertaining. While film lovers are unlikely to feel their 89-minutes were well spent, some horror fans should be kept happy.

Hell Fest tells the story of six college students, somehow all quite attractive (what a surprise), who have been salivating while gearing up to this night, in which they get to go to Hell Fest and enjoy all the fun, scary, bloody, heart-attack-inducing frights and rides to get their juices flowing. What could possibly go wrong? There are six of them, some more important than others, and we are actually given approximately 20-minutes of backstory, yet the characters remain flat as a cleaver blade and we don’t actually mind or care who gets killed and when, as long as all, or at least the majority, of them are laid to waste.

Amy Forsyth, Reign Edwards, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Robby Attal, Christian James and Matt Mercurio portray the six unfortunate students and equate themselves well enough not to be blamed in any way for the film’s shortcomings. Stephen Conroy as the masked killer does what, I can only assume, he was told to do and performs adequately enough from behind the mask. Again, I’m not sure what they were thinking with this killer character as it is neither menacing, nor remotely interesting and feels like a cosplay actor doing his best to be a kind of a Michael/Jason-type killer without an interesting backstory or charisma. Also worth mentioning, is a cameo from horror legend Tony Todd, however, it neither does Mr. Todd any justice nor satisfy the viewer. Again, that role could have been played by anyone and it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference.

As mentioned before, overall, the film manages to not completely bore us as it is not slow, just unoriginal and uninteresting. While this will greatly dissatisfy and even more so, annoy fans of good filmmaking, it will likely still please horror fans who are just in it for an hour and a half of ‘killer chasing victim’, with some brutal kills and strangely minimal, and questionably adequate, gore.

Uninspiring and lacking in any real effort. Strictly for horror fans who don’t expect much from their horror.

Stick with the trailer. 5/10.