I only saw this movie because Wife came home after being gone for the week and I was waiting for our car to be fixed and had several hours to kill and wasn’t allowed to see anything 1) good or 2) after 10am. All of those conditions were met by both Hellfest and Smallfoot, so I went with the one that I thought would have fewer people so that I could text through the movie. There ended up being other people who had the same limitations, or maybe they got lost on their way to Venom, I’m not sure.
Hellfest is trying really hard to compete for second place at your high school’s annual film festival. I was hoping that if I did some digging, I would find out some things about the movie that would endear it to me a little bit, like all the shoddy haunted houses were from a real festival and they were filming on location and some local perennial wonder, but no, nothing so magical. It cost $5.5 million to make, which seems steep considering how much of the action takes place in darkly lit, cramped rooms covered in skeleton wallpaper and populated with plastic goblins wrapped in medical gauze. There were a stupid number of extras in this movie, or at least it felt like there were a hundred people in every crowd scene.
The story itself is pretty silly. Dude kills people–specifically, people who aren’t scared of him–attending haunted houses by posing as someone in the park. Premise necessitates us going through two or three haunted houses on GoPros with the actors, but there were like two or three too many houses. There were only a few visually interesting moments because of some killer lighting. For the most part, it was just the audience watching a bunch of people get spooked by jump scares, which felt oddly soothing, but not a recipe for an emotionally dynamic movie.
Usually, there’s a moment in the horror film where the main characters realize their situation and turn the tables on the bad guy by using his environment against him, but that doesn’t really happen in this film, at least not that intentionally. We don’t have the emotional catharsis of feeling like we’re in control of the course of the film at any point, which is maybe why the few positive reviews out there describe Hellfest as an homage to an earlier time of slasher flicks, but what I really think that means is that Hellfest does not contribute anything new to the genre, and in doing so it sort of ignores the contributions of that earlier generation of films too.
The love story is grating and short-lived. The characters are colorless and one-note, spend a lot of their time making out or wishing they were making out and not much else. The villain doesn’t have a lot going for him except that he’s kind of a creep. His refrain of “Pop Goes the Weasel” is timed poorly, which means you’re expecting him to POP! the second time he repeats his melody, but he’ll often go three or four times and then trail off into nothingness. Not in a scary way, just in a why was he singing it like that kind of way.
Usually the magic of a horror film is the audience’s discovery of the way in which an old genre trope taps into a particular modern cultural struggle, identifies a peculiar fixation of the zeitgeist. Hellfest is a little timeless in that there isn’t very much time allotted to any cultural discussion. There are no metaphors. The fest signifies nothing. It’s just a fest, but not very fun.
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