Hell Hole

I am a fan of Adams family. I have watched both "The Deeper You Dig" and "Hellbender". Good movies, especially Hellbender, by those talented artists who obviously love a lot the horror genre, and they try to leave their mark on it. I respect their effort, with the means they have at their disposal. These are not groundbreaking movies though, neither great ones. Their movies are not scary neither much intense. For example, HELLBENDER is something like a "Coming of age/indie/art horror". It's easy to make a garbage movie like every other horror movie nowadays, with masked killers or demons killing everyone, but this is just a copy of a copy of a copy. Adams' movies have identity and their movies are kinda unique.

That doesn't mean they're very good. And "Hell hole" is my least favorite movie of them. Of course it's not scary as expected but at the same time, it's not much intense neither interesting. Keep in mind though, this is more comedy than horror. At least, i saw it that way. And when i understood what this is about, i had a lot of fun, there were even some hilarious scenes during the last 20 minutes.

So, it's important to lower your expectations and undestand what this is about. If you expect something as i described it, you will find this movie entertaining as well.

In any case, this is definitely not a MUST WATCH movie and i expect something better in the future. HELL HOLE is not a failure imo but neither a step forward by those film makers.

This has some good elements but it ultimately disappoints. The good elements include a fairly novel monster that's well-utilized; some gory, gross and darkly funny splatter effects; and reasonably good performances. But they're ultimately outweighed by the bad elements: a rather lackluster premise that's like a throwaway X-Files episode; unlikeable characters; and a tepid ending that sputters to a lackluster conclusion. Worst of all is repetitive and redundant expositional dialogue. The characters talk and talk about everything that's happening and they over-explain the nature of the monster, its lifecycle and biology.

As a big fan of creature features, I was excited to check out Hell Hole. While the movie still had some fun moments, it was mostly a disappointment. The biggest issue with the film concerns the amount of dialogue that neither advances the plot nor meaningfully develops the character. The movie's plot is very basic, so there wasn't much to develop. Similarly, almost all of the characters are underdeveloped. These dialogue scenes feel as though they stretch on for forever because the action scenes are either very brief or poorly executed. So the movie often seems as though it's 90+ minutes of redshirts chatting with only brief breaks for action. Another big issue concerns the ending as I felt like it was wrapped up way too quickly with the fates of a few characters not fully understood. Ultimately, Hell Hole is a movie that falls well short of its relatively high potential.

This is a fun, low budget, creature feature that has more pros than cons: it's funny, the charters actually have personality, there are some fun practical effects (and some terrible ones too) and the directing & editing are competent. I wanted something fun and silly to put on and this hit the mark.

If you're a sucker for creature features and find guilty pleasure in cheesy movies then you'll probably enjoy this.

Main complaints are too much dialog but not enough one-liners (if they'd gone over the top with the silly effects or cheesy dialog I would have liked it more and would probably bumped my rating up) and the ending was... abrupt & bad.

To be fair, this movie is a 5, not a 6, but so many folks are hating on it I wanted to give a little more love because this film definitely has an audience with people like me.

I'd only seen one other film from these creators before (that being Hellbender), which struck me as an attempt at a folk horror / coming of age story with nice cinematography but not much substance. Hell Hole continues the tradition with terrible generic dialogue, but at least it was quite entertaining in its campiness, making up for the equal lack of depth and characterization with over-the-top gore and patently silly interactions. It reminded me a bit of the Resident Evil game series (in more ways than one), which got good once it started leaning into its more ridiculous aspects and trying to have some tongue-in-cheek fun with them.

Hell Hole's too repetitive to watch more than once, but for a one-time-thing, the practical effects, cool setting (Here's to post-Soviet industrial decay!) and comedic elements (which I'll charitably hope were intentional) make it worth seeing at least once, even if it's just when you come home from the bar and feel like watching something disposable.