Hellcat

Greetings again from the darkness. Make sure you have your popcorn ready because there's no warmup for this one. It starts quickly. Lena awakens in the back of a trailer that's speeding down the road. She's battered and disoriented. I'll admit to not being familiar with writer-director Brock Bodell or lead actor Dakota Gorman prior to watching this, yet both left excellent impressions.

Gorman plays Lena, a character who experiences a wild emotional and physical ride - most of it in the back end of that trailer. Any real spoilers for this one would be inexcusable, so I'll tread lightly. A jolted Lena regains her bearings and ends up communicating with the driver through a device hidden in a mounted wolf's head. The driver, Clive (Todd Terry) tells her (more than once), "I'm a good man. An honest man. A hunter." It's like his mantra, and we later learn the origin.

Clive informs Lena that she's been "infected", and he's her only hope of getting to the hospital in time for treatment. She experiences periodic flashes of memory, but can't quite place where she was or what she was doing prior to waking up in the trailer. She just knows she's pregnant and being held captive in a claustrophobic moving vehicle by an unseen driver.

The twists that occur expose Clive's beliefs and the reason their destination is 'Golly World' (definitely different from Wally World of FAMILY VACATION fame). It does take most of the runtime for us to comprehend the reasons for his actions, as well as the identity of the other girl Lena discovers hidden away in the trailer. An encounter with a local law enforcement officer (Jordan Mullins) does little to improve Lena's situation, but does act as a reminder that extremists are everywhere these days.

The radio talk show host (with listeners of a particular ilk) has the film's best line ... "This ain't exactly NPR" ... a statement all too relevant given the recent de-funding by the government. The evening's full moon plays a role as Clive, the would-be hunter, pulls off one true shot. Dakota Gorman delivers an impressive physical and emotional performance, while filmmaker Brock Bodell shows a knack for twists and tension.

World Premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival on July 25th.

Awakening inside a strange van, a woman tries to make sense of her captors' insistence on taking her to a special location within the hour to treat a mysterious infection working its way through her system, forcing her to rely on his strengths to get out of everything alive.

This was a rather solid if somewhat flawed feature. The main aspect going for this one concerns its central premise and setup, which manages to include a rather intriguing starting point as a means of looking into a potentially terrifying psychological problem. Starting off immediately with the awakening inside the trailer, the strange lack of communication with her captor, and the uncertainty of what's happened to her in such a scenario makes for a nice bit of intrigue regarding what's going on. With no viable escape attempt and plenty of suggestions offering up the idea of the woman carrying a secret that's about to come to fruition, the series of encounters here gets quite thrilling later on as everything comes to the forefront and requires a slew of intervention to successfully accomplish. The problem with all this is that it never fully feels as though this can sustain a ninety-minute movie, requiring all sorts of weird tricks to escalate a running time that doesn't require it. From the endlessly droning philosophical or religious monologues that try to paint everything in a different light than what we're expecting and engender the kind of sympathy for his plight that something like this doesn't require, to the flashbacks and inserts used here to bring about a kind of overblown storyline that loses steam by the second act. Regardless of the intensity of the action and the shocking nature of the revelations at play, that this meanders around like it does makes for a challenging time here without much else to keep it going, and is the main drawback holding this down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.