"Hell Fest" - Review

Slasher movies are relatively easy to make. All you really need is someone reasonably competent with makeup, one or two locations, and you’re good to go. That’s why there are so many slasher movies. However, by “easy” what I really mean is “cheap;” there’s a reason there are only handful of good slasher movies. What filmmakers tend to forget when they make a horror movie are the characters. The original Halloween had a great villain and great relatable main character. The first Friday the 13th had an intriguing villain in Mrs. Vorhees. Hell Fest is a slasher movie that could have reasonably been made in 1982, dumped into theaters in August or September, and subsequently forgotten.
 
Natalie (Amy Forsyth) is visiting her former roommate Brooke (Reign Edwards). The two had a falling out at some point in the past, and Natalie wants to repair things. Brooke on the other hand wants to take Natalie to “Hell Fest,” a traveling haunted carnival. Accompanying them would be Brooke’s boyfriend (Christian James), her current roommate (Bex Taylor-Klaus) and her boyfriend (Matt Mercurio). Natalie is unsure, but when Brooke tells her that hot nice guy Gavin (Roby Attel) will be there, Natalie agrees to go. The remaining eighty-odd minutes of the film feels like watching your dumbest college friends wander around a haunted house and getting murdered one by one by a pyscho killer.
 
A haunted carnival during Halloween, where everyone’s dressed up and everyone’s trying to scare you is a perfect location for a slasher film. The killer could be anybody! And anywhere! At any moment! That buys you a ton of jump scares. Unfortunately, Hell Fest sticks its killer in the same costume the entire time. Therefore, none of the spook house jump scares have weight to them and eventually you become numb to them — the middle of the movie is literally watching other people go through a haunted house. The script written by (deep breath) Blair Butler, Seth M. Sherwood, William Penick & Christopher Sey, and Akela Cooper is thoroughly uninterested in giving any of these characters any development. Even the killer is uninteresting. There’s a final twist, which I think is supposed to be shocking, but since we don’t know anything about the killer it doesn’t land with the punch it should.
 
The direction by Gregory Plotkin isn’t bad. He wrings some tension out of the scare, and stages some fun, creatively gory kills — but honestly that’s all it’s got. Everything else is a sleepy, by-the-numbers slasher film.
 
The actors do what they can with the material, but when everything is this thin, there’s not much for them to work with. Amy Forsyth makes for a decent final girl, and she makes some good jokes here and there … but she has nothing to do and the script is completely disinterested in exploring the “bad stuff” from her past. Oh, and Tony Todd shows up for a brief cameo that injects a welcome dose of energy into the shenanigans.
 
All in all, Hell Fest is a garden-variety slasher movie. Mediocre to the point of irrelevance, it’s every slasher movie made in the ‘80s that you’ve never heard of. However, horror fans might be looking for a slasher fix and this could do the trick … at least until the next Halloween sequel opens in three weeks.
 
One and a half stars out of Four.