I can think of no better way to kick off the Halloween season than with a celebration of frights and friendships — oh, and bloody murders. Razor sharp, with a cast of characters so likable you’ll hope they all survive, Hell Fest is a giddy and almost euphoric horror experience. In Gregory Plotkin’s new horror feature, a group of college buddies are headed to the titular haunted park to have some fun and get terrified. They get both, but not in the doses they’d ideally measure out due to rumors of a masked killer sneaking into haunted attractions. Once inside, he creates a terror that is all too real, protected by the spirit of the season and a collection of realistic props. The film’s premise is a clever one, drawing parallels between viewers and the group, all strapped in for the art of the scare. But we know something they don’t, and the idea of bloodlust and spectatorship sneaks into the narrative, without beating a dead corpse. Set in a haunted park, Hell Fest has twice the jump-scares of your average slasher, yet director Gregory Plotkin does something smart. Within the world of the characters, the sound is realistic, coated with killer cackles, and loud spring-loaded contraptions. The characters scream, and they laugh. He contrasts this with moments of real fear for the group, where the sound becomes more expressionistic; background noises fade — or are accentuated to represent sensory overload — and aural tinglings of terror overtake the atmosphere. The score shrieks or whimpers to silence, and we are enveloped in terror. The sound design represents Hell Fest as a whole: a balance of fun and fear. A return to old-school horror, Hell Fest surely strips down the slasher to its core components yet it also updates it in both surface level and elemental ways. At its most basic functions, these updates come from the characters: their perspectives, their interplay. Plotkin also brings in modern technology for scares, namely for a cellphone sequence wherein the tension begins to unfold into terror. Beyond this, Plotkin approaches the genre with an understanding of its foundations, and crafts subversions and new perspectives on some of the staples to create a Halloween banger. The masked murderer audiences have known for decades is given a fresh fierceness in Hell Fest. An early indication of Plotkin’s grasp on the atmosphere is with the killer’s entrance into the park. Plotkin actually bothers to load this moment with genuine menace and precision, introducing a specific music cue and loading a visual signifier that will serve as a device for tension. As he steps amidst the crowd, there is the sensation of terror walking among us; the weight of his presence is sustained throughout, and he walks a line between ungovernable evil and human error. Within this juxtaposition, Hell Fest creates a slasher for our time. The anchor to all of this is undoubtedly the performances. Unlike in many slashers, the friend dynamic in Hell Fest is a joy, and their chemistry is electric and hilarious. Budding romances and vows of life-long friendship all work, and I found myself hoping for 90 minutes watching a group of friends enjoy a night together. Amy Forsyth stands out, giving a focused performance that demands you believe she is real, and root for her at every turn. Throughout, there is a naturalism and truth which brings the group to life. This means that when they near the end of their lives, it devastates. As the first kill approaches, dread overtakes an excitement for the display of practical effects (though what a display it is), a rarity in this subgenre. The group’s organic humor is contrasted with a crimson red one, as if your friends are actually getting murdered. This makes for one a more complex slasher, and creates a dichotomy in Hell Fest that is essential for an impactful horror film. A balance is struck between fun and fear, make-believe terror and actual trauma. It borders on an examination of real pain, still lets you whoop at the madness, then has that cheer catch in your throat. A scene of tension assembled around a photo-booth is a summation of Hell Fest’s impact: what starts as a cute development of romance between two characters shifts to an unnerving panic, with the act of their passion now the hindrance to their safety. As they kiss, the killer approaches. They are unknowing, and yet we know, so we are caught between egging on the bloodshed and worried for our friends. The score builds as the crosscutting intensifies, but at this stage, we are only teased their fates, and left with a relieved sigh. Fun tips toward fear without losing tempo, and the lexis of Hell Fest — the memorable score, crosscutting, and misdirection — mirrors the film’s narrative trajectory of ramping intensity and genre play. Complicating our relationship to slashers while still delivering the goods, one thing is certain: Hell Fest is the park to be in after dark. Hell Fest is now in wide release. Grade: B+<doc-sep>Hell Fest is in great danger after the escape of a serial killer. Will the slasher return?! You might not make it out alive! Hell Fest was directed by Gregory Plotkin, who is the man behind Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, and this film follows a bunch of teenagers who go to a famous theme park called Hell Fest. The park is known for its horrifying haunted houses. Once there, the teenagers discover a serial killer is on the loose and is blending in with the crowd. The slasher’s teen victims were not discovered at first because everyone thought they were part of the scenery. What a great concept. Although not 100% original, there have been a few films that have used this similar story before. Nevertheless, I was excited to see what this film could be and it was very disappointing. Why? Because despite its concept, it follows the basic formula and rules of just about every slasher film since the 1980’s. So, it is nice to see an endeavor like this in theaters because I love horror movies. It seems like most of the effort on this film was given to the sets, which are the haunted houses, costume designs, and the use of extras. When it comes to the story and characters, there is no effort at all, except for Tony Todd’s character, who did well. The ending didn’t work either. Hell Fest – Courtesy of Tucker Tooley Entertainment, Valhalla Motion Pictures Grade I would give Hell Fest a C+. This film deserves a sequel because it needs a backstory on how the slasher came to be and better character development for the teenagers. Hell Fest stars Amy Forsyth, Reign Edwards, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Christian James, Roby Attal, Matt Mercurio and Tony Todd. The film was produced by both Tucker Tooley Entertainment and Valhalla Motion Pictures. Have you seen Hell Fest? What did you think of the film? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments section below.<doc-sep>Eye candy without much to offer the brain or emotions, “Hell Fest” is a competently crafted slasher film rendered instantly forgettable by its disinterest in character, plot, and motivation, let alone original ideas. An early Halloween salvo, it will be gone from theaters before that holiday (or even the latest screen “Halloween”) arrives, but should in the short term satisfy that seasonal itch among horror fans before bigger, better fright-fests arrive. After the obligatory prior-victim’s-fate prelude, we meet the film’s college student protagonists, who are young and cute but not much else. Natalie (Amy Forsyth) reunites with ex-roomie BFF Brooke (Reign Edwards) — the movie suggests there’s some reason why they haven’t seen each other for a while, but never gets around to explaining it — while less enthusiastically renewing acquaintance with Brooke’s irksome new flatmate Taylor (Bex Taylor-Klaus). Nonetheless, all three are soon off to Hell Fest, a theme-park-like Halloween extravaganza, with their respective boyfriends. Brooke has Quinn (Christian James), Taylor has Asher (Matt Mercurio), and Natalie has Gavin (Roby Attal) — who’s not her boyfriend, at least not yet, but after tonight he might be. Unless, of course, a homicidal maniac should interrupt their first date. And wouldn’t you know it, the guy who killed the girl at a similar attraction in the prologue is also attending this one — and his idea of a good time comes at the expense of others’ enjoyment. First he stalks a young woman who gives him attitude. He finishes her off in full view of Natalie, who at first assumes it’s just part of the general performance by paid actors dishing out various forms of fake mayhem. Then she’s not so sure, a doubt that the perp (Stephen Conroy) duly notes. So he spends the rest of the night stalking her and her friends, drastically shortening several lifespans en route. While Natalie soon susses that something genuinely sinister is going on, the authorities dismiss her suspicions as nervous overreaction to spook-house thrills — and of course, it’s hard to spot a real corpse when there are so many phony ones laying about. “Hell Fest” gets nice visual mileage out of its primary setting, with lots of neon, blacklight, lurid disco gels, and original haunted house (or tunnel-of-terrors ride) interiors designed for the film. (They are purportedly being replicated at select Six Flags parks during October as a promotional tie-in.) The candy colors against dark nocturnal backdrops pop in Jose David Montero’s cinematography. But as there seems to be no overall theme at this fictive Hell Night, and the attractions run a miscellaneous gamut of horror scenarios (carefully avoiding direct copyright infringement), there’s little connective tissue to stylistically heighten the suspense — just a lot of pretty lights and people in costume jumping out for boo-scares. Nor is there much to distinguish the actual threat here, since “The Other” (as stuntman Conroy’s figure is named in the closing credits) is just your generic Michael Myers-type ghoul. He hides behind a mask and under a hoodie, saying nothing (he does mumbly-sing a bit) as he advances toward victims in ponderous slo-mo, apparently an ordinary mortal yet almost supernaturally omnipresent. Despite a shrug-worthy coda, we never really find out who he is, or what motivates him. Somehow it took the efforts of six writers to draw that blank, as well as to deprive the protagonists of any backstory or other points of interest. No one expects dramatic depth from this kind of joint. Still, a token effort in that direction is always appreciated, and very much absent here. Neither does the film compensate much in terms of basic “kill count” payoff. “Hell Fest” is moderately gory, yet its best deaths (while not particularly memorable) are in the middle, with the climactic Final Girl(s) action a bit flat. When the film should be at its most pulse-pounding, it’s already past its mild peak of tension. Editor-turned-helmer Gregory Plotkin’s prior directorial feature was “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension,“ the underwhelming final chapter to date in that franchise. (He’d edited all but the first prior entries.) Freed from its found-footage constraints, he’s assembled a Georgia-shot movie that looks and sounds good on likely modest means. But having also edited “Get Out” and “Happy Death Day” — two recent movies that constitute a gold standard for combining horror content with clever writing — you’d think he and the producers would have noticed that “Hell Fest” barely has a plot, let alone anything that could be termed a “plot twist.” They’ve made a colorfully wrapped package whose content turns out to be just styrofill.<doc-sep>The slasher movie “Hell Fest” captures all the fun and excitement of wandering aimlessly through an amusement park with boring people you don’t like. On the upside, you won’t mind when the bad guy kills them. On the downside, he doesn’t kill them often enough to make the experience interesting. “Hell Fest” takes place in a horror-themed amusement park, ostensibly a traveling show, but one so gigantic and elaborate that it probably employs hundreds, if not thousands, of people and costs as much to run as Knott’s Berry Farm. It’s an elaborate, scary place full of mazes and monsters and people in masks who jump at you and yell “Boo!” It’s also the perfect seasonal vacation spot for the film’s serial killer, who wanders the park in a fright mask, looking just like one of the employees. He can kill whoever he wants and all the bystanders will think it’s just part of the show. It’s a disturbing premise for a horror movie, make no mistake. Also Read: Can the Team Behind 'Girls Trip' Land Another Box Office Hit With 'Night School'? And make no mistake, it doesn’t work. That’s because the people he’s stalking are Natalie (Amy Forsyth, “Channel Zero”), Brooke (Reign Edwards, “MacGyver”) and Taylor (Bex Taylor-Klaus, “Scream: The TV Series”), three college students with nondescript boyfriends, who have no other purpose than to wander through Hell Fest, take in the sights, and occasionally get murdered. Taylor-Klaus is the only member of the cast who can muster up any energy, and it’s unfortunate that the movie doesn’t give her — or anyone else — anything interesting to say or do. Indeed, “Hell Fest” rather stubbornly refuses to have any sort of point, even though a myriad of themes try to bubble up to the surface. Taylor is passionate about horror and finds it to be a thrilling aphrodisiac, and she tries to impart a positive attitude about being scared onto Natalie. But Natalie wasn’t that scared in the first place, and she didn’t really have a problem with going to the park, so that falls flat. It’s a film about people who go to an amusement park to play at being scared, and wind up being genuinely frightened for their lives, and it’s not even about fear. Even the film’s most shocking moment, when Natalie witnesses the killer in the midst of his slaytime and encourages him to kill someone, because she thinks it’s just part of the show, goes nowhere. What could have been a creepy exploration of how feeling superior to fictional horror potentially enables real-life horror is dropped in favor of a prolonged, tedious stalking and a contrived final attack. Also Read: Treat: NBC Sets 'Wicked' Halloween Concert With Hosts Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth The killer demonstrates no meaningful connection to his victims, no motive to speak of, and no personality whatsoever. The filmmakers don’t even give him a distinctive look. He makes his first kill, in the prologue, wearing a Satan mask. It’s a rather obvious allegory, but at least it connects to the title, and to the idea that he’s running loose in his own devil’s playground. But for the rest of the film he just toddles around in a nondescript “creepy guy” mask and a hoodie. He’s dressed like someone who thinks they’re too cool for Halloween parties but who showed up anyway, in the quickest disguise they could find. That’s hardly the kind of person who would treat Halloween like their own personal murder bacchanal. It’s almost charming to see a theatrically-released slasher movie that’s this badly written (by six credited writers). Not just the plot; the dialogue is so inane that it almost doubles back and becomes profound. The characters drone on and on about nothing, never saying anything clever or significant. And they drone on so much, on top of each other’s dialogue, that you start to wonder if the filmmakers think they’re doing a Howard Hawks movie. (They’re not.) See Photos: 37 Fall Movies to Obsess Over, From 'Halloween' to 'Mary Poppins Returns' “Hell Fest” is one of those rare motion pictures in which the extras look like they’re probably more interesting than the stars. The park is populated with exciting costumes, impassioned revelers, and professional startlers who clearly have more going on in their lives than the kids we’re following instead. We get it, “Hell Fest.” Natalie likes Gavin. Gavin likes Natalie. You don’t need to spend half an hour gossiping about that. It’s not that interesting. Slasher movies work when they’re about people whose lives are interrupted by a murderer. That’s what makes them scary: the idea that at any time, your normal life could transform into a nightmare. But “Hell Fest” gives us a cast of characters with no outside interests and no personal squabbles. The movie can’t get invested in them, so why should the audience? And why should we care if they live or die when they’ve clearly only been constructed as hollow automata whose sole purpose is to get murdered? “Hell Fest” isn’t about the characters. It isn’t about a theme. It appears to have been made as an elaborate pitch for a pretty cool Halloween-themed amusement park, which has impressive animatronics and nifty-looking mazes. The film is so impressed with its own creations that the running time is dominated with audience surrogates simply walking around the park, enjoying the rides, doing and saying nothing, and not even being threatened by the movie’s villain for at least half of it. But if “Hell Fest” was really staged as an elaborate commercial for this fictional park, it still wouldn’t work. Because in order for the plot to work, and for all these murders to happen, this park has to be absolutely awful. The security guards are ineffectual (when you can find one), the fake props are deadly, and the shaved ice vendor uses an icepick that’s easily stolen and wielded by maniacs. Put a string on that icepick! What if you dropped it? And why don’t you have a proper shaved ice machine?<doc-sep>
Gregory Plotkin’s throwback slasher Hell Fest has a pretty killer premise: A group of college students hit up a Halloween theme park (like Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, just off-brand enough not to get them sued) where they’re pursued by a knife-wielding killer clad in black and sporting a mask that roughly looks like the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead films. There are some occasionally brutal kills — a Test-Your-Strength mallet providing the single best one — and the leads, including Channel Zero’s Amy Forsyth, are all likable enough, though they’re saddled with some occasionally tinny dialogue. It has all the makings of a solid October night at the movies, so why didn’t I like this at all? Well, for starters, I’m always super wary about theme park films — there’s only so much showing people having a such a visceral experience like a roller coaster ride that I can take without losing interest, even if it’s inherently cinematic — and Hell Fest doesn’t really know what to do with its attractions or even the very character of the park itself in a unique or particularly interesting way (not to mention that a solid and scary film could act as its own roller coaster ride without the extras). The latter half of the film devolves into maze after maze where our leads will be caught in, running from the killer, and it’s hard to tell them all apart, especially when they simply become jump-scare bait. It’s aesthetic is pulled straight from the Halloween display at your local Hot Topic, full of generic “horror” bullshit that snuffs out what few moments of light remain, including a fun appearance by Tony Todd. And, perhaps even worse, the park’s staff is only represented by one security guard, so we don’t even get to enjoy the chaos that properly ensues once they discover they have a killer in their midst. That, in fact, is the main problem, one that nearly every modern slasher has suffered from: The faceless killer just doesn’t really work very well in this context, and it feels more like laziness than anything else on the part of its six credited writers and storytellers. I get it: There’s no way you want to compete with the most obvious figures in this genre — Jason Voorhies and Michael Myers for two — but that’s not an excuse for you to wholesale take that imagery without providing the slightest hook. The reasons those two characters work is because, well, they’re characters. They have backstories and motivations, and their sense of presence comes entirely from that — you know why to fear them. Our killer here is a nameless garden-variety psychopath, whose supernatural speed and strength seem out of place in this particular approach. If you’re going to the faceless whodunnit route, your other characters have to pick up the slack, which the film isn’t really equipped to do, so the empty deaths and the anonymous killer make the entire film utterly generic. Watching Hell Fest is like going up a roller coaster, and pausing right before the big drop, only to realize that the ride is stuck and that park staff is walking up the side of the coaster to come bring you back to the start. It’s one lame ride. Featured image by Jackson Lee Davis via CBS Films.