HELL FEST (2018)

It would seem that the runaway success of Halloween has made slasher flicks en vogue once more - and one of the very first to take advantage of that resurgence is Gregory Plotkin’s Hell Fest - even if it is hitting our screens at least two weeks too late.

It’s a simple tale of a brutal psychopath who offs teens at a travelling Halloween attraction, using the ghoulish decor and screams of fright to hide his own monstrous acts. It’s a nice premise and one rife with potential and interesting possibilities. Sadly Hell Fest ignores all of those and sticks resolutely to the least inspired path. It gets from A to B (albeit with some nice visuals along the way) then gets out of there.

That’s not to say Hell Fest is a bad movie - it really isn’t. There is plenty of fun to be had here.

The cast is great - especially our lead trio of ladies: Amy Forsyth, Reign Edwards, and Bex-Taylor Klaus, while stuntman Stephen Conroy brings an imposing physicality to his silent role as the very intimidating villain, The Other.

The sets and design are all very interesting to the eye, using the Haunt attraction location for a couple of very good set pieces. The Other’s mask is also pretty unnerving, resembling a badly burned version of Rob Zombie’s dirty roughed-up Michael Myers mask.

Another strength for a lot of horror fans will be the surprising level of brutality and gore - we get some very messy kill scenes along the way, all of which are achieved with good old fashioned practical effects.


Of course, anybody familiar with fright attractions will pick holes in some quite glaring inaccuracies in the way the mazes are depicted here, but overall the feel of these sorts of events is well represented on screen.

As I said, Hell Fest is not a bad film - there’s just nothing here to distinguish it from the scores of other slasher films dumped direct to DVD every other week. Annoyingly, the potential was there for the film to stand out, especially in a few scenes that, with a little more craft, could have been nail-bitingly suspenseful and genuinely frightening. Sadly, that same workmanlike approach to storytelling slips in here too. It's just another case of the wasted potential in Hell Fest.

Hopefully, this shift to bringing crowd-pleasing horror back to wider release will lead to the discovery of the next big horror smash - alas, I don’t think the very slick, fun, but ultimately unfulfilling Hell Fest is that film.

Hell Fest is in cinemas from 16th November by Vertigo Releasing.