‘Hell Hole’ review: Body horror at its absolute silliest
If the trailer — or, indeed, the title — had left you in any doubt about the type of movie Hell Hole might be, then the film’s opening sequence quickly dispels any uncertainty.
With a caption placing the action in 1814 Serbia, we see two of Napoleon’s troops stalking through a misty forest. They’re given a horse by a strange woman which they take back to camp to eat, but — surprise! — an octopus-like creature bursts out at the last second and starts running rampant through their camp while heavy guitar kicks in.
It’s all very silly, gory, and tongue-in-cheek from horror household and filmmakers the Adams family (Hellbender, The Deeper You Dig) — and it sets us up perfectly for what’s to come.
What’s Hell Hole About?
The bulk of the story takes place at a present-day Serbian fracking site, where a small team of workers — plus a couple of scientists — are trapped due to some nearby flooding. They start digging, discover a still-alive man preserved underground in some kind of subterranean slimy substance. Then the hell hinted at in the movie’s title quickly breaks loose.
Yep, this is a subgenre of horror you’re familiar with. Like Alien and The Thing, Hell Hole gets its tension from trapping a core group of characters and watching them get picked off — or pick each other off — one by one. Unlike Ridley Scott and John Carpenter’s chilling classics, though, there’s a wriggling tentacle of comedy twining through Hell Hole‘s horror. The gore, and the monster, have a silly B movie feel. The question is, does it work?
Hell Hole is not to be taken too seriously.
Hell Hole is the kind of horror movie that’d be easy to enjoy on a Saturday night with friends. As they perfected in 2021’s Hellbender, horror stalwarts the Adams family have instilled the film with a decent amount of tension — not enough to make it genuinely terrifying, but enough for plenty of pantomime it’s-behind-you suspense. The comedy isn’t exactly laugh-out-loud, either, but the film is silly enough to prompt plenty of grins, groans, and grimaces.
The characters, too, are comfortingly familiar. There’s the inevitable tension between the oil drillers and the scientists, the star-crossed lovers romance between driller’s son Teddy (Maximum Portman) and environmental intern Sofija (Olivera Perunicic), and the inevitable rebellion from the workers when their colleagues start getting picked off.
The dialogue is solid, as are the performances. The directing delights in, and makes the most of, explosive body horror affects.
Hell Hole isn’t aiming for IMDB top 100 status. But if you’re looking for something light-hearted and fun that the Adamses clearly had fun making, then you could do worse.
How to watch: Hell Hole is streaming on Shudder from Aug. 23.
