There’s always something extremely pleasing in sitting back and watching an 80s slasher movie whether it's 'Halloween', 'Tourist Trap', 'Boogeyman', or 'Friday the 13th'. What makes those films good, at least to me, are the imaginative deaths, a good dose of eye candy, the tension, and the atmosphere. They follow a specific horror formula and it provides you with a highly entertaining film. It may not be a good film, but at least it’s entertaining. That’s not the case for ‘Hell Fest’ because it is neither entertaining nor a good film.
It’s Halloween and six teens decide to go to Hell Fest, which is a traveling Halloween carnival. There’s a wide variety of horror based games, rides, mazes, and performances. So it’s basically a traveling Universal Horror Nights. However a masked man who is using Hell Fest to his advantage stalks the group and takes them out one by one. It’s a simple plot for a simple movie.
How can a film that turns Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights into a slaughterhouse end up so very boring? It clocks in at 89 minutes, but it feels like I’m watching the Titanic film back to back. I kept looking at my watch only to realize that just twenty minutes had passed. It was a great idea for an entertaining film, but it just kept dragging on.
Out of the group of friends, I only liked two of them. The rest I found to be the generic bland characters that typically only have small parts in films or in television shows. They have no chemistry with one another. So it’s hard to believe that they’re actually friends. Then watching them do “elaborate” mazes should never be that dull. There was a good kill or two, but the rest were rather repetitive seen it before types of kills. The production design is nice, but not even that can save it from the disappointing script.
The most disappointing and unforgivable thing about this film was how they used Tony Todd’s character. Well underused is more like it. Tony Todd was the whole reason why I went to see the film in the first place. He was barely in the film for even a minute and it pissed me off beyond belief. You can’t have a horror film and underuse Tony Todd. He’s one of the kings of horror in the film industry. Candyman is my favorite horror film of all time.
The film was predictable. The characters were unlikable. What was the deal with the killer? I don’t know. No backstory. See the film was not following the horror formula. Hey at least the production design and visuals of the park were nice. Not enough to save the film though. It was a puny dull little slasher film with no substance or entertainment factor. This film should be a lesson to all horror films: DON’T UNDERUSE TONY TODD. Skip it and watch Haunt instead or if you need a Tony Todd fix watch Candyman and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.
2 out of 5
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