This week, I subjected myself to torture! And no, I’m not talking about listening to Eminem’s new album, I’m talking about watching “Hell Fest.” Holy crap this movie sucked! The movie is about a bunch of teenagers/college students who go to a horror-themed night at an amusement park on Halloween, and subsequently, most of them get killed. You’ve seen this plot before in literally every slasher movie ever made. The movie centers on a college student named Natalie who acts like the “I’m too cool to be at a Halloween-themed night” kind of girl. She, along with literally every other character in this movie, was not relatable at all and genuinely annoying. I was actually cheering for the killer to kill her.
As with most horror/slasher movies these days, this movie relied way too much on jump scares. Even with my dislike of jump scares, in most horror movies that contain jump scares, I can usually be scared by at least one jump scare. However, in this “film,” there was NOT A SINGLE jump scare that shocked me. They weren’t even predictable, they were just lame and completely unexciting.
I will touch on the one positive aspect of “Hell Fest.” There is a scene in which one character is killed, and a knife is slowly lowered into his eye. This scene was actually pretty gruesome and disturbing! I really think that this scene deserves some spotlight in this terrible movie because it was what I wanted to see in this movie: gruesome movie deaths. While I’m sure the director put almost no effort into this scene, it was pretty convincing and gross. That being said, I was cheering for the killer in this movie. The characters were incredibly unlikeable and had no development at all. There was one character in particular who I believe to be perhaps the most unlikeable and despicable character ever put onto a film screen. The character’s name is simply “Taylor”. She deserved to die in a movie more than any other movie character that I have ever witnessed. It would actually be impossible for me to explain how unlikeable and annoying she is in the span of this article. In fact, and this is not a joke, when she was killed, all four people in the theater with me cheered!
I’m going to go back to when I said that you have seen everything in this movie before in literally every slasher movie ever made. That may be the most accurate thing that I have ever written in a review. This movie is trying to be “Scream,” “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th” all at the same time. The characters are one dimensional and annoying, the death scenes were cliché and unexciting. It almost felt like it was supposed to be a parody of horror movies. This is both a joke, but at the same time it wasn’t. It actually felt like I was kind of watching a film in the “Scary Movie” franchise. This movie actually works as a comedy. It can serve both as a parody of horror movies and a movie that should be featured on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
If you actually want to see this movie, go to a late showing to make sure that there’s no one else in the theater, bring a friend with you, and make snarky remarks at this stab-in-the-eye of a “film”. In conclusion, walk, no, don’t run away from theaters showing this “film”. You’re just going to be wasting your money and your time. 0.5/5