Hellions
Canada 2015
Written by Pascal Trottier
Directed by Bruce McDonald
Watched on 25.09.2015

During the movie, my predominant thought was “I guess someone discovered digital color grading!”. After the movie, my first thought was: “What a piece of crap.” Any more questions? Then read on…

————— SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD —————

While I can’t even really bring my /slash 2015-mantra “It started off strong”, the first couple of minutes nevertheless were ok. The setup was nice, I liked the Halloween-setting, so overall, while I wouldn’t have called it promising, it was at least a decent start. And then came the bloodmoon, and everything was tinted in this strange pink light, and for 2-3 minutes or so it looked really nice, but then it really started to get old and boring. Every shot looked pretty much the same, and far too soon, it wasn’t interesting any more, but instead got pretty annoying. Ultimately, though, that’s the least of its problems – and that’s saying something. The plot also was a little too bonkers for me. Dora finds out that she’s pregnant, she’s not really prepared to be a mum and thus is not sure if she wants to keep the child, and as soon as she’s home these demonic children start to show up and harass her (why, BTW?), and then we find out that her child is the offspring of the devil, and it grows really fast, and she’s actually going to give birth to it in this night, and I was like… whaaaaat? Seriously? But ok, I mean, its horror, and not every horror flick has to be down-to-earth and about a worldly, mundane threat, so ok. If I can accept zombies, vampires and japanese ghost girls, then I can also deal with an extremely accelerated pregnancy. What I cannot deal with, however, is that said pregnancy seemingly also ate away all of Dora’s brain cells.

Seriously, I thought that Evan’s friend in “Knock Knock” already acted stupid beyond belief, but Dora and her partner in crime Corman (played by Robert Patrick) – really took the cake. So, lemme see. She finds out that salt hurts them. What does she do? Well, obviously, she leaves it behind in the kitchen and instead runs out of the house, where she doesn’t even get into the car to drive away, but instead runs and hides in the shed. What else was she supposed to do? Equally great: Corman tells her “We have to get you out of here”, and then he hears something in the attic, and instead of doing exactly as he said five seconds earlier and grab her and get the fuck outta there, he of course enters the attic to see what’s going on there. Later on, Dora finally recalls that salt seemed to hurt them, so she starts filling the shotgun-shells with salt. As much as I’d love to give her points for effort, I kept asking myself why she even bothers, and doesn’t just simply throw the salt at them. The single worst fucking moment of the movie, however, where I almost couldn’t take it anymore, was when she took the shotgun, ran outside the house, and instead of staying somewhere where she can see them approaching, she freely, inexplicably and causelessly walks through the sheets that hang outside to dry, just so that Bruce McDonald could get a “cool”, “tense” shot of her walking between the sheets while the demonic children surround her. Gimme a fucking break! Later on, there also were two dream sequences that came totally out of the blue and which felt incredibly forced, which had the additional unfavorable effect that afterwards I wasn’t sure anymore what was “real” and what illusion and/or a dream. But to be honest, at that point I didn’t care anymore about what happened anyway. Add to that the fact that this was one more movie where I was able to predict every fucking cheap jump scare, that I found it to be incredibly dull and devoid of any tension, as well as the fact that it began with a scene from the end (a stylistic device that, due to its overuse since the noughties, I came to hate) and you’ve got a total stinker of a movie on your hands. An unwanted pregnancy can’t be even half as unpleasant as this.
2/10

IMDB