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Hellbender
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| Year: |
2021
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Director: |
John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
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| Stars: |
Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams, John Adams, Rinzin Thonden, Khenzom, Shawn Wilson, Judy Rosen, Ron Figueroa, Tess McKeegan, John Adams Sr, Tannis Kowalchuk, Jessica Beveridge
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| Genre: |
Horror, Weirdo |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Some years ago, a witch was caught in this New England region, and sentenced to be hanged before she did any more damage. But as the execution took place, the assembled women were alarmed to see that once the body, strung from a tree, stopped twitching, it resumed its animation and though their leader produced a gun and fired into the witch’s head, it was not enough to prevent her bursting into flames and escaping straight up into the sky in a fireball. Now, the witch's descendants are a mother (Toby Poser) and daughter, Izzy (Zelda Adams), who live in isolation out in the forest, seeing nobody...
The Adams Family (not to be confused with Charles Addams' Family, though the reference is a conscious one, it appears) are a clan of Americans who have been creating tiny budget efforts in the horror genre ever since daughters Zelda and Lulu were kids, plugging away at the genre in their own determinedly idiosyncratic manner. The fruits of their labours divide audiences, but there is little doubt these are the films they want to make, and their home made, artisan qualities are difficult to truly hold a grudge against, as you are pleased someone out there is trying something original in their field of expertise.
Indeed, though director John Adams - the patriarch - obviously has the skills, as do his co-directors Poser (his wife) and Zelda, there was a curious analogy to be made with outsider art here, as Hellbender in particular came across as a horror flick created by cult band The Shaggs, that group of nineteen-sixties sisters who were corralled by their father to make music, despite having no idea of what music should sound like. Imagine if The Shaggs were just the drummer, mom was on guitar, and dad was making a film about them where they had gone off their rockers and turned to the occult, and you would have an idea of this.
It had that not quite there, naïve but sinister, tone of the best outsider endeavours, and though the Adamses managed to secure a proper distribution deal and festival plays for Hellbender, and indeed were happy to do publicity, there was plenty that fed in from their unconventional approach to fashion a work that contained that indefinable otherness. It was the movie's real strength, that sense of intruding on an insular unit that had manufactured its own rules anybody else would fail to understand, that kept you watching even as the plot began to fall away in the second half (though it was a fairly brief experience, not hitting the ninety-minute mark). Much of that was thanks to its vision that was every bit its own.
Indeed, it was a rare twenty-first century horror movie where you could genuinely say you had no idea where it was headed from minute to minute. It slotted neatly enough into the folk horror genre, and saw the close bond between mother and daughter emboldened by various spells and remedies made from the plants, and later, animals, of the woodlands. But then again, it was its own entity as well, and the theme of a parent fearing their child breaking away from them as they mature was warped into the fear of your offspring's adulthood should they become more powerful than you. That said, what happens in that scenario in reality is unlikely to play out in the same way as we see it here, a hallucinatory series of apparently reasonable conversations against a backdrop of witchcraft and insanity. No, it wasn't perfect, it was rather shapeless in retrospect, but you won't see many of its bigger budget contemporaries taking such chances. John Adams did the music, too.
[Hellbender - A Shudder Original
New Film Premieres 24th February 2022.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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