There is a legend of a wedding ring that once belonged to one Josephine, who met a sticky end on her marriage day, although she continued to haunt her jewellery down the decades, causing untold violence on those who tried to use it. The ring has disappeared for a while, until now when it shows up as Lee Parker (James Fisher) is shopping for an engagement gift for his girlfriend Nicole Meadows (Rebecca Herod). He settles on it as the best on offer and the shopkeeper is only too pleased to hand it over, little knowing of the mayhem it will cause...
Hellbride was a modest low budget horror movie from British auteur Pat Higgins, on direction and screenwriting duties, that bravely wrestled with the drawbacks of its style, namely that there probably wasn't enough money to successfully pull off the tricks that were really necessary to have it be a convincing alternative to the higher budgeted efforts that it attempted to jostle for position with. For a start, the photography wasn't even camcorder level, and resembled something you would find on YouTube, although in other areas there was no denying the ambition.
To make up for the actual horror sequences being few and far between, there are substitions in the form of dialogue, which leaned too heavily on the laddish efforts of far too many British gangster movies: lots of swearing, supposedly daring humour, and the inclusion of a subplot involving murder. The victim is a son of a dodgy asscociate Mr Meadows (James Kavaz), who he shoots when the son threatens to kill off Nicole in return for non-payment of debts, but is included to provide a shootout for the final act, which perversely takes place offscreen as the other characters deal with the meddling Josephine.
This doesn't really hang together too well, as it comes across as bits and pieces of other scripts edited together, but there are compensations for followers of the low budget aesthetic. Although the harsher humour is not all that funny, the sillier bits are more likely to raise a laugh, and the two boiler-suited security guards Lee encounters deserved further screen time as this scene hits the right mark you imagine Higgins was aiming for. Elsewhere, he doesn't make up his mind whether this is serious or not, with some fair supernatural stretches alternating with comedy routines that tend to fall flat. Still, Higgins' perseverance was to be admired, as at least he secured distribution for his film where many others failed, which may tell you something about the quality of the competition, or otherwise the good fortune of the director. Music by Rich Miller and Phil Sheldon.
