Tonight is Halloween, and at the police station they're currently investigating a double murder from the previous evening when a couple of young men were getting amorous in the back seat of their car; one of them stuck his head out of the open window to better accomodate his pal and all those balloons he had bought, when someone came along and cut his head clean off, then did the same to the other man. There could be a serial killer on the loose who has just claimed his first victims, but for an office worker at the station, Eddie (Dylan Fergus), it just means another low effort task to carry out as he leaflets the area...
Although homosexuality is included in a fair few horror movies, quite often sad to say it was in the form of making the heterosexuals either fear the otherness of them, or have them as victims to be bumped off. Or maybe the comic relief, whatever, the list of shockers aimed more or less at the gay audience was not numbering a tremendous amount, so when Hellbent arrived on the scene it pretty much had an open field to ply its trade in. It did so to mixed reviews, with some of the target audience lamenting that fact that the characters were apparently created to fit certain stereotypes rather than being living, breathing, three-dimensional people.
But when this was a slasher movie they were talking about, you might have thought they were hoping for a little too much from a genre not best known for its carefully crafted dramatis personae. Indeed, screenwriter and director Paul Etheredge was keen to keep it fairly flimsy on this evidence, which was no bad thing because you didn't really want a horror flick weighed down with heavy issues and long stretches of character development, or if you did this was not the movie for you. In spite of a bunch of people getting their heads cut off intermittently throughout there was nothing here too serious, indeed you could describe it as comedic in places, even lighthearted when the violence wasn't occurring.
Our hero, a final boy if you like, is Eddie, who looks like a winner but is harbouring frustration he was not able to be the cop he aspired to be for reasons which make him self-conscious, but are also designed to bring about what they must have been hoping would be an iconic image (well, it was on the poster) when Eddie is attacked later on. On his leafleting trail he notices a strapping young buck (Brian Kirkwood) getting a tattoo, and strikes up an awkward conversation, hoping it might lead somewhere though it doesn't - yet. Retreating, he returns to his apartment to find his horny flatmate Chaz (Andrew Levitas) enjoying a threesome in his van parked in the street (!), but there's no time to hang about as there's a Halloween party to get to this evening.
There's a fairly long stretch between the opening murders and the villain finally setting about killing Eddie's friends, who also include Tobey (Matt Phillips) who spends most of the movie in a spangly purple ballgown and long, blonde wig, and Joey (Hank Harris), the nerdy one who is persuaded into bondage gear for the night, but is really trying to overcome his shyness and get together with some eligible male. Now, the trouble with this is that Etheredge spends that bit too much allowing us to get to know the central quartet which means we don't really want to see them get slaughtered (literally) and would rather watch them have a good time, which is what we do for half the running time anyway. But this has to stick to some conventions, so at the midpoint the bloke dressed as the Devil puts his sickle to bad use, which might be a metaphor for something religious, but more likely the filmmakers weren't thinking that far or they'd have a bloke dressed as some intolerant, Old Testament, fundamentalist God as the killer instead. For such a low budget, Hellbent wasn't that bad at all. Music by Michael G. Shapiro.
