That title pretty much sums it up. This write up is the result of me having to sit through two crappy films in one afternoon. So put your big girl panties on and let’s get through it.
Hellinger (1997)
We begin this movie with a flashback to 20 years earlier. Eight-year old Melissa’s dad is being a total dick to her because his wife, her mom, left him. Apparently the little tyke is afraid of the dark and of something called Hellinger, a mythical demon of sorts that she fears will come take her away to Hell. So naturally the dad taunts her because dick and by doing so, incurs the wrath of Hellinger - who’s real, by the way - who pops in just long enough to pluck out daddy’s eyes and deliver a promise to return.
He doesn’t give us a timetable or a reason WHY so Melissa is left frantic, fearful, and fucked in the head.
Now it’s present day and Melissa is in therapy (shocking). Her therapist doesn’t believe her story about Hellinger, even though she saw him the other night! The power went out in her apartment and Hellinger showed up, tore some skin off his face then ate it. He blathered on about how much he missed her. Is he hitting on her or something? I guess yelling at a woman about how much you love her eyes and wanting to rip them from her skull is considered foreplay in the demon world…
Elsewhere in the city, the cops are presented with a couple of gutted and eyeless bodies. The main detective hires Ken, some ginger with a Yakuza complex, who just happens to be Melissa’s cousin, and he stumbles upon this Hellinger story. Apparently Hellinger was a priest back in the 50s who was murdered during astral projection. And when Melissa was a girl she basically called on him to help her when her dad was being a dick bag.
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| Come with me if you want to die of boredom. |
So it turns out that Hellinger has pretty much been PROTECTING Melissa her all along - from some very bad elements in her life - and that’s why he loves her or some shit like that. So she punches a hole in his face.
FIN
Wow. Just...wow. I did leave out some details here because I wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun for you. And by fun I mean boredom that makes you wish you had some gut-wrenching parasite just so you could CARE about something.
The acting. Oh, dear lord it’s awful but I was expecting that. It’s the norm in this kind of flick. Though I have to say the actress playing adult Melissa wasn’t all that bad. Not great but compared to everyone else she was Laurence Olivier.
The music is terrible. It’s either similar to that minimalist shit by Phillip Glass or cheesy rock music. Never really fit the film but it was probably free or cheap. The sound in general is awful. The dialogue is very muffled most of the time if not completely inaudible, like in the scene where Ken talks to some random hookers and their pimp outside. All you hear is street noise. When you can decipher the words it sounds completely forced and unnatural.
I don’t really understand what was going on with Hellinger. Why was he yelling all the time? And if he wasn’t yelling he sounded like he might be choking on his own spit or a fur ball. The look of the character is cenobite rip-off. There’s even a dream scene where he’s beckoning to Melissa and there are chains hanging down and swinging around him. When he’s not spouting love sonnets to Melissa he’s philosophizing about life and shit. It’s like Pinhead and Dr. Phil made a baby in Hell.
There is one very brutal rape/murder scene that made me cringe. It seemed added in either as filler or as “oh shit we forgot to expand on this character to explain why Hellinger does what he does later” so they needed to make it memorable. That it was, folks. That it was. And not in a good way. It was complete overkill (no pun intended) and though it might have been necessary to expand part of the plot, it could have been handled better.
*pours herself a nice glass of Rum Chata to ease the pain of having to do this again so soon*
Holy Terror (2002)
The second feature can be summed up like so: A nun, who was possessed by the Devil in life, must now do Satan’s bidding in death. I only know this because of the blurb on the back of the DVD. Nowhere in the movie is it ever really explained, though I suppose some of the silent movie overacting in the opening scene does give us a bit of an idea.
Kane, a milquetoast real estate agent, is somehow in the employ of the evil nun. He rents a particular house to young couples who are eventually killed by the nun. It’s like he’s setting up sacrifices for her or something. The newest couple, Julie and David, move in and right away weird shit begins to happen. The evil nun is invading their dreams. But what does that matter? We’re young and horny and have a pool!
They eventually have a house warming party and invite over four friends. Kane shows up at one point to drop off papers so he might as well join in. Needless to say (oh but I will) one by one they are picked off by the evil nun in her never ending quest as Satan’s bitch.
Oy vey.
Again, this is just terrible. Luckily it’s only an hour long so my suffering was limited. Pretty much like everything in the flick.
The acting is sooooo lackluster. Again, quelle surprise! However, I got a good laugh when I recognized the actress who plays Julie. She was in a Brain Damage film called Hell’s Highway - another low budget film but it was much more entertaining than this. She’s also been in a bunch of soft core porn. Yeah, I recognized her from that stuff, too.
The music is that angry speed metal crap or styled like shitty 80s pop music. The special effects (basically the nun using some kind of demon psychokinesis on Kane when he gets all uppity) look very vintage arcade video game-esque, aka laaaaaaaame. Maybe if I threw a bunch of quarters at my TV it would have been better.
The whole movie felt trite and uninspired. Many of the scenes felt like filler and most of the characters were just plain stupid and I didn’t even care when they died.
Nothing at all redeeming about either of these films.
0 Hatchets (out of 5)
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