Delayed Reaction: Hell Fest

Premise: A scary amusement park becomes the hunting ground for an actual masked killer.

 

You can get a lot of mileage out of "artificial scary thing becomes real scary thing" as a horror premise. It's a very easy writing shortcut. If the characters explicitly think it's all fake, then the screenwriter is allowed to have them all make terrible decisions. No need to write smart characters. It's even some easy meta commentary: People watch this movie because they like to be scared, and the characters in the movie participate in this scary activity because they like to be scared.

 

In other words, Hell Fest gets a B- right out the gate. It hits a lot of good slasher movie beats. It's surprisingly patient getting to the actual killings, yet it effectively ramps up the tension throughout. The cast of young people are all pretty good. I doubt any of the actors are who the screenwriters imagined when they wrote it, but they all fit the types pretty well. Bonus points too assembling a group that look like young people of 2018 and not decades-old archetypes. The deaths are pretty creative. The Hell Fest park looks pretty authentic. This hit the exact notes it had to.

 

I was perturbed by the ending and what it suggested. It follows the killer home where it reveals that he's a normal family man. It still conceals his face. Any time a horror movie explicitly keeps its antagonist alive like this, that means they're positioning themselves for a sequel. That was my problem with the movie. It felt like it pulled a lot of punches. I always hope with a horror movie that I'm getting the filmmakers' complete enthusiasm. I want to believe they fit every idea they could in there and will go even bigger if they can make another. Instead, this just gave us a taste and hoped we'd want to come back for more. Look, I'm all for more horror movies knowing their mythology going in. It's painful seeing them retroactively figuring it out with sequels like the Paranormal Activity movies, but Hell Fest isn't the auteurist effort that should be calling its shot like that.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend