'Hell Hole' Digs Up a Timely Creature Feature that Drags Its Tentacles [Fantasia Film Festival 2024 Review]

​As the original tagline for John Carpenter’s The Thing declared back in the 80s, man is the warmest place to hide. With their latest, Hell Hole—which just premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival—The Adams Family filmmaking trio of John Adams, Toby Poser and Lulu Adams have delivered a monster movie that takes those words to a different level. Playing like The Thing meets The Hidden, the Adams’ body hopping creature feature lays a timely thematic skin over a clever concept, albeit one that drags its tentacles and one-note characters to an underwhelming finish.
 
Beginning in 1814, Serbia, we meet a platoon of Napoleonic soldiers who encounter a nasty little fiend. Flash forward to the present, where Emily (Toby Poser) and John (John Adams) are preparing a fracking site with their team. While drilling, they discover a goopy sac containing one of those French soldiers from over two-hundred years ago, still miraculously alive and looking worse for the wear. It’s only a matter of time before the crew learns that the soldier houses a parasite that moves from body to body, leaving each host in a mess of pieces. Split on whether to preserve the creature or kill it, the crew finds themselves in a dilemma that could cost them their lives.
 
At first glance, Hell Hole packs in all of the trademarks fans have come to associate with The Adams Family. A punk rock score from John Adams. Featured roles for both Toby and John. That grey, dreary color palette that hangs over their work like a gothic cloud. Heaps of gore. Yet there are a couple key elements of the filmmakers missing from this outing, starting with the characters. Generally, the Adams excel at creating complex humans with an air of mystery to them. Here, the cast is all relatively singular in their personalities and what drives their motivations. Nikola (Aleksandar Trmčić), for example, does his best Ash from Alien, taking on the role of a scientist who admires the monster terrorizing the crew and overplays it to a silly degree. No one manages to stand out in a large cast of uninteresting people hindered by unnatural dialogue. As a result, much of the tension and horror that tends to come with these sorts of films withers on the vine.

Turn on any Adams family film and you’ll likely be drawn to the trio’s penchant for a music video style, often portraying strange imagery that haunts you long after the credits roll. Not the case with Hell Hole. While the Adams’ attempt to incorporate their unique stylings here and there, they struggle to do so in a way that fits, often making the editing feel clunky and without rhythm. Aerial shots look down over vehicles and the like, image throbbing to the sound of guitar riffs, all of it failing to illicit the same hypnotic sensation we’re used to seeing in their previous films such as Where the Devil Roams or Hellbender. It’s as if they’ve tried to cram their stylings into a rather by the numbers monster movie, clashing instead of fitting nicely together like bloody puzzle pieces. Between scenes that go on longer than they should, wobbly editing and an utter void of atmospherics needed to build the suspense, Hell Hole suffers from a pit of pacing issues it can’t crawl out of. Ninety minutes ends up feeling like two hours.
 
The saving grace for Hell Hole comes in the form of the rubbery creature designed by MastersFX, Inc. and a clever concept to go with it. Despite some rather poor CG, the filmmakers incorporate their practical creature—and gruesome gore—wherever possible. Bodies explode into glorious bursts of blood. The Lovecraftian thing crawls into horrified mouths. Tentacles wriggle out of nostrils and assholes (score one for any of you tentacle porn enthusiasts). Yet most intriguing is the trio’s take on body hopping monsters. Where the creatures of The Thing, The Hidden, Night of the Creeps, you name it, are often insidious in nature, Hell Hole applies a bit more empathy to its tentacled parasite. Most of the killing results in the thing being scared out of its host. Characters debate whether or not to kill it. And most curious, it is only concerned with occupying the bodies of men. Wriggling all throughout are themes of bodily autonomy and abortion, observing the hideous thing and asking if it deserves life more than its potential host. This isn’t the first time men have been forced to carry any sort of embryo in horror—hello, Alien—but few films have placed the responsibility primarily on men. Hell Hole forces a male audience to consider the terror of carrying something inside them they don’t want there. Considering the state of things, this is a body hopping creature feature for our time.
 
Despite pacing issues, a severe lack of tension or scares and characters stiffer than your average slug-brained corpse, Hell Hole offers up just enough fun to make for a worthwhile watch. From exploding bodies to a rubbery monster with tentacles protruding from unpleasant places, the Adams inject the right amount of humor into this relevant conversation on bodily autonomy that just barely sets it far enough apart from other entries in the sub-genre to stand on its own. I don’t expect this will become a new favorite with fans of the filmmakers, but for anyone wanting The Thing by way of the Adams family, Hell Hole delivers all the tentacled nastiness you could ask for.

Hell Hole arrives on Shudder on August 23rd. 

By Matt Konopka