The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Hell Hole (2024)
★★★
USA. 2024.
Crew
Directors – John Adams & Toby Poser, Screenplay – John Adams, Lulu Adams & Toby Poser, Producers – Milos Bukelic, Matt Manjourides & Justin Martell, Photography – Sean Dahlberg, Music – John Adams, Visual Effects/Stop-Motion Animation – Trey Lindsay, Special Effects Supervisors – Danilo Dudic & Zarko Dudic, Creature Effects – Masters FX, Inc., Makeup Effects – Kristina Miljacki & Veroljub Naumovic, Production Design – Vladimir Vicentic. Production Company – Not the Funeral Home.
Cast
Toby Poser (Emily), John Adams (John), Max Portman (Teddy), Olivera Perunicic (Sofia), Aleksandar Trmcic (Dr. Nikola Klesic), Marko Filipovic (French Soldier), Petar Arsic (Danko), Bruno Veljanovski (Christian), Janko Radisic (Bosko), Marko Vuckovic (Luka), Joana Knezevic (Mickey), Boris Lukman (Filip), Ivan Dordevic (Ivan), Fedor Dorovic (Petar), Anders Hove (French Captain)
Plot
Husband and wife John and Emily are in Serbia overseeing the survey for a fracking site. In the course of digging a hole to bury waste, the local workers uncover the body of a Napoleonic soldier from the year 1814. They are shocked to find he is still alive. Upon coming around, the soldier begs them to kill him. They are also frightened at seeing tentacles slithering under the soldier’s skin. However, as John goes to feed the man, the creature inside emerges and takes over John’s body. The scientists among the group realise that they are dealing with a parasitic organism that uses the human body to host.
The Adams Family consist of husband John Adams, wife Toby Poser and their daughters Lulu and Zelda who between them direct, write, produce, photograph, create the music for and star in their own films. They have made Rumblestrips (2013), Knuckle Jack (2014), The Shoot (2014) and Halfway to Zen (2016), all of which are non-genre dramas. By the end of the 2010s and into the 2020s, the Adams’s discovered the horror genre and made the quite a unique and impressive body of films with The Deeper You Dig (2019), Hellbender (2021) and Where the Devil Roams (2023).
Hell Hole marks a change in the way that The Adams Family make their films. They still use the Adams Family banner but this is a John and Toby film. Absent is daughter Zelda Adams, a co-director, co-writer and actor on their previous horror films (from what I can glean via the web she appears to have gone off to attend university), although the other daughter Lulu does receive co-credit for the screenplay and, while she is appeared in some of their other films, does not do so here. It is not known the reason for their absence but you get the impression that the character of Teddy, the nephew of Emily and John, and the only other American in the show, may have originally been written as a part for one of the daughters.
Furthermore, while the Adams’s other horror films, were essentially homemade movies shot with what they had to hand, Hell Hole expands the scope considerably and leaves their home turf of New York state to shoot in Serbia. While their other films seem self-financed, this comes with the backing of a company called Not the Funeral Home, which has been behind a number of other B-budget horror films. The producers and some of the behind the camera roles like cinematography have been handed over to others outside the family.
The expanded budget has also allowed the Adams Family to make quite a different horror film. Their previous films have been rooted in rural Americana – backwoods witchcraft, deviltry, séances and eerie manifestations of the supernatural – whereas Hell Hole is an out-and-out Monster Movie and one that doesn’t hold back when it comes to splatter effects. The Adams’s have even gone so far to employ a regular Hollywood creature effects studio with Masters FX, while there is a very brief appearance from Danish actor Anders Hove, best known as a vampire in Subspecies (1991) and sequels, right at the start of the film.
(l to r) Max Portman, Toby Poser, Olivera Perunicic and Aleksandar Trmcic view splattered human remainsJohn Adams is taken over by the parasite
Hell Hole feels like the Adams’s revisiting one of the copies of Alien (1979) that were made during the 1980s/90s. There were a host of these featuring assorted H.R. Giger-alike nasties on the run. This feels as though they have taken the basics of the Alien copy and reimagined them, focusing on the Parasite aspect. The script comes with a witty and clever series of explanations for the monster where the Adams’s give the impression that they are the only filmmakers in the post-Alien era to go away and read up on the behaviour of other animals species and incorporate these into the design of the creature. It is something that elevates Hell Hole well above the rest of the fray.
It is a smart and intelligent script. I loved the scene where John tries to explain what is happening to him to Bruno Veljanovski, who takes little of its seriously – I completely cracked up at John’s explanation “As I strangled him” which gets Bruno’s casual riposte “As you do with the French” – interspersed with scenes where the others stand around tossing out wild theories about cephalopods and the like.
The Serbian locations offer up a magnificent looking old abandoned Soviet factory where the entire film takes place. The Adams’s have the biggest cast that they have had in any of their films, all being Serbian locals. All give good performances with Aleksandar Trmcic, as a modern equivalent of Robert Conrthwaite in The Thing from Another World (1951), and Olivera Perunicic being standout. John and Toby again give solid performances, even if the way they write their characters often push them into some interestingly morally ambiguous places.
Hell Hole should not be confused with several other films with the same title including the Filipino exploitation film Hell Hole (1978), Hellhole (1985) about a woman imprisoned in a mental asylum, Hellhole Woman (aka Sadomania) (1981), a Women in Prison film from prolific exploitation director Jess Franco, and the Polish-made deviltry film Hellhole (2022).
