Hell Hole premieres on Shudder August 23. This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.
The Adams Family doesn’t need anyone to validate their horror credentials. But perhaps they’d excuse a compliment: It says a lot that the moment the filmmaking clan – consisting of spouses Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams – were given a (slightly) larger budget to play with, they decided to spend it on gore. The vehicle for said effects, Hell Hole, is a transitional film, a blending of styles and modes of working that feels less visionary than their more homebound features. But the complex and unconventional characters that brought them into the spotlight in the first place give Hell Hole more personality than your average creature feature.
Up to this point, Poser and the Adamses have made films using a unique, intuitive method developed on DIY projects like 2019’s The Deeper You Dig! and their breakout film, 2021’s Hellbender. The latter got them hooked up with Shudder, which got them an appearance on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, which led to Poser and John Adams heading to Serbia to make Hell Hole, their first movie with a professional crew, artificial lighting, and a conventional screenplay. The results of that journey are sometimes uneven, but never boring.
Older sister Lulu co-wrote the screenplay – Zelda, who co-starred in Hellbender, is away at college – but Poser and John are the only members of the family to appear in Hell Hole. The way they incorporate themselves into the story is clever: playing obnoxious Americans establishing a fracking site in Serbia, they create a funhouse-mirror reflection of the real-life circumstances of Hell Hole’s production. This makes any awkwardness between the foreign stars, the local extras, and the Serbian actors playing the scientists monitoring the site’s environmental impact into an asset, rather than a liability.
Poser’s character, Emily, is a “pot-smoking hippie” who went from saving the earth to stripping and polluting it after the failure of her solar-energy business. She’s a layered character – more layered than she needs to be for a film of this type, frankly. But Hell Hole is better for it, because Poser’s credibility as an authority figure who’s snippy and sarcastic but warm underneath – ”maternal” is the best word for her energy, though Emily is childfree by choice – helps anchor the proceedings. And thank goodness, because this movie needs something to ground it.
The monster-movie element here is in the tradition of Alien and The Thing, focusing on a group of blue-collar workers in an isolated location who get blindsided by an ultra-aggressive creature. Gross shit ensues, as it should, crafted with a combination of digital VFX and practical gore from A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and Slither effects artist Todd Masters. The drills pull bloody chunks of stinking, oily meat to the surface. Characters explode like overripe tomatoes in a blender. And the critter itself, when we do see it, is equal parts H.R. Giger and Basket Case. But the weirdest thing that happens in Hell Hole is when the crew digs up a soldier from Napoleon’s army encased in a blue membrane, where he’s survived without food or water for more than 200 years.
Without giving away too much, he’s gestating. It’s a cheeky feminist spin on the malignant-parasite concept, with mixed results: Again, the thematic complication is welcome, but the ways in which this idea is put into practice are quite scatalogical. Scenes of characters being, er, colonized by the creature combine with John Adams’ headbanging score and the desaturated digital cinematography to give Hell Hole the vibe of a ’00s heavy metal video – a valid aesthetic choice, but one that doesn’t necessarily vibe with the complex dialogue and mature characterizations. As a result, the transitions between scenes – and tones – can be bumpy.
Hell Hole has more personality than your average creature feature.
Again, Poser and Adams are trying something new here. Their next project will take them back to their regular stomping grounds in the Catskills; it’s unclear at the moment if they’ll be returning to Serbia to make any more movies. Hell Hole is an experiment, highlighting the ways that Adams Family productions are different from other low-budget horror movies. And talented filmmakers like these should be allowed to experiment. If nothing else, the results will always be interesting.
