The third in a series of reviews of films shown at this year’s Fantasia international film festival in Montreal.

The cast and crew of a sleazy investigative reporting show are making their way toward their next victim when a truck t-bones their van. When the group steps out of the van, they discover that they may in fact have been killed and sent to Hell, and it will take everything they’ve got to travel the world of the damned and get back to the land of the living.

Hell plays out like a fundamentalist horror show, warning the viewer as to what awaits them on the other side and scaring them into changing their ways before it’s too late. At first the characters’ journey toward the pit doesn’t seem particularly brutal. In fact, it’s a little cheesy, like a Barry Prima version of purgatory. The guards are made up like warriors from Conan The Barbarian, and they start chucking fireballs when the recently damned get out of line. Them, just when you think that this is a piss take version of the afterlife, the detainees are carted into a dusty, blood-encrusted enclosure filled with all manner of primitive torture devices and half-naked souls writhing. When one of the main characters begins her punishment and calls out for her mother, her voice is joined by a chorus of people screaming for the same distant comfort.

Even the relatively innocent aren’t spared. Perhaps the most novel twist in the film, the guardians in this version of Hell are either unaware of the moral worth of their prisoners, or they simply don’t care to distinguish anymore. In one of the more striking scenes, the guards callously mow down people who have paid their penance and are about to enter their rebirth just to get at their target, the escaped wicked.

Unfortunately, there are too many characters and not enough characterization to be spread among them, with the result that while you may feel sympathy with a few of the damned, the majority remain cyphers, a huge mistake in a film where most of the scares come from relating to the vicitms. The overlay of cheap CGI is distracting and takes away from whatever charm the natural landscape evokes. And while there are a number of interesting set pieces, including a torturous orgy for the adulterers and the lost and forgotten children of the damned seeking out and killing absent parental figures, the majority of the film is a mess of pacing, with redundant exposition thrown in at the oddest places.

I’ll admit it could be the cultural barrier, but Hell seems to be a great idea railroaded by a weak script and too much ambition for its meagre resources.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Movies, Foreign, Fantasia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.