HELLIONS

2015 | DIR. BRUCE McDONALD | REVIEW BY SHAUN CRAWFORD. 

Canadian director Bruce MacDonald's second foray into horror territory - following his superb zombie-apocalypse butt-puckerer Pontypool - will give you all the reasons you need not to have kids.

All of the pre-teens in HELLIONS are, frankly, little bastards; imagine the kids from VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED hyped up on bath salts and you're in the right arena. Actually, kids + bath salts = scary movie may have led to a better spent 77-minutes than this banal effort.

The set-up goes like this: vulnerable girl all alone on Halloween-night fends off attacks from unknown predators at her door until she discovers the truth about the scenario. Sound familiar? It should. We've seen it all before. All of it. A thousand times. To his credit, MacDonald approaches HELLIONS - in all likelihood - knowing this and injects some avant-grade stylings into an otherwise tiresome premise.

The trouble is by doing so McDonald makes HELLIONS a horribly muddled affair. On one hand there's a schmaltzy teen pregnancy drama which takes a 180 turn to serve up some Poltergeist-esque supernatural shenanigans. It never feels like McDonald is committing to any one particular idea, or thesis, and as a result the film is entirely unsatisfying.

Throw in a score that sounds so reminiscent of John Carpenter he that deserves a 'thank you' note, and you round-off a film that should have been much better than it was. McDonald has a sure hand, though, and directs with confidence. If only writer Pascal Trottier had the same confidence when he was sitting at the typewriter then HELLIONS might have been something to write home about.

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