Hell Fest (2018) Review

"You came here to be scared, right?"

-Security Guard

A group of college students get tickets to a massive horror festival, Hell Fest, full of mazes, scares, and mayhem.  Natalie (Amy Forsyth) has a strange run-in with a masked figure during one of the haunted mazes.  As the night goes on, Natalie begins to see the figure over and over again.  As her friends start to go missing, Natalie starts to suspects that some of the scares might be for real.

There will be spoilers ahead, but I recommend this movie for people who like slasher movies and Halloween films.  Everyone else probably won't get much out of Hell Fest, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

What Works:

Hell Fest really feels like a throwback to gimmicky 80's-slasher movies and I really appreciated that. It delivers on it's promise of being a slasher movie set in haunted houses and gives us plenty of fun sequences in spook-houses.  It made we want to go through some haunted houses and really put me in the mood for Halloween.

The production design for this movie is really incredible.  The festival looks great and the haunted houses look amazing.  I really wanted to go through them myself.  The costumes the actors wear are really cool as well.  It's nice to see the movie didn't cheep out it its atmosphere.

There are a couple of really solid kills in the movie.  I'm always up for a good head smashing and anything having to do with eyes really freaks me out.  We definitely could have used more gore, but what we did get was solid.

Finally, there are some actually pretty intense sequences.  This is the type of slasher where no one is safe, not even the final girl, and I really didn't know how it was all going to end.  There was some nice tension throughout the film, which I don't see all that often in slasher movies.

What Sucks:

I wasn't really digging the movie when we were first introduced to all of the main characters.  The introductions were very rushed and it didn't give me a good sense of how these characters know each other.  It felt like they just wanted to get to the spooky stuff, which I'm fine with, but we should have gotten a little bit more on these characters.

Our protagonist, Natalie, was pretty whiny and not all that likable.  Most of her dialogue was her complaining or being annoyed by her friends.  A likable lead this does not make.  I was actually hoping she would get killed off.  This movie would have been much better if Bex Taylor-Klaus's character, Taylor, had been the lead instead.

Speaking, of Taylor, my final problem with Hell Fest has to do with her death scene.  I thought for sure it had been spoiled in the trailer because we saw her trapped in a guillotine.  I figured there was no way that she was getting out of that and was annoyed by the people who made the trailer.  I was pleasantly surprised when Taylor managed to get out of the guillotine and make her escape.  This was an exciting development that ended very lamely with her and Quinn (Christian James) just being stabbed to death.  I would have much rather had a nice decapitation then what we ultimately got.  Always go for the creative and fun kills!  We've seen enough generic stabs to last us a lifetime.

Verdict:

Hell Fest isn't spectacular and won't convert anyone to the genre, but people who like horror, especially older slashers films will enjoy it.  It's got a few fun kills, excellent production design, and some really exciting haunted house sequences.  The protagonist sucks, the characters aren't great, and some of the deaths were disappointing, but Hell Fest is a fun, little movie and is perfect for the Halloween season.

 7/10: Good