Mr. Stec reviews the indie horror flick, All Hell Breaks Loose.
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| What ever happened to good old dentistry? |
All Hell Breaks Loose is a movie that really wants
you to like it. It wants to convince you
that it's a fun, gory '80s action/horror throwback (complete with fake film
scratches), a "so bad it's good" guilty pleasure with just the right
amount of self-awareness. There's
action, comedy, plenty of gore, a biblical battle between good and evil,
gratuitous nudity, everything anyone could possibly want from a movie like
this. Unfortunately the only thing the
filmmakers left out of All Hell Breaks Loose is anything that could
possibly make it worth watching.
The film is about a newlywed couple who finds themselves
mixed up with an outlaw biker gang known as Satan's Sinners. When the gang kidnaps young bride Bobby Sue,
the groom Pete will go to any length to save her—even coming back from the
dead. But he may have met his match with
Satan's Sinners, a name more apt than he may have realized. It's a film with a surprisingly clear idea of
what it is, given the type of movie it is.
But just because you have a plot doesn’t necessarily mean you can
execute it in an interesting, meaningful way, which ultimately is the downfall
of All Hell Breaks Loose.
Knowing this, the filmmakers seem to have fallen back on
gimmicks to carry the day. The film is
designed to look like an old grindhouse movie, from its title designs to the
fake scratches mentioned above. One must
question exactly what definition of "grindhouse" was intended. It would appear that instead of trying to
make it look like a genuinely campy grindhouse horror movie, they have found
most of their inspiration from the movie Grindhouse. The film's esthetic reeks of something made
by someone who watched a lot of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez movies
and picked up all the wrong points from them.
The result shoots for the campy fun of their films, but never comes
close to hitting that mark. Scratches
and cool-looking titles just can't disguise the fact that the movie itself is
not very good.
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| Damn it! I hate reflective surfaces! They keep giving me away! |
Credit is due to the makers of All Hell Breaks Loose for
having the guts to aim as high as they did.
But they appear to have settled more for style over substance, which
never seems to turn out very well. The
comedy is never funny, the horror is never scary; basically everything that is
great and fun about these movies is absent.
All Hell Breaks Loose is not the campy nostalgia trip it wants
you to think it is. Instead, it's just
an ambitious but ultimately lousy low-budget "horror" flick poorly
disguised as one.
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Score:
-Mike Stec