“You came here to be scared. I can’t arrest people for doing their job. Welcome to Hell Fest.”
Those words from a security guard at an extreme Halloween horror park don’t do much to quell Natalie’s terror. The young woman knows a guy in a creepy mask has been stalking her throughout the evening. In fact, she may have even seen the sadistic spookster actually murder another young woman. The attack certainly looked real, anyway.
But in a theme park that’s supposed to scare you, one where you have to sign a waiver that allows terrifying masked actors to touch you, how can you be sure what’s real and what’s just really well acted?
The ironic thing is that studious, stressed-out, straight-laced Natalie never would have chosen a night of entertainment like this for herself. Nope. Not her thing. At. All.
But when she gets together for a weekend reunion with her high school BFF (Brooke) and a wild child she hasn’t seen since grade school (Taylor), well, they’ve got other ideas. Not only are they looking for a thrill to share with each other and with their significant others (Quinn and Asher, respectively), they’re also hoping to help Natalie hook up with a hot guy named Gavin.
Natalie reluctantly agrees to the evening’s hellish entertainment docket. The mock horrors that the group soon plunges into are admittedly a bit more tolerable as Natalie and Gavin hit it off (complete with a lip-locking session in a photo booth).
But that guy with the mask keeps showing up. And he’s really good at being really creepy.
That’s right about the time that Natalie’s friends start to go missing, one by one.
Welcome to Hell Fest indeed.
Natalie and Brooke have a deep friendship, the kind that stands the test of time. As the movie’s intensity level ramps up, Natalie and Brooke express their sisterly affection for each other, with each sweetly telling the other, “I love you.”
When the plot reaches its tipping point, and the dwindling number of surviving friends begins to realize that something truly horrific is happening, they do their best to protect each other. That’s especially true of Natalie and Brooke, with Nat helping her friend through a hell-themed maze after she’s wounded. Natalie bravely tries to stand up to him on a couple of occasions as well, in part to save her friend and in part to save herself.
In a movie called Hell Fest, one that’s centered on the overlapping themes of horror and Halloween, it’s no surprise that we’re exposed to a lot of demon-like imagery—all of which is of the B-movie (or perhaps C- or D-movie) variety.
Devilish costumes, vampires, gargoyles, hellhounds, demonic trappings, pentagrams and other diabolical props (such as a decapitated exhibit victim’s faux body hanging on a cross) fill the theme park. We see one room in which nuns are apparently dishing out torture. One (of many) fright-filled mazes is called “Welcome to Hell.” Someone jokes, “Nice to be in hell.” Someone else quips, “I’m going to hell without you.” Not surprisingly, hell jokes flow pretty freely here.
Despite a story that’s chockful of visual references to the devil, however, not a one of ’em has anything concrete to do with the spiritual realities it caricatures.
We don’t see any sexual encounters, but Taylor, especially, talks about sex nonstop. We hear crude references to various sexual activities as well as multiple slang references to the male anatomy. Taylor notes that “fear is an aphrodisiac,” and says that any biological “organism’s only real purpose is to reproduce.”
We hear a joke involving transsexuality, and another that makes light of someone having lost her virginity a long time ago. One of the guys hits, jokingly, on a bearded lady (who plays along). Brooke and Natalie plan a vacation in Spain which, Brooke insists, should include finding a topless beach.
Two female characters make suggestive gestures and movements mimicking sexual activities. Someone pantomimes being spanked by a zombie. There’s also talk of whether zombies can be sexually aroused or not. It’s clear that each established couple in the film (Tayler and Ash, Brooke and Quinn) is sexually active.
We see all three couples making out very passionately at different points during the film. There’s quite a bit of discussion about whether or not Natalie and Gavin will hook up sexually at the end of the night. (Brooke says Natalie is welcome to use her bedroom if necessary.)
All three primary female characters wear cleavage-revealing tops. Brooke’s crop top reveals most of her midriff. She encourages Natalie to exchange her conservative shirt for something more revealing that enables her to “let out your inner slut” (which Natalie agrees to).
Hell Fest—both the movie and the theme park it’s named after—is filled with gory, gross, bloody, nasty, disgusting exhibits of all kinds. Instruments of torture (racks, guillotines, crucifixes, tubs of acid, etc.) furnish many rooms. Rotting corpses, dismembered appendages, impaled victims and skeletons litter the place like so much Halloween confetti.
A mock decapitation concludes with a fake head being held aloft by one of the park’s actors. Monsters, aliens, scary clowns (who, ironically, aren’t scary at all) and dudes in masks roam the joint like starving hyenas, looking for some poor sap to startle.
Some of the human-ish creatures in various scare rooms are clearly props, while many other exhibits include a blend of devilishly outfitted animatronic characters with real actors sprinkled among them. People wandering through these macabre milieus are sometimes startled. (The audience? Not so much.)
As for this slasher flick’s real violence, well, there’s a fair bit of that, too. One person is battered by the masked villain, who’s wielding a huge mallet; that beatdown that eventually ends with the victim’s head being smashed Gallagher-style, like a watermelon. Another person is the victim of a painful failed decapitation (the rusty blade of the guillotine only gets far enough into her neck to motivate her to find a way to get out of the contraption). Multiple people are stabbed to death. (We see their bloody shirts, as they’re all stabbed in the stomach.) One unfortunate victim who’s not quite dead gets finished off with a lynching. (We see her dangling feet twitching momentarily.)
Another of Natalie’s clan who unwisely finds himself alone (why do people always, always, always split up in these movies?) finds himself with a long needle and syringe rammed brutally (and mortally) into one of his eyes. Someone else gets slashed with an ax (though not fatally). Natalie unleashes perhaps half a dozen blows on the masked man, predictably to no avail.
[Spoiler Warning] The film’s conclusion is ostensibly intended to layer on one last layer of schlock and awe. After the masked murderer in the middle of the mayhem manages somehow to escape (seemingly mortal wounds almost never finish these guys off), he goes home, removes his mask, and hangs it up in the garage in a locked cabinet with six or seven other masks. The implication? Just another day at the office for this guy … and he’s still out there! After that, he goes in and greets his grade school-aged daughter, who’s waiting up and thrilled to see her beloved daddy when he gets home after a long night at work, apparently. Yuck.
Profanity is another big contributor to this film’s R-rating. Nearly 100 total profanities include about 25 uses each of the f-word and s-word, more than 15 misuses of God’s name, at least four abuses of Jesus’ name, and several uses each of “b–ch,” “a–,” “a–hole,” “d–n,” “d–k” and, of course, “h—.” (The latter is used at least four times as a swear word, though it’s not always easy to tell what constitutes profane usage in a movie where it’s used almost continually to describe the theme park.)
Before everyone heads to the park for the evening, Taylor is already swigging freely from a flask of hard liquor. There’s a reference to tequila. Natalie and her friends do shots, served in syringes, at a Hell Fest bar. One exhibit pictures a seemingly dead woman with a syringe (presumably indicating that she died from intravenous drug use) still stuck in her arm.
One of the young women is shown using the bathroom. (The camera watches from the top of the stall, and nothing is seen.) After she’s done, the masked assailant tries to attack her in the stall. When Gavin takes a long time getting back (as in, he never comes back), the women speculate that he probably just needed to go the the bathroom. “Everybody poops,” Brooke chimes in helpfully.
Weirdly, the killer hums “Pop Goes the Weasel” right before he attacks people. This is supposed to be scary. It is not.
Gavin is such a clutz he can’t win a stuffed animal for Natalie. So he sneaks into an area where they’re stored to steal one after seeing another guy walk out with several huge stuffed critters. That moral lapse is the last one he ever makes.
There’s a crude discussion about what hobos’ backsides smell like. An actor in an alien outfit spews goop all over Natalie.
As this movie mercifully lurches and shuffles toward its conclusion, Natalie and Brooke think they can exit the park by entering an exhibit called Welcome to Hell.
Only in horror movies are people this stupid.
As they scramble through a demonically decorated maze in search of said escape, a Vincent Price-esque voice intones, “You are at the entrance to hell. Can you make it out the other side?” Funnily enough, that’s exactly how I was feeling by that point in the movie. (Scratch that: Much earlier, actually.) Only not, I suspect, in the way this movie’s makers intended.
This ridiculous, derivative and predictable carnival of crass carnage might more accurately have been dubbed Dumb Fest. It felt like an odd mash-up of Halloween and Scooby-Doo—only with a lot more blood, gore and profanity than the latter ever proffered as Shaggy, Scooby and the gang prosecuted their often supernaturally tinged sleuthing.
Suffice it to say scares are in short supply in this R-rated schlockfest. As is common sense, for that matter: If you’re trying to escape a masked serial killer in a horror theme park, prolly best not to head into an exhibited dubbed “Welcome to Hell” in the hope of finding a happy ending.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
