Natalie becomes suspicious when a mysterious figure in a mask begins to follow them around the park…
I remember seeing the trailer for this movie when it was on the horizon.
Sadly it did not get a cinema release and by the time it got a physical/streaming release I forgot about it.
Since I have been on a vague journey through slasher movies, it got back on my radar.
What is striking about Hell Fest, particularly in terms of its release environment (2018), is how conventional it is.
It is not trying to satirise the genre ala Scream, nor is it trying to reinvent it.
It is a slasher stripped to its essence - the characters are introduced and dropped in the titular location, where they are almost-immediately targeted by a masked killer who stalks them through the camp.
There is something pleasingly lo-fi about the movie, from its lack of excess in terms of the genre’s expectations, and its sense of realism.
There are not that many kills, and they are spread out through the story.
The characters do not realise something is definitely wrong until the third act, which gives the film a stronger sense of mounting tension.
The death sequences all fall within a certain bandwidth of verisimilitude - in between the chase scene through the various park attractions, we get a tense siege in a toilet stall as our heroine tries to escape the killer.
And when the park becomes alerted to the danger, there is a level of believability to their reaction and mistakes - the killer’s mask makes capture almost impossible.
The final chase is terrific - the survivors try to navigate the ‘hell’ attraction without tripping the motion sensors which activate the various jump scares and alert the killer.
The film also deserves credit for creating a genuinely chilling antagonist.
The mask is a great design - a crude facsimile of a human face with slightly warped symmetry at the centre, giving it an uncanny quality.
And while his plans are foiled, the film ends with the killer still at large and more mysterious than before.
The cast are all solid. The script’s exposition is pared to the bone, so a lot of information is conveyed through the group’s dynamic.
In a great piece of genre casting, Tony Todd plays the host of one of the attractions, and provides all of the park announcements.
The production design of the attractions is evocative, which adds some uniqueness to the set pieces.
It is no masterpiece, but as a ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’ slasher, Hell Fest gets it done.
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