Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hell Hole’ on Shudder, a Lo-fi Splatter-Creature Body-Horror Movie

Husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Toby Poser and John Adams garnered a following after their 2021 lo-fi horror outing Hellbender broke through to genre enthusiasts. Their latest is Hell Hole (now streaming on Shudder), a super-gloopy horror-comedy that boasts more budget than their previous films, although it’s still primitive enough that the ledger is surely a few zeroes away from matching the catering budget of a shitty Netflix action movie. And that can be a charming aesthetic for a movie that exists to toss-’n’-splat corn-syrup gore like kids with water balloons on the Fourth of July. The question is whether Poser and Adams can keep our attention for a fairly simplistic 89-minute exercise in invasive body horror. 

HELL HOLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: TITLE CARD: 1814. SERBIAN TERRITORY. Two members of Napoleon’s army are lost in the forest when they encounter a woman who gifts them with a horse that soon explodes in a bloom of viscera to reveal a rather rapey multi-tentacled special effect that has its way with these guys – after we cut away, thank gawd. SOME TIME LATER: It’s the age of trucks now, because John (Adams) stands next to one. He and Emily (Poser) head a small crew of frackers on a quest for whatever energy source lurks beneath the Serbian soil. It’s also the age of the internet, not that you can get it out here in the middle of nowhere, where an old Soviet Bloc building sits, a decaying husk of a nod to a mostly dead communist age. Well, dead enough that Americans like John and Emily can show up and be capitalists, at the expense of the environment. So it goes.

There’s a bit of a, shall we say, dynamic here, though. Sofija (Olivera Perunicic) and Nikola (Aleksandr Trmcic) are on site because endangered rabbits live in this patch of cold godforsaken woods, and nobody wants to see cute widdle bunnies get fracked, right? Maybe if you’re not a frickin fracker. We eventually learn that Sofija is an expert in parasitology, which we’ll soon learn is all too applicable to the situation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – we have lots of tedious dialogue to get through before we reach the part where the creature we saw in the cold open emerges in an explosion of stewey-gooey guts. 

A key character her is Teddy (Maximum Portman), Emily’s nephew, who cooks for the crew,  and might be showing romantic interest in Sofija. They stand by as the crew digs up one of the French soldiers (Marko Filipovic), who happens to still be alive after 200 years because he’s the functioning host for the beast. Thus kickstarted is the plot, which consists of the following: Multiple scenes in which John and Emily talk to each other, and Emily and Teddy talk to each other, and the workers talk with Emily, and the workers talk to each other, and the scientists talk with Emily, and Sofija talks weirdly gleefully about parasites, and Nikola talks about how the creature – which invades body cavities and eventually kills its host in a burst of bloody spew that’ll leave one half-leg standing there in a pool of bowels and slop – shouldn’t be killed, but rather, studied. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of talking in this movie. And not enough action.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hell Hole references a few enduring touchstones: The Thing, Alien, The Evil Dead. It also made me think of The Void, a similar shoestring horror cheapie from 2018 that does the maximum-effort-with-minimum-money thing in a far more engaging fashion.

Performance Worth Watching: Portman is the standout here, in that he generally seems to be more at ease with reciting dull dialogue than the rest of the cast. 

Memorable Dialogue: An example of the tryhard comedy on hand, via Emily: “I haven’t soaked a tampon in years. Now I just use ’em to plug my nose when I gotta deal with turds like you.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Creature features inevitably make us antsy, as we sit through the talky stuff to get to the good stuff. Hell, even Jaws has a remarkably small amount of shark action. But the key is to inject the talky stuff with energy, through witty dialogue and/or compelling characters, and then deliver a suspenseful climactic shebang. Hell Hole doesn’t do that. It drones on with a turgid script, a cast of limited charisma and a directorial style that far too often props two characters within a static frame and has them talk at each other. Consider our patience tested, as the movie threatens to wear out its welcome before the brief spurts of action even begin. (At least there’s some gooey practical effects at play here, although the use of chintzy CG is more of a winking nudge, like, isn’t it hilarious how crappy this looks?)  

Which is to say, the dynamic is off – the dull shit-to-fun shit ratio is way out of whack. Scripters Adams, Poser and Lulu Adams apparently intend to tease reveals and I-think-the-creature’s-growing developments by having their scientist characters blather on about the adaptive wonders of a species of octopus, residue from which they find among the slop that’s left of some of their fellow characters. You’ll gut out such overlong moments with your arms crossed, thinking, the payoff better be good – and then your patience is never really rewarded (especially with that vague non-ending). There’s not much tension here, and the characters are too bland to root for, whether you want to see them survive the big third-act gorefest, or succumb to it. Sometimes, this type of barely-a-budget endeavor has its charms, but Hell Hole really struggles to supersede its limitations.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A lot of blablabla doesn’t necessarily torpedo a movie, but in Hell Hole, it’s just blah. Same goes for the creature effects, scares, kills and comedy.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.