The only thing missing from “HellBent” is topless girls running for their lives. The audience this movie was made for won’t care; it has more than enough shirtless men to compensate.
Other than that, this self-proclaimed first gay slasher film plays up the genre conventions. Pleasure-seeking himbos are stalked through West Hollywood’s Halloween carnival by a sickle-wielding killer in a devil mask. The joke – and surprisingly for a film that you would think would be all camp most of the time, it’s about the only funny thing – is that everyone is dressed and acting so freaky, Devil Man barely gets noticed.
Until, that is, someone realizes that the decapitated corpses left in his wake are not really well-made holiday decorations.
Writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts wanted to make this a character-based thriller. So that means the main guys, headed by wannabe cop Eddie (Dylan Fergus), are the usual thumbnail-sketched types: lovelorn nerd, try-anything hedonist, etc. Only they are dressed in Anna Nicole drag and fetish leather.
Etheredge-Ouzts stages the stalkings and slashings effectively enough, but too much of the movie is devoted to suspenseless cruising. There is also no attempt to explain why Hornmask is collecting homosexual heads. If this movie truly took itself seriously, you would think it would make at least a token attempt to examine motivation for this extreme form of gay-bashing.
But, like I said, “HellBent” really is not any different from most pointless slasher movies. I guess, by some definition, that is progress.
* | “HellBent”
NOT RATED but contains violence, sex, nudity, drug use, language|1 hour, 25 minutes|HORROR|Written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts; photography by Mark Mervis; starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas, Matt Phillips|Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
