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HELLBILLY
Hellbilly - Clayton Bigsby
with:
Beverly Lynne
Nick Armas
Candice StringhamProduced and Directed by Max Cerchi
Written by Fratelli Dinotte
Edited by Mark and John Polonia
Director of Photography - Paul SteeleIt's always hard writing negative reviews for people you've called for years. Max Cerchi's HELLINGER was the first film I reviewed for the long defunct B-Film News, and he's been a supporter of the both B-Independent.com and The B-Film Mailing list on Yahoo since their inceptions. His annual Christmas phone calls are a blessing in that they allow me to blow off steam that's been building since the previous year. He's even been known to do a little pro-bono acting for his micro-budget contemporaries including Ryan Cavalline.
Put simply, Max is a good guy with his heart in the right place.
I'm sure that as a director Max puts all his heart into his annual horror productions, but I'm sorry to say I've liked each one less than the previous.
Max once called his release CARNAGE ROAD (aka CARNAGE: THE LEGEND OF QUILTFACE) his best movie. On a technical level, perhaps, but I still like HELLINGER better. The story and characters are more fleshed out, and holds weight against for technical shortcomings Max might hold against his work. Personally, and as much as Max might disagree, I feel HELLINGER even looks better than CARNAGE ROAD.
The CR follow-up was a possessed nun flick titled HOLY TERROR which didn't even feel like a half-hearted attempt to produce a fleshed out movie. Max later confessed to me that he lost his location halfway through production but was able to shoot enough footage that he was later able to cobble together an extended short.
Now comes HELLBILLY, a movie that possesses neither point nor purpose. As a Max Cerchi movie, we've seen the best elements before. As a horror movie, it fails on all levels, even being outclassed by amateur efforts. There's no discernable story or scares, only a masked killer who's equal parts Leatherface and Jason, and bent on snuffing the life out from every man, woman, and child in the Las Vegas tri-county area.
The rubber masked killer is a Cerchi hallmark. CARNAGE ROAD's Quiltface and his multi-faced Leatherface one-upmanship. HOLY TERROR's beastly nun. HELLBILLY's title character looks cheap next to those others, a problem that could have been corrected by careful lighting or post-production color correction. The movie is as bright and sunny as Death Valley making it hard for Hellbilly to jump out and go "boo."
If HOLY TERROR lacked a completed story, then HELLBILLY contains none. It's episodic in structure with only Hellbilly himself connecting the murderous vignettes. There's not even a climax.
The movie opens promisingly enough with two would-be lovers jumping into the back of their jeep for a lunchtime tumble only to be interrupted by Hellbilly. The love scene looks forced with the actress (TERROR TOONS' uber hottie Beverly Lynne) obviously upset over her co-star's constant pawing. In a few shots she appears to be swatting his hands away from her breasts. With blood flow to his member in short supply, Mr. Hands leaves the jeep to take a whiz where he's confronted and killed by Hellbilly. 30 feet away the woman sees the action, jumps from the jeep, runs to Hellbilly and screams in his face with all the fear she can muster. Only then does a chase ensue, one comprised of all the visual energy of a still life painting. Once captured, the woman is tortured by Hellbilly until he grows tired. Then and only then, does he give her the Whiz of Death (an ancient Italian custom dating back to the insane Roman emperor Lupus III who would urinate on his enemies before beheading them with a machete).
With the exception of the Whiz of Death, everything mentioned is a scene directly out of CARNAGE ROAD. The opening sex and murder. The capture and torture. The dull chase. Even the machete with a pre-cut groove for application to various body parts. Max offers us nothing new, just more of the same. At least he has the good taste to move it all along quicker. Infact, I started to believe the movie was going to be nothing more than a CARNAGE retread.
Afterwards, we're introduced to two men in the woods playing chess. I figured these gentlemen would replace the naked girl as our heroes since they were given more character development with their few lines of dialogue then Sex Couple had in their entire 15 minutes worth of scenes.
Wrong.
The two men are promptly dispatched with that machete.
The movie repeats the same cycle of new characters and slashing every few scenes; it even goes so far as to replace the same musical ques (while credited to Bob Mares, the music sounds stock). It wasn't until a blind girl talks Hellbilly into taking a walk with her that I started to understand where Cerchi was coming from. As Hellbilly crushes the overly cheery blind girl's head in with her own cane I realized the movie was a comedy. Max made a parody of everything he's done before, and from that perspective the mistakes, guffaws, and repetitiveness make sense. HELLBILLY didn't turn out to be a bad movie, it was meant to be a bad movie. One where the audience could laugh and poke fun at the incredible cheese-fest taking place on screen. My thoughts were solidified during a chainsaw-machete duel where the chainsaw loses its electrical power cord but keeps on buzzing. HELLBILLY is both sly and subtle regarding the faults of micro-cinema in that same way as GMP Pictures THE LONG WALK HOME. Both films start off taking themselves far to seriously...even bordering on the melodramatic. It isn't until both movies start to unfold that the joke becomes clear, over the top, and laugh-out-loud hilarious.
At least I hope that's what Max intended. I won't ask him to confirm, I'll just give him the benefit of the doubt. This way I won't feel so guilty for laughing at my friend's movie.