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A guy who calls himself Dracula (Eric Roberts) hosts a Halloween
reality TV show where 6 contestants are locked into a house for 24 hours
straight and with no option of getting out earlier, and whoever survives
gets $100,000 in cash - sounds easy enough, right? Even if the sextet of
youngsters is rather heterogenous, ranging from gun-carrying cowboy Toby
(Paul Stanko) to nerdy Johnny (Evan Bittencourt) to hip hop filmmaker Mr
Jones (Sebastien Charmant), from Russian stripper Gothia (Lola Klimenteva)
to everybody's darling Jessy (Elizabeth Peterson) to Mexican nurse Rose
(Christina Trevizo), and the location is spooky in a hokey way, it should
be no problem living through that. But Johnny is soon to sense something's
wrong that seems to be emmanating from a butt-ugly statue of a demon - and
yet, even if he has brought instruments to prove demonic presence, nobody
believes him something actually is wrong - until the demon who
actually lives in the statue and can appear and disappear at will, starts
killing our little crew one by one, and even if our heroes plead with
Dracula to let them out early, he insists a contract is a contract - and
is actually making tons of money off people betting who's to live and
who's to die (and who's to die first) on the show, making our youngsters
more and more victims of their own greed ... Halloween Hell
is filmmaker Ed Hunt's first movie in over 25 years - and to an extent, it
still breathes the flair of low budget indie horror flicks of old: It's
hokey, it's a tad formulaic, it's at times pretty brutal and gory, it's
blunt in its approach to horror, at the same time it doesn't take itself
too seriously ... and all of this works for the movie, making this a fun
throwback to yesteryear's genre cinema, yet with a satirical edge that's
very much rooted in the now. And need I even say it? Eric Roberts delivers
another scene-stealing performance, quite obviously enjoying himself
playing a hammy Dracula
actor. A fun movie, really.
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