★
“Hell would, on the whole, be preferable.”
Ir’s not often that I feel my life has become a tiny bit worse for having seen a film, but Hellfire may just about qualify. It’s such a mean-spirited and unpleasant experience, weighed down further by technical ineptitude and actresses who can’t act. Any potential in the somewhat interesting idea – which makes for a good synopsis, at least – is entirely wasted. Someone is killing young women, apparently in an attempt to protect Father McKenzie, a priest under investigation for alleged sexual abuses of pupils at a Catholic school. Chucky (Mercedes) rounds up two of the girls from her class, tattooist Athena (Peach) and stripper Lilly (Divine). After surviving some attacks from a man in glasses (Hoffman), and a betrayal from a former teacher, they decide to go on the offense and track down the pedopriest.
The first fifteen minutes kinda live up to that, albeit in an obviously cheap way – and Lilly is the worst stripper ever, failing to remove even a single item of clothing. I think the point at which this jumped the shark was the extended scene of the trio smoking weed and dropping acid. Watching other people take drugs is among the worst cinematic sins. Would anyone pay to watch me sink a six-pack of beer? Exactly. It is, admittedly, a drug trip necessary to the plot, since it allows the women to recall their abuse at the hands (literally) of McKenzie. But, especially in a film which runs barely 70 minutes including credits, it’s a waste of time. Things only go downhill from there, with the movie basically killing time as they develop their Catholic schoolgirl vigilante personas. Which isn’t anything like as interesting as it should be, attention being diverted by faux pas like the claim the previous victim’s deaths were made to look like natural causes. Oh, so the woman we see in the opening scene, getting hung from a rope in her shower, tripped on the soap or something?
Then there’s the final attack on their former school, where they face the man in glasses, in what may be the worst fight scene in cinematic history, despite the director’s efforts to jazz things up by throwing bad digital FX and screechy sound on top of it. The three then take their revenge on Father McKenzie, and I guess I have to thank the film for introducing me to a genuinely new experience: feeling sorry for a pedophile. Because the former victims’ behaviour is so vile, and carried out with such an abundance of glee, as to make me lose all sympathy for them. It doesn’t help that, of the lead actresses, only Peach knows how to deliver a line with anything inhabiting the same continental landmass as authenticity. The brief running time turns out to be a merciful release, as I don’t think I could have stood a full 90 minutes of this. Let us never speak of it again.
Dir: Moses
Star: Mercedes the Muse, Knotty Peach, Irie Divine, Shawn Hoffman