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HELLBORN
PLOT
James has just started working at a new mental hospital and he's really
excited about his new job. When his patients start to warn him about the
other doctors at the asylum and he starts receiving obscure notes telling
him to get out, he starts to wonder what exactly is going on in the asylum.
As more and more of his patients start disappearing, James gets very
curious about the situation and decides to try to find out with help from
some of the workers at the asylum... What he finds out was beyond his imagination.
REVIEW
With a title like "Hellborn", you immediately get the feeling that it will be
a lowbudget monster movie. Well, it is kind of a monster movie but it didn't
look very lowbudget. Hellborn mixes Session 9 with Faust: Love Of The Damned
in an interesting and creepy way. It was first after I've watched about 50
minutes of this movie that I realised that I had heard of this movie before.
I had read about this at Fangorias homepage and I had thought that it looked
pretty much crap since the effects looked awful. Well, it turned out to be
better than I'd expected. Though, I think that they should have tried just
to make it a creepy asylum ghost story instead of an asylum monster movie.
Indie director Philip J. Jones surprised me with an interesting and creepy
directing, using a very cool yellow colour in some scenes to create more
atmosphere. He sure has come a long way since his last movie "Backflash",
which was also pretty good directed, just that the scenes weren't put together
very well at all and the picture was quite grainy (might have been because
of the lousy UK DVD edition that I saw though, damn you Third Millenium).
I still don't understand how Philip manages to get such a great cast for
his lowbudget horrormovies. In Backflash there were many faces to be recognized,
Robert Patrick (X-Files, The Faculty, Terminator 2), Jennifer Esposito
(Dracula 2000, Spin City, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), Melissa
Joan Hart (Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Not Another Teen Movie). And here in
Hellborn we get to recognize faces like Bruce Payne (Warlock, Ripper: Letter
From Hell, Passenger 57), Tracy Scoggins (A Crack In The Floor, Demonic Toys).
The acting is top notch from everyone except Julia Lee who makes a dreadful
performance, thank god she had such a small part. She seems as if she couldn’t
remember the script all the time and it took time for her to remember her
sentences, also she never looks very scared despite the fact that she's
running for her life. Matt Stasi is a great actor and I was surprised when
I saw that he hadn't starred in any famous movies before as I thought he
made the movie one notch better. Hellborn is an interesting movie, which has
a very cool premise and I just love all these asylum horror movies. I think
the monster was well done and it didn't seem as if they had used any CGI which
I was happy to see. The movie itself was pretty predictable towards the ending
and it lost some of my interest for a while there. This is far from an
excellent movie but it's definitely something that I will watch again sometime.
GORE
Nothing much here, a cut of tongue and some gory burnt in handprints is
basically it. They didn't need a whole lot more though since this, to my
surprise, tries to scare its audience instead of trying to make it puke.
SOUNDTRACK
Some piano music, some strings, and some generally creepy background music,
does the trick but nothing over the ordinary.
BOTTOM LINE
If you liked Session 9 and Faust: Love Of The Damned, this will be a perfect
movie for you. However, I loved Session 9 and hated Faust, which is why it
only gets three stars from me. It's an original and creepy movie and I think
you should give it a try, if not for the movie, buy it for the kick ass cover
which will look awesome in your DVD collection.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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