With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects of husband-wife duo John Adams and Toby Poser (known collectively as The Adams Family) have been improving in quality and increasing in visibility of late. In some ways, their latest, Hell Hole, feels inevitable within their catalog. The Adams Family have been cycling through horror iconography as jumping-off points for a while now, checking in with metal music and witchcraft (Hellbender), carnivals and on-the-road serial killers (Where the Devil Roams), tarot cards and foreboding woods (The Deeper You Dig), and creepy dolls (Plastic Smile, an entry in the upcoming r/NoSleep-inspired horror anthology series Tales from the Void), and leveraging their DIY aesthetic and reverent yet rarely derivative style to overall distinctive ends. With Hell Hole, they go the way of creature feature, steeping their usual horror preoccupations in a broth of gloopy sci-fi.
Hell Hole’s quick prologue witnesses a group of Napoleonic soldiers set upon by a mysterious, barely glimpsed something that makes quick work of them. Jump to the present, and we catch up with an exploratory U.S. fracking team and local laborers on assignment in remote Serbia who, upon commencement of their first dig, uncover one such buried soldier: still alive, babbling in French, and clearly terrified of something. It’s at this point that the differences between Hell Hole and The Adams Family’s most recent projects begin to reveal themselves. The hilarious non-reaction by the crew marks a wackier sense of humor this time out, one that follows through in the inevitable carnage to follow — less guts and gore than outright meat splatter. That’s not to say their other projects are po-faced horror exercises that lack humor — Where the Devil Roams, for instance, masterfully imbues its carnie-killers narrative with a winking nonchalance and orchestrates the aftermath of kills with compositions careful to emphasize the “Entrance of the Gladiators” of it all — but Hell Hole certainly skews broader, especially once it becomes clear the film’s slimy scoundrel is of the cephalopod variety.
But by and large, the textural differences felt here are to the film’s deficit. Care has been taken in Hell Hole’s practical effects and creation of the octo-creature troubling the fracking crew, but in execution, the sequences feel of the B-movie variety, often looking like a jelly-dunked stuffie thrown onto characters’ faces. (One wishes that Adams and Poser had instead opted for something altogether weirder for their sucker-centric material, along the lines of, say, The Untamed.) This affect is perhaps intentional, certainly, but in either case, it reflects a larger tonal seesaw; as does the balance of no-nonsense characters and those pushed toward more comedic characterization, and that’s before even mentioning the do-nothing sorta romance thrown in the mix for no discernible reason. Then there’s the scientist who is narratively tasked with ensuring as much ethical treatment of the land as is possible when fracking, but who is really here to unnecessarily explain Hell Hole’s “science” — a teaspoon of basic parasite factoids and a hogshead’s amount of gobbledygook about octopuses living on land or some such nonsense that didn’t need explained in a movie about polypi forcing their phallic tentacles down human throats — and to act as foil to any endeavor to kill the creature, once he becomes obsessed with studying it.
Similarly empty and lazily executed are the nods toward contemporaneous discourse. The punishment doled out for fossil fuel reliance is baked into the film’s premise, but there’s also a thread here about how the octo-parasite is only hostile toward men. It’s barely explored beyond mere implication, though it does take on a little more weight within the co-director’s filmography, which broadly surveys the essential leech of parenthood and the life-death cycle within this particular context. Still, like most else in Hell Hole, it’s an idea that barely breaks the surface before just sort of fizzling out. The result is a film that ushers in a series of false starts for most of its runtime and feels entirely out of rhythm throughout, ultimately fast-forwarding through its climactic stretch and dispatching of characters with strange haste. It does all culminate in a brilliant final shot, one that suggests a more compelling film and one better situated to probe the thematic material Adams and Poser just sort of scatter on the ground here. As is, Hell Hole isn’t much more than a slightly spunky but otherwise run-of-the-mill “delved too deep” horror effort — gleefully gooey, inclined toward bodily obliteration, but far more of an outline than a final product.
DIRECTOR: Toby Poser & John Adams; CAST: Toby Poser, John Adams, Olivera Peruničič, Max Portman; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: August 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
Originally published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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