MOVIE REVIEW: HELLHOUNDS

Hellhounds is a low budget horror movie that was advertised as biker werewolves vs biker werewolf hunters which promised that the last surviving member of the Hellhounds would spend the movie hunting down the Silver Bullets who slaughtered his pack. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t deliver on that promise. In fact it doesn’t really deliver at all. Which is too bad because the promised premise sounded very exciting and this movie is anything but.

The film opens with three separate narratives that will eventually come together by the midpoint of the film but until they do the story is somewhat difficult to follow. The transitions are very jarring, with hard cuts dominating as we leap from scene to scene with no apparent connection. Now this sort of thing can be done well but either the director is not skilled enough to handle this task or the editor has failed in creating a positive flow of events.

As I stated in the beginning the film synopsis claimed that it was going to be a revenge tale about a werewolf biker hunting the werewolf hunter bike gang. At least there was a revenge plot just not the story that was advertised. A werewolf hunting werewolf hunters would have been quite cool but a few members of the rival Silver Bullets only show up for one scene and were easily dealt with. And that was just the beginning of my disappointment with Hellhounds.

Now Hellhounds is low budget and that’s fine but a movie should not promise more than it can deliver. I absolutely love indie films and low budget movies. The restrictions of a lack of finances very often forces a level of creativity on the creators that is very rewarding. The last surviving Hellhound Alias (though there is an implication that fellow biker Rooster is also a Hellhound so Alias is not the last?) ends up teaming with a bounty hunter Mia to track down those who betrayed his gang to the Silver Bullets. That being former Hellhound, the werewolf vixen Lucella as well as failed Hellhound prospect Dave, who hopes to become a werewolf in her service.

While I really wanted to see the promised film, this story could have still been entertaining enough but the quality of this project is just so low. It really permeates every aspect of the production. One of the most unforgivable sins is to have poor audio and this movie is rife with it. Poor audio just screams of an amateurish level of ability. The lighting is often poorly thought out, with some scenes clearly having the actors bathed in a bright, white focused light while walking through a desert while the next scene lights the principles in a cool blue light which is visual language for being outside in the dark.

The dialogue is poor and poorly executed. I can see why the actors were not giving it much effort. The script was so full of tropes that I couldn’t connect with it. The actors are only giving possible efforts but again, I don’t know that I can lay the blame on them so much. Humans introduced to the world of werewolves and having their loved ones murdered take things a little too in stride. The writer/director should pay attention to how Tarintino handled a similar situation in From Dusk Till Dawn. The scenes made more sense and the actors were able to respond accordingly with believable performances. I really hate to just rake a film over the coals with nothing positive to say but I struggled to find anything of value here. I can definitively say though that Daniel Link who plays the betraying prospect Dave felt completely authentic. Whenever he was in a scene I believed it. He cared enough to give a real performance in a bad film.

Production value suffered in one other crucial area for a monster film, the FX. The blood had the quality of the red paint of Italian Giallo horror. The viscera was unconvincing with a ripped out heart that I suspect was a water balloon slathered in blood. The worst part were the werewolves. They wisely avoided showing them as much as possible. They looked like Halloween costumes, unforgivable for a werewolf film.

1 out of 5

Director: Robert Conway
Cast: Nathaniel Burns, Eva Hamilton, Cameron Kotecki, Dana Kippel

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