#this is still a solid slasher sequel but the vibes are a little off‚ at least in the first half. there's too much goofiness‚ too much

[spearxwind]

omg I just remembered I am DYING to know your opinions on Malignant. (if you have seen it??) anyways I thought it was hilarious and could not stop laughing the whole way thru, but I like…. still can’t tell if it was SUPPOSED to be funny or not lmaooo

MAN... MALIGNANT.... ive got mixed as hell opinions tbh

SPOILERS AHEAD BTW ⚠⚠⚠

I fully think its intended to be hilarious or at least it is VERY much a love letter to older, cheesy slasher movies. Its a slasher!! They are very cheesy. This is up there with like, the friday 13th sequels (which admittedly are some of my only reference. rip) theres no way they filmmakers put in the scene where he throws a fucking chair across a giant room and it explodes in contact with someone and didnt expect people to laugh at it. Also, there's the Very Obvious Lore Dump Guy, among other things. Theres a lot of little bits that rly make you think 'oh yeah this has classic cheesy movie vibes' and i respect them for sticking witht hat

for some reason the intro cutscene (the best part of the movie, to me) has a song by celldweller that is NOT credited in the soundtrack??? (it's 'when your walls fall' btw. went crazy trying to find it back in the day when the movie had just come out)

I THOUGHT THE CONCEPTS IN THE MOVIE HAD SO MUCH MORE POTENTIAL THAN WHAT THEY PULLED OFF... Though i forgot a lot of it x) I dont remember a whole lot of the movie itself, While i was watching the first time i was actually thinking super hard like ough... wouldnt it be so fucking creepy if Gabriel could actually manipulate electricity or whatever (like they implied at the beginning??) and couldnt speak so he communicated through the radios instead and was more like a ghost than just siamese'd I distinctly remember there being differences in the english and spanish versions, the english one actually came across more serious, but the spanish dub was full of goofs, and even in the scene where gabriel drops from like a 3rd floor fleeing from the detective, i dont remember what the english one says but in spanish the guy says the equivalent of "you have GOT to be fucking me..." and it was just hilarious

So yeah uhh. in terms of scare? maybe a 5/10. had some spooks. In terms of fun? I'd give it a solid 7/10 :]

The poster slaps super hard though that's a 10/10. They should have kept this one bc its so freaky

#ask #honestly i might be dumb as hell but it took me almost to the end of the movie to realize thats why it was called malignant #bc malignant tumor... and i went ooooooooooohhhhh it makes sense now #i wish i could be more in depth but i actually forgor like half of the movie i just remember some funnies mostly #i had like honest to god plot thoughts that were super cool #malignant spoilers #i guess?? #uhhhhhhhhh man i should make a tag for talking about movies or something

[briangroth27]

Hell Fest Review

Hell Fest came out of nowhere for me last fall and wasn’t on my radar at all initially. Once I knew about the premise—a slasher loose in a Halloween theme park—I was in. It turns out that it could’ve been a little more inventive in places and gone further when it was doing new things, but it was definitely a fun thrill ride!

Full Spoilers…

The movie absolutely nailed the atmosphere and feeling of being at a Halloween event like Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, except when the characters were in the haunted houses: there’s no way the people in line would wait for each group to go through alone. I wish Universal could manage that! haha That said, I agree with some other comments I read online that Hell Fest could’ve used the theme park setting (in particular, the rides) a little more: this environment could’ve lent itself to a wider variety of kills based on the existence of the rides alone. One area where not using the theme park mentality as expected actually worked to great effect was the security guards’ reactions to the news that a killer was on the loose. The one-night-only conceit of Hell Fest could’ve given the security guards’ disbelief in a real serial killer a more sinister bent (they can’t shut the park down because it’d be disastrous financially), but it was a nice surprise that they genuinely believed that it was just an employee doing their job and only pretending to kill people. That was a great layer of the “what’s really happening and what’s fake?” psychological games our heroes have to contend with. It’s actually also what I wish they had pushed further with the theme park setting rather than deaths on rides: even more uncertainty about what was actually going on.

I also liked that the movie subverted my expectations regarding some of the deaths. Given one of her first scenes at Hell Fest, I thought they’d have Brooke (Reign Edwards) get killed first, following the “black girl/guy dies first” cliché, so it was an awesome surprise that charging into an isolated area after the killer in defense of her bestie Natalie (Amy Forsyth) by herself didn’t result in her dying. I also expected good guy Gavin (Roby Attal) to survive the film, allowing the harrowing events of the night to give him and Natalie the confidence to get together, so his being killed first was another shock. He also got an inventive death—killed with a carnival “test your strength” mallet—which was a good change of pace from the typical slasher M.O. Taylor’s (Bex Taylor-Klaus) death was probably the best scene of the film: first we get a theme park-sanctioned fake-out as she’s “beheaded” by a guillotine in front of a crowd, then the murderous ‘Other’ tries to kill her while she’s still strapped to the guillotine only for the blade to not be sharp enough, so she manages to free herself and escape for a brief chase where no one believes she’s in real danger. That sequence managed to create a whole lot of tension, dread, and even some comedy with the Other’s reaction to the guillotine not working the first time. It’s an extremely well-crafted sequence, so it’s a shame that it ended with the Other just going on a stabbing spree, which was much more generic (and disappointing) than the deaths that had come before. Another innovation was Nat giving up the location of a terrified Hell Fest-goer (Courtney Dietz) to the Other and even encouraging him to kill her (thinking it was all part of the haunted house). That forged a connection between them, but I wish they’d taken a lot more time to explore its effects on Natalie once she knew people were really dying. One of my favorite scares at Halloween Horror Nights was a scare-actor pulling a planted employee out of line inside one of the houses and killing them in full view of everyone, so having Natalie goad the Other into ‘doing his job’ was the most unsettling moment in this movie. Anyone could’ve made her mistake: in that kind of environment, how would you be able to tell if something like that was real?

While I liked Natalie as the lead, there was a weird streak of vaguely-defined darkness in her past that was repeatedly referenced but never really expounded on. It seemed like it was there to make her “deeper” or something, but darkness and angst aren’t shortcuts to depth, nor do they necessarily add anything to a character. She didn’t need that weirdness to make her relatable; there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with her just being a normal college student. She was a solid character without some past tragedy and it didn’t make her fight for survival any more compelling to have this vaguely referenced past (especially when the creepy bond between Natalie and the Other is established and is MUCH darker than almost anything that could possibly be in her past). Still, it was great to see Nat fight back in classic Final Girl fashion and popping out of a Boo Hole to stab the killer was great! That was a nice use of her earlier clocking the pattern of scares in the houses. The bond between Natalie and Brooke was well written and acted by both of them, making even a reference to running off to Spain that could’ve felt completely random feel like a piece of their shared history. I really liked that all these friends actually had each other’s backs and stood up for each other instead of being the unlikable idiots that you might expect in a slasher movie.

Bex Taylor-Klaus had the most energy amongst the cast and I wish the others matched her more often (though everyone else’s characters were written to be much more subdued than hers, especially the other women). She was best playing off of Tony Todd, who was wasted in his cameo. If only four people died as the news at the end of the movie says, I hope Taylor survived her stab wounds.

The villain was unfortunately kinda lackluster and the humming he was constantly doing didn’t add any creepiness. It’s not that he wasn’t a threat—the circumstances of Hell Fest made him potentially omnipresent and definitely dangerous—but he didn’t stand out as an iconic slasher. I did like how easy it was for him to get a weapon inside Hell Fest, but otherwise the Other was a pretty run-of-the-mill character, with the environment doing the heavy lifting of his intimidation factor. The reveal at the end about who he really was worked well; I wasn’t unsettled, but I liked the fact that it was just some guy. Maybe that’s an argument to not give him iconic and memorable characteristics like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, but the balance between his ability to blend into normal society and the memorable factor should’ve swung more in the latter’s favor for the purposes of a movie.

The movie’s dialogue was a little off in the first few scenes, but once they got to Hell Fest it flowed much more naturally. This was especially true of Natalie and Gavin’s bonding scenes; they sounded just like real people trying to find their groove on a slightly awkward first date. I liked most of the characters and thought their respective actors did a good job, particularly Forsyth, Edwards, Taylor-Klaus, and Attal. The score was good too. I thought they did a good job of crafting a more or less new environment for a slasher film, even if they didn’t utilize it to its fullest potential. Things like a ride “breaking down” and Natalie not knowing if the masked man approaching her while she was trapped in the car was the real killer or just an employee, were very cool tricks to throw the audience and the characters off-balance as to what was real and what was just part of the experience. More of that could’ve created a bigger thriller vibe, but what was there worked well.

Overall, Hell Fest is a fun slasher movie that could’ve pushed itself further. It’s worth watching, and if a sequel were to dig deeper into some of the themes and uncertainty this movie touched on, I’d watch that too.

Check out more of my reviews, opinions, and original short stories here!