Hellions (2015) Review

Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!

Plot Summary: After discovering she's pregnant on Halloween, a young girl must battle supernatural children hellbent on taking her baby.

Review: Wow, as I live and breathe, someone actually decided to make a pretentious Halloween horror movie. I thought the closest instance of that shit we'd ever experience would be Rob Zombie's bastardization of "Halloween 2." Oh fuck...this is not going to be good. Look, Halloween is either fun or scary depending on your perspective. Hell, maybe even sexy if you want to go there (the more nurse and schoolgirl outfits the better!). But don't give me this art house bullshit with lame, pro-life metaphors spliced in for good measure. It's not a total debacle, but there are only so many "what does this mean" moments a sane individual can take before they snap and reach for the kitchen knife. This movie started off with a lot of promise too...what a shame.

So what on earth is this movie about? The face value interpretation: Dora, a 17 year old, finds out she's pregnant on Halloween conveniently. Planning to hang out with her boyfriend that night, and explain to him the...uhh...good(?) news, Dora is harassed by strange trick-or-treaters. At first things appear to be typical hi-jinks, but they quickly spiral into murderous chaos when she finds the boyfriend's head in one of the kid's bag. Magically, the house shakes and the night becomes a somewhat lit up world. They were trying to make this look like a blood moon, but it's far too pink; I don't know, the lighting is way off. Dora's doctor comes to help her, gets killed, and Dora realizes her baby is growing far faster than a normal human baby would. There is something with a voice talking to Dora in her mind--not sure if that's supposed to be the baby or one of the evil kids. Whatever...Dora learns that salt hurts the evil children, or hellions if you will, just as the town Sheriff shows up; I don't know why Robert Patrick signed up for this shit but okay. The sheriff explains how he knows about the hellions as they came for his wife and kid too which is utterly ridiculous but, again, okaaaay. Dora is later captured, after the sheriff seemingly dies, and she experiences an overblown coke trip. The T-1000 saves her, however, and they run away only to somehow end up at the sheriff's house. The sheriff gives Dora a monstrous baby just as hers begins to grow rapidly. After running through a field of exploding pumpkins, Dora uses a sickle to cut out her hellspawn before waking up in a hospital. The film gives us the dream within a dream fake out before cutting to a scene that was actually at the beginning of the movie. Dora looks at a bunch of babies in the maternity ward, hears that dumb voice from earlier, and roll credits. Well...that made perfect sense.

Pretentious interpretation inbound: Dora, a scared, wannabe rebel teenager, learns she is pregnant and realizes her life will fall to pieces as a result. Already struggling to graduate, and perhaps realizing her relationship with her boyfriend is superficial, decides to initiate her own abortion once she learns the doctor must tell her mom. Due to the copious amount of blood loss, Dora hallucinates while in a state of regret over her decision; we see evidence of this when she inexplicably wakes in a pool of blood in the bathtub. Dressing ironically as an angel for Halloween, Dora is tormented by the hellions which represent angry children who were also aborted. They killed her boyfriend since he was the one who got her pregnant, the doctor for shattering her world, and the sheriff who may have been wooing her mom or whoever the hell he's supposed to be; there was definitely something shady going on there. The world turns pink as that represents the inside of her womb with constant cuts to the baby growing inside and that inner voice probably belonging to the baby as well. The fake out dream even mentions the fear that Dora thought her mom would see her as a whore. Everything else added is just for artsy reasons I'm not going to waste my time trying to understand.

Now if you think I'm being exceptionally harsh simply due to the pretentious nature of the story, well, there are plenty of other stupid aspects. For example, why does the music sound like a reworked "Silent Night?" This isn't fucking Christmas, son. Why are so many shots reused over and over again? This movie, with the credits, barely clocks in at 80 minutes--this is shameless filler. You're really going to make that crack trip scene last for a full 2 minutes?! When we factor in the opening and ending scenes being the same, what are we looking at, a 50 minute running time realistically? That's unforgivable. And what's up with the fucking pumpkin patch--obviously that was supposed to mean something. Kind of hard to take it seriously when the CGI is absolute, sci-fi channel-esque shit. Come on, son.

The general idea here, a pregnant girl attacked by demons on Halloween, could have worked quite well, but it turned into whatever the hell this was. The imagery can be good at times, and the actors were decent given the material, but it's hard to find many positives to say. The amount of filler is unacceptable, the execution is a mess, the story is incoherent, and the film itself was trying way too damn hard to be pretentious. They didn't even take advantage of the scene when Dora is gearing up to fight the hellions with her salt filled shotgun shells--that shit ends almost immediately. I don't know what the fuck went wrong, but if you've made me resort to comparing your film to the Rob Zombie "Halloween" sequel, you've done something incredibly wrong!

Notable Moment: When we get that random, two minute coke trip. Seriously, what the hell was that all about besides padding out the running time?

Final Rating: 4/10