07 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Hellions (2015)

I like weird movies.  I always have and I'm not 100% sure why.  Pragmatically, I like movies that challenge my perception of what I'm seeing and leave the ending open enough for me to imagine the continuation/conclusion of the story while the credits are rolling.  But even writing that here feels like a bit of a cop out.  I also like when a movie is so strange and bizarre that I have to watch it again and again and again to try and determine just what the hell I watched.  There's a Canadian filmmaker named Bruce McDonald who makes films like that and he seems to have provided yet another bizarre horror film, set on Halloween, called Hellions.

How the hell do I describe this movie?  It's a psychotronic Halloween pregnancy nightmare.  Let that sink in for a minute.  The simple description of the plot is that seventeen year old Dora (Chloe Rose) learns that she's 4 weeks pregnant on Halloween.  While weighing this discovery in her mind and waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up she begins to get accosted by children in the creepiest damn costumes you've ever seen.  Their taunting escalates as they show her boyfriend's head in their candy sack and suddenly the entire world shifts to a crazy pink world where a tornado happens inside a kitchen and it becomes completely impossible to discern what is real and what is fantasy.

I love Bruce McDonald's films.  That is to say, I love the three that I have seen, including this one.  The first film of his that I saw was The Tracey Fragments and in 2014 when I first did this little movie challenge I watched and reviewed the incredibly strange, but also arresting, Pontypool.  Hellions fits in nicely with the two films.  Like Tracey Fragments it employs incredible hallucinogenic editing sequences to metaphorically show (rather than tell) the heroines fracturing psyche.  Like Pontypool it employs equally incredible music and sound editing as well as subversion of horror tropes, such as deliberately over the top acting moments to accentuate the psychotically deranged fever dream that we've been sucked into.  Hellions also takes the creepy kid factor and pushes it to one of the most extreme levels paying homage and simultaneously outdoing classics like Bloody Birthday and Children of the Corn.  And when you think it couldn't go further, it does, and how.  Hint, if you've seen Andrzej Zulawski's Possession you may have an idea.

The music of this film stands above and beyond.  Composer Todor Kobakov and Ian LeFeuvre have quite possible crafted the creepiest mixture of electronic, rock, and chorale I've ever heard.  Every element comes together to set and elevate the mood of the film making it damn near impossible to look away even when you may want to.  The ending is questionable and since I've been using the "fever dream" analogy I feel it is appropriate to say that I'm still not sure if Dora's entire experience was real or imagined.  Definitely one to watch once, twice, maybe even three times, and conveniently on Netflix.  Oh yeah, and Robert Patrick (Terminator 2) is in it and he's wonderful.

Pontypool: 15 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

Ever watch a movie that had you completely captivated, but by the end of it, you felt like you had no real clue what you just watched?  It's happened to me a few times, not very often, but a few times is still  a few times.  Bruce McDonald's  Pontypool is another such film that has left me with a thoroughly confused, "What the hell did I just watch?" feeling.

The film is about a sleepy town's morning radio show.  What starts out as a typical day in a small and boring provincial town quickly escalates into the day from hell as a strange virus starts infecting the people of town via words.  Shock Jock Grant Mazzy and Producer Sydney Brier are hard pressed to figure out what's going on, let alone survive it.

The film is all about words, perception of words, and power of words, at least from what I can gather.  The virus is kind of like a metaphor for the dangers of misusing and misinterpreting words.  Essentially, it turns people into repetitious, word spewing, zombie like critters who have to infect other people or they physically come to pieces and die.  It's got some pretty gruesome moments as well as some eery tension building where Mazzy looks like he's losing his mind in a most fantastic fashion.

Ultimately, I still don't quite understand what was going on with the film.  It left me and my room mate staring at it and repeating the word "What?" for quite some time.  It definitely had our attention though, I think we just need to watch it again and maybe pause it and really examine certain parts.  It's quite well shot, well edited, and the sound design is great.  Stephen McHattie puts on a great performance as Mazzy and Lisa Houle's frantic performance as Sydney lends quite nicely to the duo character dynamic.  Again, I keep having to ask the question: "What did I just watch?" Which, in all fairness, should not have surprised me from the director of The Tracey Fragments.

3 out of 5 skulls.