‘Hell Hole’ Review – This Monster Movie Needs To Dig Deeper

The Adams family films have been on the up and up lately, catching the eye of horror enthusiasts ever since The Deeper You Dig in 2019. Their tendencies for lingering, dread-infused horrors present in their recent filmography grew in Hellbender to play with something more overt and in your face. That is to say, a good bit more daring. The Adams family have pushed their efforts here towards daring in a greater capacity.

The family’s latest film Hell Hole stars John Adams and Toby Poser, who also direct the film, and on paper, everything points to an enormous reference to The Thing. It veers from this crutch very early on, but it does find itself touching on similar themes of othering & paranoia, with the addition of environmental messaging.

Setting the scene for its borrowed themes of alienation sees Emily and John (Poser and Adams, respectively) running a fracking site on foreign soil in Serbia with a local crew. During the drilling efforts, something strange is unearthed: a body enveloped in a mysterious black membrane of some extrinsic origin.

Once the body regains consciousness, paranoia eventually settles in amongst the team and is introduced in a relatively similar fashion to how the Adams team has excellently woven in lingering fears and foreboding indications of something being wrong. This unfortunately clashes with markedly different attitudes of splatstick and tongue-in-cheek B-movie conventions that establish themselves in the opening of the film. Once the sequences of Hell Hole’s honestly compelling sociological stalemates reach their natural end, the waves break and the film strips itself away as a comically simplified kill-or-be-killed vehicle that cheapens the depth it has granted itself.

Perhaps what the Adams family wanted to lend was an ode to the monster movies of the Cold War. Styled for the modern age, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between tensions then and now on an interpersonal level. But a few steps up the ladder of progress earned over decades of diplomacy can be undone in the blink of an eye. This can be gleaned from the film’s first act.

As its more well-handled themes are discarded, the monster portions that dominate the rest of the movie are devoid of the reasoning of questioning a motive beyond “they might be the monster in disguise” and devolve into base-level paranoia. It reneges on the depth it promises; where the B-movies of the Cold War era used its creatures as either heavy-handed or nuanced allegories for very specific fears during its eras, Hell Hole doesn’t particularly have any to draw from when the monster shows its hand.

The film still provides an entertaining watch but there isn’t much to offer underneath the slick and frozen ground it presents. It may be that this needed to gestate longer to adopt more meaning or possibly take that which was already embedded, extending into a figuration of what fears this monster can draw independently from the oil fracking workers and those who ran the operation. There’s a lot more waiting to be mined under the surface.

Hell Hole is currently available to stream on Shudder.