Main cast: Zelda Adams (Izzy), Lulu Adams (Amber), Toby Poser (Izzy’s Mother), and John Adams (The Hiker)
Directors: John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser
Normally, low budget movies that are directed, written, and starred by the same people, and worse, people that are related to one another—John Adams and Toby Poster are married, and their daughters star alongside them here—scream vanity project or money laundering. Fortunately, Hellbender isn’t something I’d find lurking in the lower levels of B-grade movie hell.
Oh, and heh, this is a movie from the Adams family.
It’s more of a coming of age story than a horror film, actually. Izzy lives with her mother, who is never given a name here, and they entertain themselves by forming a metal band call H6llB6nd6r to pass the time. However, the young lady is bored. Her mother tells her that she is born with an auto-immune disease, which is why she must never leave their remote home to the town where there are folks around, and also why she eats nuts and tree bark all the time. Hence, it is inevitable that she will one day sneak out and meet a young lady, Amber, and decides to rebel against her mother’s rules.
Yet, why does her mother insist that Izzy stay away from other people? Well, with a movie title like Hellbender, of course the reason isn’t a benign sort. The movie gives it away pretty early, so I guess I won’t be spoiling things if I share that Izzy and her mother are witches called the very thing this movie is named after. They become more powerful by eating other living things, the bigger the people. What, are they the descendants of the witch that plagued Hensel and Gretel?
The plot of this one doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. For example, Izzy and her mother avail themselves to modern amenities and technology, so unless I’m to assume that Izzy is really stupid. I don’t understand why she never tried to find out more about her auto-immune disease online. Heaven knows, there is so many information out there to allow one to believe that they have any and every disease under the sun.
The acting is alright, thank goodness, although the lines uttered by the characters can be occasionally hammy at times. Still, it’s pretty interesting to see how Izzy and her mother begin to come into conflict as Izzy discovers her true nature and decides that she’d rather live a different lifestyle than the one decided for her by her mother. Ah yes, teen rebellion, so typical and, in this case, hell on earth because eating people by the dozen and yet somehow never getting fat can sure be an addictive diet to have.
However, I feel that this one is better off being a short film. This is because much of the movie feels heavily padded with inconsequential, long drawn out scenes of people walking or staring far ahead, and some other scenes feel like they could be easily taken out without the movie losing anything important in the process. The bulk of the good and important-to-the-plot stuff is packed in the later half, and one can easily just fast forward through the more plodding scenes in the first half.
All in all, this one has some intriguing ideas and concepts, but it feels limited, by perhaps its budgetary constraints. What could have been expounded on may require special effects or lighting that are too expensive, for example, while cheaper-to-shoot scenes are lengthened unnecessary to make up the running length. This one is a potentially solid movie, in other words, trapped in its low budget hell that it unfortunately can’t bend.
