The rare slasher film that’s not a sequel to or remake of a previous one, Hell Fest<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0exploits the premise of a traveling Halloween carnival being infiltrated by an actual masked killer who avoids detection by blending in with the hired scarers. Directed by Gregory Plotkin (Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension<\/em>) from a screenplay with five names attached to it, the film is free of subtext and provides only minimal backstory: College student Natalie (Amy Forsyth), her best friend Brooke (Reign Edwards), Brooke’s sarcastic punk roommate Taylor (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and their respective male love interests go to the Hell Fest amusement park on Halloween night, where they — but Natalie in particular — are stalked by a Michael Myers-ish figure. The scares are modestly effective, and the between-scares scenes of six lively young people horsin’ around at a spook alley are tolerable. The place itself is a vast theme park full of creative environments (this is supposed to be a traveling<\/em> operation?), and it’s fun to watch the characters interact with them even when they’re not being killed. Horror stalwart Tony Todd (the Candyman himself) has a one-scene cameo as if to give the potential new franchise its bona fides. It could have used more themed kills — smashing someone’s head with an oversized “test your strength” mallet is all we get — but slasher movies are like trick-or-treat candy: You can’t be too choosy.<\/p>\n The rare slasher film that’s not a sequel to or remake of a previous one, Hell Fest\u00a0exploits the premise of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":10310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B-<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 28 min.; rated R for\u00a0horror violence, and language including some sexual references<\/em><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"