Hell’s Half Acre

K Studios

R1 DVD

Web: http://www.hellshalfacremovie.com/

Hell’s Half Acre moves between comedy, grindhouse and horror and offers a cheesy low budget tale of serial killers, ghosts and gore. It begins with a rather fun seven minute introduction. It is presented as a “paid announcement” from a group called “Wake Up Call for Parents”. It is filled with such the family-values angst and moral outrage that you at first consider that it may be real. Slowly, however, as the tone moves from angst to hysteria the satire becomes obvious and sets the exploitation genre tone for the film itself.

Hell’s Half Acre opens with a group of friends looking for a missing girlfriend. When they locate her naked dead body in a dungeon under Bob Moore’s house they decide to take revenge. In a totally over the top scene they beat Moore up, tie him and his young son to a chair and then set the house on fire. This really gives you fair warning of the presentation of HHA, it is filled with cheesy, excessive and deliberately exaggerated horror violence which is filmed using classic exploitation and horror cinematography.

We then move forward ten years later to the anniversary of the killings – exactly what you would expect in a splatter film ! A couple is parked at a secluded location with the boyfriend, Steve, complaining that he can’t ever seem to get any. Nicole, the girlfriend, sees a strange isolated figure near a tree but it soon disappears. Before Steve can drive away it smashes into the car with a sledge hammer and then as Steve lies bleeding on the ground takes a running jump and smashes the hammer into his head !

Of course when Nicole goes to the police they accuse her of playing a prank and then being hysteria, when she grabs the detective’s gun they lock her up. Only the next day do they find Steve murdered and a rampage of rather nicely presented if not extreme killings begin.

HHA is a strange amalgam of exploitation, grindhouse and dark comedy .It certainly has solid horror moments with some great scares and bloody antics, but the tone is generally that of black humour. This is especially evidentwith the film being prefaced with the Wake Up Call for Parents warning and Spitshine singing the “Hell’s Half Acre” song extolling the virtue of killing.

Of course this is a low budget film and the acting is a little wooden here and there, but Tesia Nicoli as Nicole is surprisingly successful and the killer certainly send a chill up your spine. The mixture of horror, comedy and grindhouse actually works pretty damn well here and the explosions, gore and violence are very professionally done. Hell’s Half Acre ends up packing quite a punch in both the horror and dark humour departments and stands out from many other indie productions in both it’s production values and great sense of horror humour !

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.4 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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