TADFF Day 2: Hellmouth

Its been a pretty sparse start to Toronto After Dark due to a miserable poutine induced case of indigestion that I was wholeheartedly convinced was lurking Ebola thanks to my layover in Dallas. However day two of the fest I managed to squeeze in a double header starting with Pontypool & The Septic Man writer Tony Burgess’s new film Hellmouth. A bold and moody atmospheric personal and spiritual journey dueling demons and self, did Hellmouth set the audience afire and live up to the hype? Hell no.

I have never found a film so instantaneously dull as Hellmouth. I knew within the first ten minutes this misguided effort couldn’t be held together even with the gravitas superglue that is Stephen McHattie. A green screen soaked affair visually similar to a low rent Sin City 2 and dialogue as wooden and dated as Frank Miller’s 2008 debacle The Spirit adaptation. A throwback film attempting to pay tribute to noir films of the 50s and 70s I will concede that especially given its budget the visual effects team has done a fantastic job of creating a sprawling and ominous grayscale environment that looks gorgeous and engaging even with the occasional misplaced and overdone demonic creature. Hellmouth wants to be an epic, a bizarre Dante’s Inferno. All it succeeds in being is more confusing than reading all of Divine Comedy translated by one-limbed monkeys using typewriters made of emoticons.

There’s a ghostly buxom babe straight from a pulp detective novel who for whatever reason immediately falls in love with Baker (McHattie does look damn good for his age but really?), and a cop hilariously pulled straight from the same clichéd pages. Not to mention evil afterlife creatures and gothic gloom galore. It reminded me a lot of Sucker Punch with the actors trying their absolute damndest to convincingly deliver dialogue that reeks like sulfur and eternal hellfire. It’s a mess. A complete and utter mess that tries to wrangle far too many tangents and loses sight of the already messy focus of Baker battling his own mortality and years wasted living in fear and seclusion. I sat through the entire film with the same confused look on my face that McHattie wears as he scans the bubbling brimstone landscape around him.

Yeah, that look. That’s the one.

I honestly have very little of value to contribute to a civilized discussion of Hellmouth. McHattie is brilliant as always and somehow works his way through a script Burgess must have written by passing around a group of Alzheimer’s patients asking what life was like in their day. I can say without sarcasm that director John Geddes truly has tirelessly worked to create a stunning original environment for such an impressively limited budget. The film’s conclusion finally seems to right the ship slightly and point us back in the direction it was steered before wave after wave of unnecessary convoluted distractions sunk this film to the depths of agony. A film that will have inevitably have just as many blind champions as it will bitter detractors. Hellmouth will require repeat viewings to fully decipher exactly what the fuck is going on. Coincidentally repeat viewings of this film can be found in a particularly brutish circle of hell.

This column originally appeared at Loser City.

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