1.78:1 DVD capture: HellBent The DVD

Through Genius Products, the here! channel's boutique label shepherds HellBent to DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Sad to say this is a bootleg-quality presentation: the decision to source the DV production from a 35mm blow-up costs the film much of its aesthetic richness; shadows are so thick and impenetrable as to make one wish for a pair of night-vision goggles. The telecine operators seem to have introduced edge-enhancement into the image in an effort to compensate, but instead they've amplified the ringing artifacts intrinsic to tape-to-celluloid conversions. If it's tolerable, it's mainly because this movie is fucking awesome. The DD 5.1 audio is much less problematic, though the mix itself is disappointingly hemispheric and the instances of ADR tend to stand out. The only significant supplement is a HellBent-related episode of "here! backlot"--a 30-minute, spoiler-laden talking-heads featurette that doesn't start cooking until it's half over, once all the plot-rehashing is out of the way. Disappointingly, the piece never connects the dots between the late, great schlockmeister Joseph Wolf's desire to produce a 'gay Halloween' and writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts' involvement in the project (was he commissioned? Did parallel courses just happen to intersect?), but the tangent that delves into Steve Dyson's visual effects is revelatory. (HellBent's use of CGI is astonishingly seamless.) We also learn that almost the entire cast is straight--Will Smith has never looked like a bigger pussy for refusing to kiss Anthony Michael Hall. Trailers for HellBent, Third Man Out, Dante's Cove, Julie Johnson, April's Shower, and Deadly Skies round out the disc.-

An example of a movie that well and truly has its shit together, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts' excellent HellBent bills itself as the first "gay" slasher film and then transcends the gimmick to strike at the heart of the essential tragedy of "coming out" for many gay men: that at the moment of freedom, they're cut off at the knees. HellBent gains resonance in the fact that the modus of its shirtless, devil-masked antagonist (the film's feral/virile version of John Carpenter's Shape) is a super-sharp sickle with which he decapitates his victims--long the cinematic shorthand for castration. Sure, sexuality is at stake, as it is often in slasher cinema (and marvel at the moment in a club called "Meat" where a man is mock-raped by two chainsaw-wielding boy toys), but here, it's not so much about the fucking as it is about the knife-in-wax at the critical moment of sexual actualization. Fans of the sub-genre can probably mark the order in which its central foursome will (or won't) be dispatched--but consider mousy Joey (Hank Harris) discovering affirmation the moment before his ugly execution. Or, better, look to the lonesome complaint of Tobey (Matt Phillips), who actually finds himself pursuing the instrument of his demise, stripping off as he does the adornments that disguise the vulnerability of his true self.

Shot like an '80s slasher with all of the period's appreciation for lurid set-pieces and gore (it looks, and this is a compliment, like Tobe Hooper's Funhouse), HellBent delivers the goods with a tremendous amount of respect while elevating the conversation along its own parameters. There's a sense of true peril in the fates of our heroes, and in that identification, the picture--like "straight" slasher flicks that have its predominantly male (predominantly adolescent) audience identifying with a woman protagonist--manages to universalize the struggle for existential stability across battle lines drawn according to sexuality. Blue-eyed hero Eddie (Dylan Fergus) pleads at one point to a pal on the police force for her to not let "them" make this "just a gay-bashing thing," and amazingly enough, HellBent complies. There's an ineffable sadness about it that speaks to the skill with which it's been brought to the screen: it's a real movie about real people who, at the moment of their greatest satisfaction, are cut down and emasculated by a world that still wants to patronize a film like this into some kind of ghetto. Smart, sensitive, human, and sexy (note the murder of Chaz (Andrew Levitas) in a hopping nightclub): there's a lesson in the fact of HellBent; I'm not too good to learn it again.- (excerpted from a longer review found here)

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
84 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.78:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Stereo
CC
No
Subtitles
None
DVD-9
Region One
here!/Genius

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Published: September 26, 2006