Filmmaking duo Toby Poser and John Adams have built a fan base following their 2021 lo-fi horror film Hellbender the breakthrough among genre enthusiasts. Her latest work is Hellhole (now streaming on Shudder), a super-slimy horror comedy that boasts a higher budget than their previous films, though it’s still so primitive that the tally is surely just a few zeros away from matching the catering budget of a crappy Netflix action flick. And that can be a charming aesthetic for a film that exists to splatter corn syrup blood like kids with water balloons on the Fourth of July. The question is, can Poser and Adams hold our attention for a fairly simplistic 89-minute exercise in invasive body horror?

Hellhole: STREAM OR SKIP?

The essentials: TITLE CARD: 1814. SERBIAN TERRITORY. Two members of Napoleon’s army get lost in the woods when they come across a woman who gives them a horse, which shortly thereafter explodes in a flood of entrails, revealing a rather rape-like special effect involving lots of tentacles that finishes these guys off – after we cut away, thank goodness. SOME TIME LATER: It’s the age of trucks now, as John (Adams) is standing next to one. He and Emily (Poser) lead a small crew of fracking extractors in search of the energy source lurking beneath Serbian soil. It’s also the age of the internet, not that you can get it out here in the middle of nowhere, where an old Eastern Bloc building stands, a decaying shell of a nod to a largely dead communist age. Well, dead enough that Americans like John and Emily can show up and be capitalists, at the expense of the environment. That’s how it is.

It is a bit, let’s say, dynamic here, though. Sofija (Olivera Perunicic) and Nikola (Aleksandr Trmcic) are there because this piece of cold, godforsaken forest is home to endangered rabbits, and nobody wants to see cute little bunnies getting fracked, right? Maybe, if you’re not a damn fracker. We eventually learn that Sofija is an expert in parasitology, which, as we’ll soon learn, applies all too well to the situation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – we’ve got a lot of boring dialogue ahead of us before we get to the part where the creature we saw in the cold outdoors emerges in an explosion of mushy, gooey guts.

A key character is Teddy (Maximum Portman), Emily’s nephew, who cooks for the crew and may show romantic interest in Sofija. They stand by while the crew digs up one of the French soldiers (Marko Filipovic), who happens to be alive after 200 years because he’s the beast’s functioning host. Thus sets in motion the plot, which consists of the following: several scenes of John and Emily talking to each other, and Emily and Teddy talking to each other, and the workers talking to Emily, and the workers talking to each other, and the scientists talking to Emily, and Sofija talking oddly gleefully about parasites, and Nikola talking about how the creature – which invades body cavities and eventually kills its host in a gush of bloody vomit that leaves half a leg in a puddle of guts and goo – shouldn’t be killed but studied. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of talking in this movie. And not enough action.

What movies will it remind you of?: Hellhole points to some lasting touchstones: The thing, Foreigner, Dance of the DevilsIt also made me think The emptinessa similar cheap horror film from 2018 that implements the principle of “maximum effort with minimum money” in a much more exciting way.

Remarkable performance: Portman stands out here as he seems more comfortable reciting boring dialogue than the rest of the cast.

Memorable dialogue: An example of tryhard comedy, from Emily: “I haven’t soaked a tampon in years. Now I only use them to hold my nose when I’m dealing with motherfuckers like you.”

Sex and skin: None.

Our opinion: Creature movies inevitably make us nervous because we have to listen to all the talkative stuff to get to the good part. The Great White Shark has remarkably little shark action. But the key is to energize the talky stuff with witty dialogue and/or compelling characters and then deliver a thrilling climax. Hellhole does not. It plods along with a turgid script, a cast with limited charisma and a directing style that far too often places two characters in a static frame and has them talk to each other. Consider our patience tried, as the film threatens to lose its appeal before the brief bursts of action even begin. (At least there are some cheesy special effects at play here, though the use of cheesy CGI is more of a tongue-in-cheek nudge, like, Isn’t it hilarious how shitty this looks?)

That is, the dynamic is off – the ratio of boring shit to funny shit is completely out of balance. Screenwriters Adams, Poser and Lulu Adams seem to want to tease revelations and I-think-the-creature-is-to-be-revealed.Cultivation developments by having their scientist characters rant about the adaptability of a species of squid whose remains they find in the food left over by some of their fellow characters. You will sit through such overly long moments with your arms folded and think: The payout had better be good – and then your patience is never really rewarded (especially with that vague non-ending). There isn’t much tension here and the characters are too boring to root for, whether you want to see them survive or succumb to the big bloodbath in the third act. Sometimes this kind of tight-budget endeavor has its charm, but Hellhole really struggles to overcome his limitations.

Our call: SKIP IT. A lot of blablabla doesn’t necessarily torpedo a film, but in Hellholeit’s just boring. The same goes for the creature effects, scares, kills, and comedy.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.