Rent Hellions (2015)

Spoilers follow ... - Hellions review by NP

I nearly didn’t make it through the first few moments of this Halloween themed horror. Sultry teen Dora Vogel (Chloe Rose) finds out she is pregnant and it seems very likely she is set to use the miracle of a life growing beneath her pierced naval as a reason to pout and act petulant, rolling those eyes beneath her thick goth make-up. And yet these tedious inevitabilities never actually happen. And if you can get through that, the rest of the 80-minute running time is a very rewarding experience.

For someone I was expecting at best to tolerate, Dora emerges as a true hero. She does everything right, even scores a few victories against the creepy, larger-than-life trick-or-treaters that have created a seeming world of their own. And like all heroines, she is put through a punishing and genuinely unnerving sequence of events before the ending brings about absolutely no conclusion at all!

‘Hellions’ straddles demonic baby possession, creepy children, a pink-hued alternate dimension, and some frightening surreal imagery. Director Bruce McDonald and Writer Pascal Trottier have clearly worked very closely to bring about this convincing dark journey to life and the pace rarely slackens – although in an hallucinogenic project like this, the pace can be negligible. Suffice it to say, you may be too busy being impressed by the scale of strangeness, or trying to figure out what is going, or just feeling sympathy for Dora as she is continually convinced she is free of the nightmare, only to find he is even more deeply embedded in it.

I recommend this dark horror fantasy.