Hellbride (2007)

September 24, 2008

by Nathan Shumate

Produced, written and directed by Pat Higgins
Starring
- James Fisher
- Rebecca Herod
- James Kavaz
- Eleanor James
- Oli Wilkinson

Everyone says that kids these days don’t take seriously the great social institution of marriage. (And I can call all you twenty-somethings kids because I’m thirty-seven, and I can remember when people bought cassette tapes on purpose, dammit!) That’s why it’s heartening to see a movie with Hellbride’s premise even being made; after all, a possessed antique engagement ring would be pretty much a non-starter if the whole idea of getting hitched was irrelevant and passe, right? Granted, the young couple’s already living in the same apartment, so I don’t know why getting married is such a huge leap for them, but I guess the institution will take all the support it can get.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. According to the prologue voiceover, Victorian-era bride Josephine Stewart was betrayed by her fiance and retaliated by turning the nuptials into a bloodbath. Her engagement ring was thereafter graverobbed and ended up on the fingers of several other young brides-to-be whose matrimony became a cursed massacre. After residing for several decades with a collector of cursed paraphernalia (by the way, did you hear that Friday the 13th: The Series just hit DVD?), it was sold out of his estate, which is how it eventually end up in the hands of…

"Right. Next time, bring lawn chairs. Got it."

“Right. Next time, bring lawn chairs. Got it.”

…Lee (James Fisher), a young and nervous twenty-something Brit who hopes that having the ring in hand will give him the confidence to pop The Question to Nicole (Rebecca Herod). Lee’s kind of an interesting case; he is, putatively, a comedian by trade, although the clips shown of his standup act work as evidence to the contrary. It’s not even bad comedy, such as one might find in Holla! If I Kill You (2004) (which would more accurately be characterized as “apocalyptically-bad comedy”); what Lee does is non-comedy. He tells no jokes, and nobody laughs. I was ready to label his shtick as some kind of performance art until he’s referred to definitely as a comedian. Those Brits sure have changed their definition of comedy since the good old days of Fawlty Towers!

Now, just to keep you on your toes, the cursed engagement ring is not where the troubles start for Lee and Nicole. (She says yes, by the way.) Nicole’s father Mr. Meadows (James Kavaz) is a businessman in debt for £250,000 to one Mr. Cardini. When Cardini sends his son Jacob (Joey Page) around to rattle Meadows’ chain, Jacob makes the cardinal mistake of threatening to go after Nicole. One bullet hole in the forehead later, Jacob’s in no condition to threaten anybody. Nicole walks in on the body and the blood-spattered wallpaper, and immediately… volunteers to help her dad get rid of the body. It’s not just “the Family” that can show family solidarity, you know.

“Yeah! That’s right! Got any other sons you want to send around to threaten my daughter? Booyah!”

But now all the wedding preparations are being accomplished under the shadow of Cardini’s eventual retaliation. And if that weren’t enough, now the supernatural stuff starts going down. The pawnbroker (Neil Andrews) who sold Lee the ring is slaughtered by a figure in a “plague doctor” mask — the second no-budget feature in which I’ve seen that motif (here’s the first); I’m guessing that it’ll end up being the hockey mask of the 21st century.

Howcome I can’t get my own plague doctor?

Now, with that beginning, you probably think that this movie follows the patterns set down by scores of not-too-ambitious horror films, i.e., the supernatural menace starts working on the periphery of the star’s circle of acquaintances and works its way inward for the climax — and to a degree, you’d be right. (The most inexplicable occurrence? Nicole’s best friend Carly’s (Natalie Milner) current boyfriend Eric (Danny James) meets Nicole exactly once, for about twenty seconds; that night, he has his lips sewn shut in his sleep by the ghost of Josephine (Eleanor James) and her pet plague doctor. The second most inexplicable occurrence? Carnie notices he’s not in bed in the morning and panics, then sees that his car is still there and calms down — and his absence is never mentioned again.) What keeps the movie from grinding down its preset course like a locomotive on autopilot — though in this budget range, it’s probably more like a handcar — is the story’s tendency to digress, either back into the “gangster are after Dad” subplot, or into scenes which don’t much matter, but are pure gold anyway. The movie as a whole has a fairly light tone to it, and some of the tangential comedy scenes absolutely sing, like the security guards at Mr. Meadows’ establishment that try to extort a new coverall from Lee for spilling coffee on the old one. And there’s Carly’s cousin Sinclair (Cy Henty), the convenient occult researcher who knows the history of Josephine Stewart’s ring; Henty plays him for all the camp value he’s worth, making him a socially inept, horny, single guy with bad personal habits who’s got some sort of fixation on “kissing cousins.”

“Nothing gets rid of demonic possession like Mountain Dew!”

But if that’s where we hit the level of camp, then the conclusion of the movie zooms past that marker like it’s standing still and lands hip-deep in the kind of goofballism that one usually associates with Troma, with a supernatural showdown during the wedding (in the cheapest stand-in for a recption hall I’ve ever seen — and brother, I’m judging them against Mormon receptions held for nothing in the church’s cultural hall/basketball court), while outside a largely-unseen (and thus cheaper) gang war rages. I would have rather had a steady stream of campiness through the movie instead of huge lumps of it disgorged at the end, but what do I know?

Hellbride was written, produced and directed by Pat Higgins, who previously gave us KillerKiller (2007) (the films also have a couple of performers in common, James Kavaz and Cy Henty, and Hellbride even uses the same abandoned asylum in a dream sequence that was the central location for KillerKiller). The tone is wildly divergent between the two films (and having seen Hellbride, I’m more impressed with how Higgins restrained his comedic tendencies for KillerKiller), but unfortunately they share some of the same technical problems, especially in sound: again we get the dialog-deadening combination of thick British accents, spotty recording on location, and ambient background noises (most notably in early scenes where Lee and Nicole have soft conversations while walking through autumn leaves, or within earshot of the ocean). That, plus the budgetary limitations indicated by having this whole climactic gunfight between Cardini’s goons and the muscle Meadows hired to fill out the wedding party off-camera, leaves the impression that the final product isn’t exactly what Higgins had hoped for it.

“And if you think I’m ever coming here to get my nails done again, you’re crazy.”

However, it’s still head and shoulders above what most no-budget horror directors have done (especially no-budget directors who think they can breathe new life into that sucking wound of the genre, the tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy). At the time of this writing, Hellbride has no distribution, which I can only attribute to the fact that the godawful horror-comedies have muddied the water too far.