‘Hell Hole’ Review: A Creature Feature By Way of a Mumblecore-ish Workplace Comedy

With Hell Hole, the Catskills-based filmmaking collective known as the Adams family takes its first wobbly baby steps outside its homegrown horror comfort zone. Trading the group’s signature brand of lyrical, self-reflective terror for rambling, environmentalist sci-fi story set among a fracking crew living and working among industrial decay at the edge of a Balkan wilderness, the film is more interesting as an exercise in stretching genre tentacles than a satisfying narrative or artistic one-off. Still, it features enough of the cockeyed familial ruminations and loose improvisational aura for which the filmmakers have become known that their devotees will be more than pleased.

Heading up a fracking crew in the remote reaches of Serbia, Americans Emily (Toby Poser) and John (John Adams) find themselves at odds with the local workers and researchers who make sure their recently legalized extraction operation is above board to minimize environmental impact. As they bore into the earth, they puncture a stinking, organic sac containing a perfectly preserved (and still-coherent) 19th-century French soldier who demands that the team end his life. Ignoring his pleas, Emily, John, and their cohorts discover too late that his body is carrying a stowaway of uncertain origin that’s hunting for its perfect, fleshy new home.

In characteristic Adams family fashion, Poser and Adams have their suckers in every facet of Hell Hole’s creation, having written the film alongside their eldest daughter, Lulu Adams, in addition to performing on camera and sharing the director’s chair. John Adams does quadruple duty here with additional credits as editor and composer, and it’s through score and editing that Hell Hole feels most of a piece with the collective’s prior work—namely with its sky-high drone shots, jaggedly assembled scare interludes, and a spare, guitar-heavy soundscape that gestures back to the group’s punk-rock roots even as the film expands their creative canvas outward.

Frequent collaborator Trey Lindsey handles visual effects and stop-motion animation alongside VFX veteran Todd Masters. Together, they bring to life a tentacled, butthole-diving monstrosity accentuated with simple CGI that’s charmingly redolent of such primitive digital creature features as The Faculty and Deep Rising, only on a much smaller, Henenlotterian scale.

Whether making movies or rearing squidgy primeval cephalopods, growing pains are to be expected. As filmmakers who’ve found their niche with the homespun expressionistic horrors of The Deeper You Dig, Hellbender, and last year’s Where the Devil Roams, the Adams family seems to struggle a bit with the more prosaic nature of this science-minded riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing. After an amped-up opening sequence, Hell Hole settles into a lightly mumblecore-ish, workplace-comedy vibe and only intermittently picks up its feet thereafter.

Chatty, expositional, and dry as a cuttlebone, the humor here is merely amusing, but consistently so. Olivera Peruničić and Aleksandar Trmčić are saddled with reams of technical dialogue and ably rise to the occasion as smiling, socially clumsy pedants, and comedy arises from misunderstandings between their characters and their foolhardy American taskmasters.

The most consistent recurring theme across the work of the Adams family—parenthood as a siphoning off of the life giver’s vitality in a protracted, eternal cycle of decay and renewal—finds its most literal, alien expression here. Though Hell Hole has a lot on the brain, it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers had nurtured this thread a little more, as the film’s tender, gestationary final minute provides more horrific food for thought than the preceding 87.