For the Boys: Paul Etheridge-Ouzts’ “HellBent”

The central killer’s lack of motivation or identity becomes the film’s strength as well as its nagging question mark; bare-chested and “horned” (literally and figuratively) he simply lords over the L.A. queer community like an earthbound Chernobog, mercilessly massacring this group of friends with a rather rude insistence. While one could read any number of offensive ideologies into this single-minded gay-killing machine, the film revels in playing both stalker and victim with a refreshing joie de vivre. Just as Fergus (and the camera) ogles Kirkwood’s arched, bare back as a single trickle of blood makes its way down into the waistband of his jeans, the audience is made complicit in that most reliable of eye-candy combos: flawless tanned flesh and violence interruptus. The masked killer, who first spots his chosen quadrangle of victims (from behind, mind you) in a cruisy forest locale, needs not to define himself beyond the genre parameters the film sets up: like his audience, he’s come for the guys…and the decapitations. 

As with any low-budget formula slasher, “HellBent” plays by the rules, rather clinically marching its way through each killing on its way to the climactic chase and/or shoot-out. Though one could (understandably) wish it wasn’t simply content to be a sexual role-reversal horror standby and had pushed harder for a little narrative ingenuity, “HellBent” has a palpable sense of good will that’s pretty hard to deny. And first-time director Etheridge-Ouzts certainly has some nifty tricks up his sleeve: there’s a bit in a menacing, dulled neon red-drenched nightclub bathroom that’s as well-gelled the film’s primped boy-toys, and then there’s the money shot, in which a lascivious tongue snakes ever closer to our hero’s eyeball, until…well, talk about eye candy.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of a Reverse Shot, as well as an editor at Interview magazine and frequent contributor to Film Comment.]

A scene from Paul Etheridge-Ouzts’s “HellBent.&rdquo Photo courtesy Regent Releasing.

Take 2
by Brad Westcott

Civil unions. Hospital visitation rights. a “Halloween” of one’s own. The self-touted “first all-gay slasher film,” “HellBent” seeks to rectify a heretofore alarming absence in the annals of cinematic history.  Should this reviewer’s tone sound needlessly glib or insensitive, chalk it up to the bottomless depths of enmity engendered by 85 minutes he would desperately like back. Swap out the movie’s foursome of predominantly hunky twentysomethings—in search of good times at a West Hollywood Halloween party—with the usual gaggle of straight horny teens, and you’d have a movie so derivative, predictable, and well, just bad, that one doubts it could have found an outlet on the straight-to-video market. 

But then it is impossible to separate this movie from its homosexual address. Although director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts claims he “wanted the sexuality of the characters to feel incidental rather than be the defining trait,” everything in “HellBent” is defined by just that, from the emphasis on the boys’ relative cruising skills, to the specific set of fears exploited by its devil-masked killer. There is certainly nothing wrong with a film addressing itself so narrowly to a specific demographic—especially when one considers the century of hetero-centric cinema with which queer audiences have contended. And admittedly the ideas behind “HellBent” threaten to become interesting and relevant to film scholars concerned with “subject-positioning,” genre, and gender politics. Yet the just-plain-awfulness of it prevents one from taking it that seriously.  Let’s hope better things come of the second gay slasher film.

[Brad Westcott is a frequent contributor to a

Reverse Shot.]

Andrew Levitas in Paul Etheridge-Ouzts’s “HellBent.&rdquo Photo courtesy Regent Releasing.

Take 3
by Suzanne Scott

It takes a great deal of effort to make a disappointing slasher flick, and even more to make a cowardly one. “HellBent” is, at first glance, a film full of potential, and many will initially find themselves happily overlooking the muddy DV aesthetic with the pre-title credits tease featuring a scythe-wielding serial killer (apparently an “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy extra who kept his costume) getting medieval on the nubile asses of young men. One might even forgive the fact that the film does little with its cinema-ready setting, the West Hollywood Halloween parade and surrounding S&M clubs, all specializing in that fine line between pain and pleasure, all flirting with the cocktail of excitement and dread that a good slasher film should drown its audience in. But, sadly, for a film that has the gall to verbalize the desire that its killing spree not just be about “fag bashing,” “HellBent” is precisely that, a cock-tease of a film that doesn’t even allow its characters to get a little action before they are unceremoniously sliced and diced. Poor form, since the slasher rulebook clearly states that chastity is rewarded and promiscuity punished—the only crime here, apparently, is being gay. Compounding this crime is a killer with no motivation whatsoever who is coded as “Dark Other,” another disappointment in a film that can’t help but be viewed as political as it’s openly billing itself as the “first gay slasher film.” Though, arguably, one might read the psycho’s devil mask and grim-reaper weaponry as a cheeky condemnation of Right-wing prejudice, “HellBent” doesn’t put out in any capacity.  For a movie that strives to twist convention, it is painfully conventional.

[Suzanne Scott is a staff writer at Reverse Shot.]