From the mind that brought you Blood Gorge comes another indie masterpiece with an iconic slasher, easter eggs for RFN fans, 90s nostalgia, and all the indie awesomeness you could imagine: Hellmare is a legend for a reason.
The year is 1997, and on a gloomy evening in Detroit a group of friends are sucked into a horror movie when they gather at the house of a recently deceased occultist to screen a film entitled…HELLMARE.
Hellmare, RFN Pictures
Involve a 90s video store in anything and I’ll watch it. Hellmare is the VHS tape of legends, where no one knows where it came from, who made it, or why this horse-headed slasher is so fucking rad. Schneider inherits a home from his dead grandpa, inviting friends Whitley, Avi, Stanton, Linda, Bell, and Donny over to watch. Soon after the opening trailers, though, they are transported to the world of Hellmare, where the friends get picked off one-by-one. This meta horror masterpiece is not only heavy on the gore, but laughs and horror tropes that any fan would recognize immediately. It’s half horse, half man, all carnage as the group tries to free themselves from this living nightmare.
Hellmare follows Blood Gorge in having the same level of awesome effects. Everything from crowbars through the head to horseshoe violence to dissolving faces and death by power tool, Hellmare makes it look like a pretty gnarly way to go. But I think the star here was the amount of meta commentary involved. So many movie callouts, so many references to modern-day happenings — get distracted and you might miss one of these quit-witted quips. Not that you’d want to look away anyway, because Hellmare had my eyes glued to the screen with an indie-but-polished look and story that kept you engaged, forever guessing where this wild ride would take you next.
Which is a whole other aspect that I really appreciaed watching this film. So I already talked about the references to other horror movie classics, but I would be remiss to not talk about the in-movie trailers and their addition to the Hellmare main plot. Usually added as a fun nod to in-universe media, three trailers (Witchcraft Cop, The Vampire’s Lament, and D.E.A.T.H) weave their way into our main Hellmare movie. And even though I would’ve been fine having those remain trailers, never to be referenced again, the addition of those extra characters and monsters made Hellmare so much cooler than it already was.
Hellmare turned out to be so much more than I was anticipating. It reads like a love letter to the genre, packed with wild kills and effects, a storyline that kept me entertained, and the most fun set of characters I’ve seen lately. Not only was I rooting for the group to survive, I was also rooting for Hellmare to fill the screen with bloodshed and viscera. And even in the end, we’re blessed with credits full of bloopers. I love it here.
We’ve been slowly inching our way out of the 80s and into 90s nostalgia, and Hellmare took it to an entirely new level. When I tell you I said “I love this movie” no less than 5 times during my watch, I was not joking. Not one bit. Y’all just wait, Hellmare is gonna be the next big thing.
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