The first full hour of Hellbreeder consists of a woman's dreams, hallucinations, & possibly some real-world encounters, a jumble of nonsense that drags on & on with no real story. Several scenes shown more than once with slight variations, as if showing a bad scene three times would make it less bad. There are excruciatingly long sequences of smoking cigarettes or walking or sitting or staring.
Now & then the story cuts to the detectives investigating the murders, & they talk without doing anything, then we get to watch the protagonist smoke another cigarette or go somewhere else & sit down or have another dull hallucination or dream about going somewhere to sit down & listen to the voices in her head.
Within this moronic mishmash we are kind of informed there is a serial killer of children on the loose, & in the surreal dream-state of the female protagonist which we can't trust, the killer is either a weird clown, or a homeless nutjob she encountered on the night her own son was murdered, & who she plans to murder in revenge but then decides to screw him instead, if he even existed.
Then at about exactly the one hour mark, without prelude or foundation, it is announced from left field that the killer is a supernatural vampire clown known as Hellbreed -- a name that means absolutely nothing & we never hear it said a second time -- & we realize that in its own awkward ignorant way, this film is a rip-off of Stephen King's It.
The last half hour gets more confused as it is revealed our dreaming hallucinatory protagonist is an escapee from a mental asylum, the same asylum where the vampire killer clown hides out, & the police take our progagonist back to the madhouse where she watches them get murdered by the glow-in-the-dark vampire clown. This half hour though extremely foolish at least has some exploitation value & is better than the deadly dull first hour of crappy dreamin' & smokin'. When all is finished, the rest of the madhouse loonies gather around our protagonist & sing a nice song. Our last image is of the nutty heroine laughing maniacally; I think she was laughing at us viewers for the evil trick of making us watch such a turd.
Throughout this glacial hour & a half of nonsense we are forced to listen to an aggressively obnoxious soundtrack that monotonously rips off the soundtrack to Halloween.
There is a ten minute film in this mess somewhere, an unlikeable short film but better than this unbearable hour & a half. There's enough pomposity in the thing that it seems probable the writer-directors mistook their failure for some kind of art-horror project, but it is eight-percent padding of the worst kind, while the remaining twenty percent is plain assinine.
The acting wasn't as bad as the direction & writing. Lyndie Uphill as the screw-loose heroine hovers around adequate in her performance, & might've been great fun if the script had been half good. Dominique Pinon miscast as the English detective with the French accent is not up to his usual level of fine character performance, but he's got presence & if the film had made any sense he'd've been great to see in it.
Harold Gasnier as the evil clown is successfully disgusting & would've been a great monster-clown if he'd had any actual context or story in which to do the evil. The cinematography here & there attempted some uneven experimentalism, but it all had a cheap look; like Lyndie Uphill's performance, the photography might've seemed pretty good for Z-horror, if only it had been telling anything resembling a coherent story.
The talent & semi-talent knocking around in this turkey is all wasted on direction & scriptwriting that doesn't even rise to the level of abject amateurism. Reportedly there was an earlier cut of the film that was even worse, with a voice over explaining what's going on a la the Golden Turkey Award classic The Creeping Terror (1964). The final cut has so little dialog it approaches being a silent movie.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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