Hell is Full (2010)

Directed by Steve Hudgins

Viewed on Amazon Prime

 

Story Summary: A series of people’s encounters with the undead during a budding zombie apocalypse.

 

There is a very good reason that this zombie film was picked out of the surely thousands that exist. That sole reason is that the director (among other things) is the same person who directed one of the previous movies that I covered, Goatsucker. Goatsucker was an ambitious micro budget film about a group of people being hunted by a…Goatsucker (that still seems so wrong to type) while out in the wilds of Kentucky. No one is who they appear to be and the plot is rather twisty, leading to a good time had by me and a poor time had by most of the characters.

While Goatsucker was far from perfect, it had a charming amount of craftiness and ambition to it, which made me curious about the other films from Hudgins, so I decided to go in order and watch the movie that he made after Goatsucker. So without further ado, Hell is Full:

 

Hell is Full is a zombie movie with a micro budget and an unhealthy amount of ambition. Ditching the traditional narrative structure that most mainstream movies adhere to, this film has a non-linear narrative. The opening scene focuses on who I assumed to be our main character, Johnny, an average young man who finds that his neighbor, Joe, has left his truck in the road. Johnny examines the truck and finds that it is covered in blood so he goes up to Joe’s house to see if he is alright. After being sent away by Joe, Johnny returns home where he is attacked by zombified versions of Joe and another man he is unfamiliar with. Things are looking bad for Johnny, but before the scene resolves completely the film cuts and we are met with a title card reading ‘Joe’s Story’.

 

The next scene is that of Joe going about his day, meeting neighbors and dealing with emotional problems with no hint of the undead. The sequence proceeded as a slice of life, with Joe interacting with people he had become somewhat estranged with after the passing of his wife. At the end of this story, Joe gets bitten and the next story starts with the person who would become the zombie who bit Joe. These sequences continue until the chain ends with the revelation of what caused the zombie outbreak to begin with. This narrative structure is unorthodox and incredibly ambitious, putting a bit of a twist on what could have been a rather standard zombie movie.

 

It’s this same ambition though that winds up causing most of the problems that this film has. Abandoning a conventional narrative structure can be a great way to tell a story, or series of stories, in a way that is unique and has a different feel to it than a film with a more standard structure. But there has to be a reason for why this unusual structure is used. Memento is one of the more famous examples of this, with its structure utilized to convey the mindset of a character whose memory only lasts 10 minutes. There isn’t as obvious a reason for this kind of narrative structure, but it may have been something of a deconstruction or examination of things commonly seen in zombie movies. Many zombie movies are about a small cast of characters who evade huge hordes of the undead while trying to accomplish their goals, so this may be riffing on the idea of zombies who are ‘just zombies to get the plot going’ by showing how everyone who was bitten lead a full and interesting life prior to becoming a zombie.  This is an interesting idea, but it leads into the biggest problem that the movie has in that almost none of the stories about the people who end up becoming zombies are well-told stories with compelling characters.

 

here are a lot of these stories. There are ten different segments following people through this intertwined story and the biggest problem with these stories is that they are just so dull. They all follow roughly the same structure of: person has problem, they talk to people about this problem, they do something, and then get bit by a zombie or have blood sprayed on them. This structure makes the pacing feel absolutely glacial, and hurts the movie the most. Interesting characters are peppered throughout the film, as are interesting conflicts, but the characters never really evolve or end in an interesting place, they just feel like window dressing that exists to establish themself with a few character traits, putz around a bit, and then get turned into a zombie. Part of this feeling may have something to do with the acting being all around not great in this movie. Considerations must be made for the level of this production but it is tough to forgive bad acting in a movie that is explicitly a character-driven film with less emphasis on an overarching storyline.

 

These scenes have some connection to each other but not enough to establish what could be called an overarching plot and that is one of the biggest problems here, the scenes never add up to anything when you take them all together. The overarching story, as far as I can tell, is that a zombie disease ravages a small town in Kentucky by making its way first through a series of cheating spouses and then by infecting a series of people just going about their day around town. There are interesting ideas there, the virus initially seems like just a deadly STD that destroys people in perhaps the same way that infidelity destroys relationships, but these ideas seem almost at odds with the purpose behind having the structure of the movie be in reverse.

 

There are so many individual ideas I can point to from this movie and say, “yes, this is a good idea, I want to see this developed into something bigger,” but seeing them all being jammed into the same movie doesn’t work at all. I like the idea of having the backwards narrative, but the characters are unengaging and the pacing is slow. I like the idea of presenting a zombie plague as being a sort of ‘homewrecking’ illness, but that just gets lost in this storytelling method. The characters themselves could work in an ensemble cast movie but the interesting ones don’t stick around long enough to explore who they are and how they relate to the world. I can point out so many of these quality premises, but these things don’t add up to anything and unless you are super into low budget zombie movies, I just cannot recommend this movie.

 

This review has been edited by Dylan Rupp.