Hell's fever (2006)

New Italian gore movies dont grow on trees, you know and thats why finding a movie like this makes you happy. Well, at least thats what I thought after watching the first four minutes of Hell's fever where a guy gets parts of his face ripped off while hunting deer in a winter landscape. After that we are treated to scenes of poorly dubbed dialogue and I felt like I was in heaven. Too bad I had to watch the rest of the film to get my hopes dashed.

Yes, the movie starts with a halfdecent gorescene, just enough to get you interested and when the bad dialogue starts you feel like you are back in the eighties when deleriously crappy (read: entertaining) Italian schlock was all over the videostores. We now get to follow a small group of friends preparing for a skitrip but after half an hour we realize that they are actually on the run from robbing a bank and killing a guard. Now, if this was a real plot-twist or just bad storytelling I'm not really sure but it sorta felt like a plottwist. Ok, interesting. Then we find out that they are going to hide in an old abandoned mine and your mind goes: Woohoo!!! A cavemovie! Cavemovies are awesome! Especially with some unseen beast running around tearing faces of people. This will be good stuff!

Wrong.

The problem is that the filmmakers didnt want to make a horrormovie. Nooo, they wanted to make one of those thrillers where everyone doublecrosses each other and there's a cool twist in the end. Well, what they want and what they provide us with isnt exactly the same thing. I will now spell out the entire movie for you just to illustrate what a wasted opportunity this movie is. If you dont want any spoilers, stop reading about this awful movie NOW.

So, they all end up in the mine but the lift down to the 2nd level only takes one person at a time. The first guy goes down with the money in a suitcase handcuffed to his arm. 5 minutes later the lift comes up again with an empty suitcase and a cut off hand. Next guy goes down, and next, and nest. We dont even get to see the 2nd level of the cave until the last 10 minutes of the movie! The characters spend the entire movie moaning and whining on the first level mineset, where you from time to time even can see where the set ends and the walls of the studio begin. Then, when the movie is almost over we get these extremely gory flashbacks to what really happen and I kept wondering "Why now?!" The workings of the plot are so incredibly lame and convoluted that you wonder why they even bothered when the filmmakers clearly werent There are two other strands of plot which I wont even discuss here because they are so poorly integrated into the movie that it would have been better without them. Oh, and that beast? It's a rabid dog that never gets near the mine.

What a waste of time, especially since the rarely seen level two of the mine actually is a well designed, atmospheric piece of work and if the movie has used that location more it could've been really good. Well, better at least. But as it is now it is a poorly written movie with awful acting/dubbing and the only nipples you get to see are through a bra! The twists are just stupid, and frankly, the concept with the characters going down into the mine one by one is just... I was gonna say retarded, but I think the words Totally fucking uninteresting is more like it.

I must admit that I was somewhat entertained by this trainwreck, just by watching the idiotic ways the characters behave, the so called twists in the story and the hilarious dialogue. The nice gorescenes towards the end (gutting, pickaxe to the head and more) is somewhat redeeming too. If you are a fan of italian exploitationmovies there is a chance you have seen worse movies and enjoyed them too.