Hell (2012)

Masterful and chilling, Hell is a film that was tragically overlooked when first released. Despite winning the Fantasporto award and being acclaimed at several festivals, it deserved a wider and more appreciative audience. The director has certainly embraced the style of the great German auteurs of silent and early sound film and made their genius his own. In his hands, the cast gives performances that are virtually breathtaking. Working within a minimal budget with imagination and skill, the crew make the situation seem all too real. One of the better films to come out of Germany in the last few years, do not deny yourself the incredible experience that is Hell.

Check on any review of the German film 'Hell' and it'll tell you that it's a film 'of two halves.' I can't really add much to that.Set in the near future when the sun has scorched the Earth, leaving only a few survivors to scour the land for what they need most - in this case, water. We meet four of them as they travel across Germany, unable to set foot in the sunlight and doing much of the travelling at night, as they desperately look for the fabled mountain range where it still rains.The first half is pretty good. It takes the whole 'can't go out in the sunlight' idea and introduces many nice touches, i.e. how the characters have developed new patterns of living, plus how they ingeniously find various ways of getting more water (out of pipes, using cloths to soak moisture off cave walls and so on). Plus the acting is good. Everyone plays their part well and there isn't a Jar-Jar Binks among them (in other words, hideously annoying and unbearable to watch).However, the second half kind of slips up on itself and turns the whole thing into a simple 'escape from the baddies' movie. It even comes complete with 'running through the woods' scene. Plus the idea of being unable to go out in the sunlight kind of gets forgotten about. The sunlight suddenly plays no real part in the second act, even to the extent that the characters are somehow able to run about it in with no real side effects.What starts off excellent, just ends up being okay-ish. It's definitely worth watching, even if it's just for the nice atmosphere created and decent first half. If you fancy a German subtitled version of The Road, give it a try.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

It is a relief to see a movie of such genre with no blood and gore. More directors should follow this example. There is strong tension within the film, all done with no over empathized violence and crunchy fleshy sound effects. There is the expected unpleasantness and danger, generated only from the elements of raw film making alone, that is great acting, writing, direction, editing, design, images, sound and music. The lead actress did an outstanding job, and the script had her carry out clever and logical actions that one would expect from a non-perfect but intelligent person with regards to the obstacles she was faced with. It's refreshing to experience such an apocalyptic film without bucket loads of violence.

Picture this: you've been barely surviving in a post-apocalyptic over-heated world for 3 long years. People have become savages, fighting violently over food and water which are extremely scarce. You are aware that malicious humans lurk everywhere. You drive along, and suddenly you nearly crash into an obviously man-made roadblock. Do you really stop to look around? Do you actually scatter, have a stroll? Do you leave a young girl in the car alone? Doesn't this look to you like a very obvious trap? It should - but certainly not to the morons in this movie. They get played over and over like a bunch of ninnies by a family of semi-retarded hillbilly cannibals!The movie has a very bland, unappealing look, a great problem with most modern (horror) films. If you're colour-blind, you miss out on nothing - the movie has only two colors; green for indoor scenes, and yellow for outdoor scenes. Yeah, I get it; the Sun has expanded, it's very hot all the time, bla bla bla. The temperature went up by 10 degrees, not bloody 100 C! The indoor greenish hue is almost a coincidental or at the very least ironic tribute to "Soylent Green", an old non-greenish movie that must have exerted some influence on this movie's creators. Speaking of which, that was no surprise at all. The stench of cannibalism followed this movie from the very start; it was obviously going to play a role at some point. And yet another such movie presents cannibals as people with super-human strength and skills. But eating human flesh doesn't give you any such powers or we'd all be munching each other by now, right? Where did these people develop such dexterity, speed, and even web-throwing skills? I have seen seasoned Texan cowboys who'd be jealous of the precision with which these man-eating buffoons catch their prey with mere webs. Anyway, this family would have to be much larger in order to carry out such a successful operation.Nor do I find a speck of logic in a family of savage, butchering cannibals saying their PRAYERS before every meal – aside perhaps in a horror comedy directed by a young Peter Jackson. Real (ex-Christian) cannibals would have dropped the Bible and God a long time before starting to stalk, maim, butcher and cook random humans. Even though I'm an atheist, I'd have to side with the religious sheep on this one; a true Bible-hugger is less likely to start killing people for food (and not even temporarily but as a way of life) than a non-religious person, simply because a religious nut has larger barriers i.e. bigger walls to pull down in order to commence engaging in an activity that is so blatantly Satanic. I am not saying violent sects don't exist, but this is CANNIBALISM we're talking about.Besides, I see plenty of trees and other vegetation here. I don't see how this green-surrounded family had to turn to cannibalism so quickly.The older sister is a bona fide retard; she makes all the dumb decisions, one after another. Her biggest blunder was giving away the location of her wounded hence vulnerable boyfriend to a woman she'd just met 5 seconds earlier – in spite of already having realized that someone had set that roadblock as a trap. So 3 years of bare-knuckle struggling in a post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog world hadn't taught this woman anything at all? If she were really this stupid, my guess is that she would have been dead a long time before this wee cannibalistic adventure even began.The less said about her younger sister, the better. She is a spoiled, back-stabbing, dumb, egotistical little brat, and yet it's expected from us to actually care about her ongoing rescue efforts? Couple that with her group's overall stupidity and I see no reason why we should not root for the cannibals to eat them. It's not as if anyone has a future anyway in this totally bleak, hopeless wasteland. (Unless there's a sequel in which the Sun starts shrinking again - which could make for a great comedy.) Hence the predictably inconclusive ending; the plot simply had nowhere to go.Still, for a German movie it wasn't badly done. 4/10 is probably the pinnacle for them.