Hell (2012)

One of my all time favorites.

From my favorite movies..

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This movie starts out very much as described in the bible, the cataclysmic events on earth, not by a deluge, but by an intensified global warming, that ultimately destroys most of humanity. It is the survival of the fittest with little or no interest in one another survival. Although the actors portray their parts convincingly, the great disappointment of this movie is the part, when the main characters encounter a so-called farming commune that are shown as Christians. Here we have a blatant attack, portraying Christianity as a bunch of self-consuming degenerates, while all along giving the impression of being pious and helpful, but all along with ulterior motives. If the same scenes were to make reference to the Jewish faith, there would be an huge outcry of antisemitism by the international Jewish community against it. One can only wonder, why there is a total silence against the movie makers of this kind of film by organized Christian establishment.

The marketing might make much of Roland Emmerich producing involvement, but while this low-budget German survivor story is set the day after tomorrow but it's about as far from The Day After Tomorrow as you can get. The sun is flaring and Earth's temperature has risen ten degrees. A group of survivors, led by tough Marie (Hannah Herzsprung), make their way toward the mountains, toward water. As with John Hillcoat's The Road, this is a tale about the day-to-day fight for survival after a nameless cataclysm has befallen the planet. But while Hillcoat's film was perennially chilly, writer-director Tim Fehlbaum's is all about the lethal glare of the sun. The conceit of the characters having to avoid direct sunlight seems like an affectionate nod to Kathryn Bigelow's vampire classic Near Dark. It adds an intriguing extra dimension to many scenes. The film begins as a fairly standard waste-crawler, but gradually turns into a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style nightmare, as Marie and her sister find themselves the prisoners of a ghastly family, led by a monstrous matriarch, horribly rational and literal in her attempts to ensure her family's survival. Fehlbaum draws impressive intensity from the actors and delivers a series of tense set-pieces. In the final act I feared events would lurch into torture porn territory, but on the contrary, it's at this point that the films characters properly emerge, and the humanity of the piece comes to light. What could have been a film about cannibalism is actually about sisterhood. On a technical level, the film is well shot. But the editing is at times of the chaotic variety: needless rapid cutting. I guess this technique is meant to bring across the thrill and confusion of the moment, but for me the filmmaker is giving us a sense of the experience at the expense of us actually understanding what's going on. Not a trade worth making, in my opinion. There's nothing much new in Hell, but as a refined, engrossing amalgamation of well-worn ideas, it hangs together nicely, all the way up to the disappointingly sudden ending.

A German post apocalypse movie ? Last time I saw something resembling one of those movies was Wim Wender's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD . You remember that don't you ? The world ends in three hours and everyone stands around discussing the human condition in a film so dull , pretentious and talkative you'll be thinking that Michael Bay is perhaps a misunderstood Orson Welles in comparison so I went in to HELL with some trepidation . No need because whatever its faults HELL is a unpretentious mainstream international horror movie that one rarely sees coming out of Germany That said it is heavily flawed and ill thought out . The premise involves solar flares that has scorched the Earth destroying civilization and making it impossible to stay out in the sunlight for any length of time while at the same time evaporating the reservoirs and food chain . Or has it ? This is the major flaw of the film it's never consistently explained what effect this has on individuals or human society . A character claims two hours exposure to the sun light is near fatal but this scenario collapses when given serious thought . Early in the film two characters haggle over swapping water for petrol and one character replies to the other he'd get more " in a city " . So cities still exist in this post apocalyptic world ? The logic behind the plotting revolves around the idea there will be water in the mountains and if you suspend disbelief for long enough you can perhaps see the logic in this to a degree but too often the storytelling draws attention to the ludicrous nature of the plot . The reality is human beings would die without water in three days . If the taps in the cities stopped working the human race would almost certainly die out before people would consider cannibalism to survive. It's also illogical to assume that only a handful of people have come up with the bright idea to head to the mountains . This is what's known as contrived plotting and HELL is full of these contrived plot turns Some people have referred to this movie as " A German version of THE ROAD " . They're right to a degree but I was also constantly reminded of 28 DAYS LATER . The original premise of the solar flares becomes quickly forgotten the same as the infected become forgotten about in Boyle's film as both films share a common ground of " Would a woman prostitute herself in unpleasant circumstances to simply survive ? " . HELL doesn't really explore this idea too much as it's trying to be a commercial horror movie and to be fair for a low budget horror from Europe it did manage to keep this audience member involved in this segment . Like 28 DAYS LATER it does often feel like its two films stuck together In summary HELL is an uneven mixture of good and bad . One can't help thinking the producers had two films . One film featuring civilization collapsing due to solar flares and another featuring a backwoods brutality tale featuring mountain cannibals and merging the two to come up with one unsatisfactory movie . If you're a fan of the horror genre you'll like it and it's good to see a German film that doesn't feature either war guilt or introspective pretentious brooding . But like so many other horror films you also can't help noticing how dumb situations and characters in this genre can be

Tim Fehlbaum, Screenwriter and Director of "Hell", has sure taken a difficult and unrewarding challenge upon himself: to make an original post-apocalyptic film, and a good one. And despite what those who enjoy complaining would say - he has done a pretty good job!Unlike most films, "Hell" keeps things disturbingly realistic, portraying a world in the near by future where global warming has made temperatures dangerously high. All the too-familiar motives of such films are there - scavenging for food/gas, water as the highest currency, some people turned to savages by the harsh reality, distrust and bonding, all of it. And even so, after The Road, I Legend, Book of Eli etc etc, Hell still proved to be very enjoyable. It even has some vampire-films motives, especially "Stake-Land".Acting, screenplay, cinematography, all weren't innovative, but still good. All in all I've always enjoyed the more realistic post-apocalyptic films, and Hell is definitely one worthy of watching!