Here Comes Hell

 Here's an intriguing idea: What if we do a modern, Evil Dead-riffing horror film, but dress it up so that it's indistinguishable from an old B&W one?

 I'd love to see it done well. Think about something like I Walked With a Zombie that suddenly burst out with Tom Savini gore effects, for example. Exploiting what we traditionally think of as classy for shock purposes. That could really work!
 As you may have guessed from my hedging, that goal's a little too ambitious for director/co-writer Jack McHenry to pull off. So instead we get a goofy little oddity where you can tell everyone making it had a blast, but it comes off as... well, watching a bunch of enthusiastic friends putting on a show.

 Good on them; This is clearly a labour of love, and a lot of effort went into it. But that still doesn't make it enjoyable.

 Let's start  with what I liked: The movie begins with a 'classy' presenter who tries to scare us away. Going for either a theatrical Agatha Christie vibe, or maybe William Castle; Eh, either's fun. And Ben Pearson's music is very well done, though it hops in styles and time periods a bit too much. A jazzy number pops up for the credits, with this production company logo:

 

That got a laugh.

  As far as the story goes, a bunch of rich young friends (plus a plus one) get together in a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside. There's a suave athlete (Timothy Renouf), his middle-class girlfriend (Jessica Webber) a gruff, sad and very Texan oil tycoon (Tom Bailey), a beautiful, sophisticated mean girl (Margaret Clunie) and the host for the evening, an ineffectual dilettante scion (Charlie Robb) misspending the last of his late parents' fortunes.

 And here's where the plot finally kicks in. For, you see, the dilettante's latest craze is the supernatural, and he's hired a medium (Maureen Bennett) to contact the ghost of the mysterious occultist that owned the manor, and was rumoured to have opened a gateway to the land of the dead.

 It's a decent setup for some comedy horror, but it takes up half of the movie's lean, under-eighty-minutes runtime. And it's filled with clumsy exposition and weak character work. The actors, while very game, are... well, none of them are good enough to breathe real life into their roles. I appreciate it's trying to replicate a specific, talky 40's horror melodrama style, but it's neither well-written nor well-acted enough for all the waffling to be enjoyable.

 Once things get rolling, they momentarily get off to a great start when the film's best practical effect bursts (or is burst, I guess) into the scene. But then it starts treading water, throwing in random ideas, and leaning a little too hard on Evil Dead 2 without finding a good balance between its comedy and its horror.

The 4:3 aspect ratio and old-timey filters are ok for the budget level - they don't make the obvious mistake to go overboard with the grain and negative damage effects... In fact, I'd go as far as to say they go underboard with them, as it never really looks like anything except digital footage in black-and-whiteface.
 The effects are a mix of practical and digital effects, and they're all over the place - you can tell where they spent some of the budget, and where they ran out of money and used a crappy toy for a non-sequitur instead. I really enjoyed one of the deadites, which is clearly the crew's pride and joy as it gets a lot of deserved screentime. As for the rest... eh.

 Everyone involved definitely puts in the work, and it was made for something like twenty thousand pounds; All of which is really admirable! It also must be said that doing something that looks bad on purpose for comedic purposes is not something a lot of people can pull off successfully- not at feature-length, at least.
 I hope it works as a calling card and gets these folks better opportunities. But to be brutally honest, to me it felt like watching a bunch of people playing live-action role-playing, or some sort of semi-improvised dinner theater. They're clearly having fun, but there's just not nearly enough there for the rest of us.