Hellblazers

 It's an old, old trick in the world of Video on Demand to cast well known actors on small roles to give a film a visibility boost. Hellblazers does it specifically to attract genre nerds: Meg Foster! Tony Todd! Adrienne Barbeau! Bruce Dern! Billy Zane! John Kassir!
 It also does that time-honored mockbuster thing of naming the movie after something famous (in this case a long-running horror comic previously adapted as Constantine and a TV show) in the hopes someone will be fooled/piqued by it.

 That cast, though, coupled with a deceptively decent-ish trailer, suckered me into watching what ends up being the worst kind of bad movie: a low-effort mediocrity.

 After a terrible-looking, long-ass credit sequence (gotta fill up that run-time!) there's a promising prologue with Billy Zane as a cult leader, obviously having a lot of fun (when his underlings hesitate to throw a sacrifice into a pit to hell, he prods them by saying "Steve didn't dig a hole to hell for nothing, put him in there!"; That's unfortunately the last good joke in the movie, by the way.) The cult's efforts manage to raise a (pretty good looking!) demon.

 Unbeknownst to them their ritual is observed by Bruce Dern. A character played by Bruce Dern, not Bruce Dern himself - that would be a far more interesting/funnier movie.

 The movie is set in a tiny burg in rural California in the eighties - I guess it's meant to tie into the era's satanic panic, but that goes pretty much uncommented on. The ostensible protagonist, Joe (Ed Morrone), is a New York cop who's recently for unspecified reasons moved out and become the sheriff of this podunk town. 

 He and his acting-impaired deputies soon get a visit from Bruce Dern, who proceeds to chew the scenery as he recounts the whole damn prologue, at length. Good as he is, his scenes are so obviously there to extend the running time it's not even funny. Joe goes out to investigate Bruce's claims and pretty much vacates the movie until the very end, leaving his deputy Teddy (the awesomely named Crash Buist) in charge; from here the movie gets a bit more episodic as we're introduced to several of the soon-to-be-demonically-besieged town residents.

 As the day goes on there are a couple of supposedly creepy incidents - a couple necking in the middle of nowhere get eaten by the demon in a hilariously inept scene, and a few robed, hooded cultists stand in the background menacingly looking at people like a really bad remake of The Void.

 When night falls the cultists finally attack, and the movie turns into a low-rent, low-energy action movie; Though they act in pairs at most, the cultist numbers are seemingly endless, giving the proceeds the feel of a video game. Until, finally, they're all gone, the sheriff returns and in a hilariously unclimactic confrontation deals with the summoned demon.

 There's no pacing, no tone, and no rhythm to anything; The antagonists have no agenda, no discernible plan other than to be a kind of ineffectual physical menace. The script is fucking awful, full of boring banter and squabbling that's there to only inflate the running time, people reacting to things in extremely stupid ways, senseless 'heroic' self-sacrifices; It seeds a chainsaw only for it to be used in the most underwhelming way possible, has the most hilarious bit of inept policing I've seen in a while... I could go on and on.

 The acting is as variable as you'd expect. The vets anchor the movie and provide some very badly needed quality - Todd, Foster and Barbeau are all great in their clichéd roles; The film repays this by unceremoniously killing them off or, in Barbeau's case, completely forgetting her character in the finale. At least Tony Todd gets a fight scene in.

 Bruce Dern is given too much latitude with an extremely broad character, and Zane is barely there; Both of them seem to belong to a completely different movie. As for the young people... I kind of liked Morrone's deadpan turn as the sheriff, but that's it. It's an uncharismatic bunch, with a big "look, I'm acting!" energy about them; It's not like they could do much with the lines they're given anyways.

 
 The action is, to be positive and mildly heretical about it, about as OK as the brawls and shootings on most of its inspirations - with the huge, huge difference that no self-respecting eighties action B-movie is going to skimp on squibs and blood splatters the way this one does. It's also completely devoid of character or coolness or elaborate set pieces; Literally Bloodless, as well as metaphorically.

 At least writer/director Justin Lee makes it look like a real movie. It's mostly competently shot, which I guess counts for something.

 Hellblazers is a Tubi original, which would have kept me away from it as I've heard (and now confirmed) bad things about them, but here in Britain it's not marketed that way at all.
 Distributors High Fliers films, a UK company that according to themselves "...capitalize on the potential of producing their own low risk commercially viable feature films...", were on my radar thanks to the surprisingly classy and enjoyable The World we Knew and because their products have now flooded my streaming recommendations list. Going to be a lot warier with them from now on.

 Either due to limitations, not giving a shit, a lack of talent or a combination of some or all of the above, Hellblazers completely misses just about everything that makes this sort of movie work.
 #Content for the #Content gods and a payday for some beloved actors, a fucking waste of time for the rest of us.