Horror Movie Review: Hell Hole (2024)

Written (alongside Lulu Adams) and directed by John Adams and Toby Poser, Hell Hole is a Thing inspired horror with an environmental message, one based around the process known as ‘fracking’. A controversial fossil-fuel mining technique that is responsible for a ton of environmental damage and pollution. A technique that is ripe for horror film exploration.

Hell Hole is set in Serbia where an American-led fracking crew are on the hunt for shale gas in the ruins of a rundown Soviet-era factory. The team is led by Emily (Toby Poser) and John (John Adams) and while this isn’t their first fracking rodeo, they’re not having the best time here as the road in is currently flooded, it’s freezing, and a biologist team is slowing their work down.

Work that is halted when they drill into something that oozes.

While this is being investigated, another part of the crew makes an even more shocking discovery though. The body of man in some sort of cocoon. A French soldier from a Napoleonic campaign in fact, and he’s still alive.

How? The answer is simple, and shown in an intro that surrounds this character. He has some sort of primordial parasite inside him, filling up all the space, and staying warm until the opportunity to find a better host presents itself. A host like some of the big, strapping men that are part of the fracking crew. Fear and paranoia run rampant, but not everyone wants to kill it.

A creature feature through and through, Hell Hole isn’t the smartest film you’ll ever see, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing on certain jumps, but it is still an entertaining film overall. Part of that comes from the clear ‘love letter’ that it is to creature feature and body horrors of old, part of that comes from darkly comedic moments, and part of it comes from the overall silliness of the story. Credit to the cast for managing to keep a straight face when having to talk about an invasive tentacle monster living in the body of 200-year-old French man.

Happily, this silliness results in plenty of visual treats, not just gore either, but the sight of tentacles coming out of just about every orifice. It is this, and the promise of so much more, that keeps the viewer engaged even if it never quite manages to deliver on all the horrible delights a horror fan’s imagination can conjure up.

This, some early pacing issues, and the ecological message that is promptly forgotten about in favour of tentacle-related terror, are issues in the film that are hard to overlook. There’s a lot of positives here, but the negatives are notable and it does leave you feeling like it could have been better.