Hell Hole
It was a contract of compromise from the outset, a former solar energy enthusiast obliged by the economy to make a deal with the devil and use her engineering expertise at a derelict site in rural Serbia selected for test drilling for fracking, she and her crew isolated after a flood which has cut off the road out of the encampment and obviously with nothing so mod con as cell signal, diligently pushing ahead with the work regardless.
The first oddity which disrupts the drilling thought to be a gas pocket, it turns out to be less organic matter than an actual fleshy mass just under the surface, yet the second discovery is more alarming, a buried man sealed in a membranous sac, astonishingly alive and pleading in French for help, the impossible magnified by the realisation that he may have been there for over a century and that what has kept him alive did so because it also wants to survive.
The latest film from the Adams Family, husband and wife director team John Adams and Toby Poser who star as John and Emily, digging the Hell Hole is co-written with their daughter Lulu Adams, a monster movie which veers hip-deep into bloody comedy from a more energetic branch of the cryptid evolutionary tree than the claustrophobic examination of guilt and grief the last time they moved earth in The Deeper You Dig.
The crew including two researchers assigned to assess the environmental impact of the fracking, Doctor Nikola and grad student Sofija (Aleksandar Trmčić and Olivera Peruničić), they hypothesise and assess the evidence offering intellectual insight into what is happening while elsewhere the wheels come off the big digger, the last survivor of the Napoleonic wars (Marko Filipović) and his companion finding the stresses of the twenty-first century too much.
The endoparasite jumping explosively whenever it perceives a threat, there are aspects of Alien, The Thing and The Host of The X-Files, but Hell Hole is its own thing, the effects limited by the budget but the bleak Balkan post-industrial setting adding to the atmosphere of desperation and limited choices, that there is little chance of any of the survivors coming out of this unscathed, unchanged and with hands and conscience clean.
With the contractors scouring the woods with a cache of weapons and losing the game of last man standing to something which resembles a particularly angry Kaled mutant, in contrast Emily is practical, adaptive and empathetic but the circumstances are not anything she could be expected to be prepared for, yet in an unusual consideration of the life cycle of the organism she and Sofija might be the best chance for survival, undesirable as hosts, if only the angry men would stop shouting and shooting long enough to listen to reason.
Hell Hole is available on Shudder now
