Hell Fest

Hell Fest is in the spirit of I Know What You Did Last Summer in that it rips off a lot of countless horror films that came before it, and it also sucks hard. Natalie (Amy Forsyth) joins some friends for an evening of terror as they attend an amusement park full of haunted houses, death mazes and masked cast members running around the park with a mandate to scare the shit out of them. Walking among the paid crew, wearing a mask and hoodie similar to many other characters in the park, is an anonymous man who isn’t going for makebelieve. He actually likes to really kill people with ice picks, mallets, guillotines, syringes and knives. Much of the action takes place in the dark, with flashing strobe lights and shades of red and backed by stock horror sound effects. There’s a pretty good reason why none of this is scary. Director Gregory Plotkin films in a way that renders the locales flat, cheap-looking and stagey, just like your average amusement park haunted house. Maybe this stuff is a little scary in real life, but is sitting in a movie theater watching folks enter into these themed rooms scary? No, not really.