Super Hell (2004)

Rating: E

Director: Johny Walker
Stars: Johny Walker, Conrad Brooks, Robert Z’Dar, Chris Braineater

Despite her name on the cover, Syn Devil is in it for precisely one shot, lasting ten seconds at most. I’m fine with this. She’s been on our shitlist since she was a guest at the first Phoenix FearCon. Half-way through the event, Syn comes up to Chris, and goes “Pay me, or I walk.” Bye, Felicia. I feel I can share this story, since she’s dead now. Syn, not Chris. I tell it at this point, because it’s better than discussing the movie. Let me be clear. I have passed more entertaining kidney stones than this film. I have had haemorrhoids that were greater fun. The true nature of “super hell” would be having to watch this again. 

I’m just going to copy the synopsis from the back of the DVD. Partly to avoid having to think more than absolutely necessary about the film. Partly because I have no clue, since it is an incoherent mess, made on a budget of fourpence by a retarded gibbon. “An ominous glimpse into what the world could be… The atmosphere is in shock as strange new dimensions are opening and the dead are coming to life. Satan is walking the earth and good people have become murderous filth, playing out there perverse and sinful desires. Follow along with Conrad Brooks as his depravity steers him toward his first strikeout in his hometown and the way this ended in the second half of his earlier life.”

Oops, I think I fell asleep on the middle key of my phone at some point there. No matter, it isn’t any less palpable nonsense than this. It is no more than a jumble of scenes, mostly boring at best, with little or nothing to connect them. Veterans Z’dar and Brooks look drunk the whole time, could be in the early stages of dementia, and are still 10x the actors of anybody else. The audio is terrible, and the effects peak when a woman pretends to give birth to an iguana, which is then chopped into pieces. None of it is at all convincing. Indeed, at one point when someone is attacked, we get a screen saying, “Censored due to extreme graphic content.” Oh, fuck right off. You’re just a lazy cunt.

If your idea of cinema is watching people running around in cheap Halloween costumes, yelling at each other, without any attempt at a narrative… This is still a wretched failure, because Walker has not the slightest idea how to direct in interesting ways. Mind you, what would you expect from someone apparently unable to spell “Johnny” or “Cannibal”? The credits even refer to a “Direcor” of photography. That’s the level at which we are operating here. I’m not going to give it an F grade, because it might entice some poor fool into watching it, and I don’t want to be held responsible for that. Besides, it did actually provoke intense feelings in me, so I guess that makes it “art”. Even if those feelings were almost exclusively annoyance and boredom.