If you don’t like open-ended movies, then definitely don’t watch Hellions, but if you don’t mind a little ambiguity, definitely check it out. If you are in a generous mood, Hellions is still better than Mother! and Woodshock, and if you aren’t, you just watched a demented Calvin Klein ad. The movie unfolds on Halloween when a teenage girl discovers that she is pregnant and decides to stay home from the night’s reveries, a choice that she regrets when her home feels like a reboot of The Strangers or Ils except with a supernatural bent.
Initially I thought that Hellions ended up in my queue because Robert Patrick plays a small, but pivotal role, but after watching the movie and reading about it, it is probably because Bruce McDonald directed it, and he directed Pontypool, which was far from perfect, but always intriguing. Unfortunately this movie is a little less rigorously structured than Pontypool and feels like a draft than a final version. McDonald definitely has a thing about people acting strangely around holidays.
Hellions may or may not be transpiring in the girl’s mind. Either as a depiction of a mental breakdown or a supernatural occurrence that creates a gap between dimensions, it works. Her home can be a metaphor for her body, and no further explanation is needed for little demonic people trying to break into it. I imagine that there is nothing more terrifying to a sexually active teenage girl than hearing a little person address her as “Mommy.” The manifestation of male characters that she met earlier in the day failing to help her or suddenly being used as a disguise for the demonic creatures indicates how alone she is and unintentionally betrayed by them that she feels in her predicament.
I liked that she still did her best to mount an offense against the titular characters. The Winchesters would proud of her deductive reasoning. I made up my own story explaining why Patrick’s character was really so adept at handling the crisis. It was because of all the time that he spent working on the X-Files. Hellions has a dream logic that makes inconsistencies and inability to make any progress less infuriating.
Hellions is more Donnie Darko meets Stephen King in Freddy Krueger’s neighborhood in its surreal representation of societal horror of the teen mother’s lack of control over her own body. It may not make a satisfying, sustainable feature length movie, but the thick atmosphere is so perfect that I can’t be mad at the movie not meeting my expectations.