
Welcome to Gruber Hills, a desirable suburban community established in the 1850s. Great – or is it? As we quickly catch sight of torn pages from a grimoire (I’m convinced grimoires have a style guide) and boxes of ammunition, it seems that the community – and this home in particular – are under a monstrous siege, and Mabel (Devney Nixon), for one, is getting sick of it. This isn’t the retirement she envisaged, even if her husband is dead set on retaining his property, come what may. Well, just in case, Mabel has some potential buyers lined up; they’ll be along in the morning, oh, and they’re offering more than a million dollars for the place. It turns out, for one reason and another, that they’re going to be ready to make that sale after all.
Enter Lucas (Chris Mayers) and wife Jenny (Haley Leary), two young urbanites who have finally made the leap from a city rental straight into an HOA (something I had to look up, as we don’t really have these in the UK: they can tell you how long to grow your lawns?!). Lucas is much more clearly tailor-made for this lifestyle, whereas Jenny isn’t so much, but when they receive an invitation to a residents’ equinox party, they can’t really say no. An equinox party, though? What is this, some kind of cult?
No – it’s worse. Backfilling what we might have gleaned from the opening scenes, it turns out there’s a nearby portal to hell which requires the community to band together once per year to fight off its unholy forces. They call it a ‘party’, but that’s just clever branding: really, the equinox is something to survive, and not just in the sense of simply avoiding HOA-baiting faux pas over the buffet. The other HOA members are pretty sure, by the by, that Lucas and Jenny will be dead by the morning, but there’s not much time to debate their odds. Things kick off early, with the first wave of monster attacks happening ahead of time and – let’s not dwell on the whys and wherefores – their tried-and-tested neighbourhood monster killer, McScruffy (Hamid-Reza Benjamin Thompson) in unexpectedly out of action. More or less.
This is clearly one of those films which would thrive in front of a festival audience: Hold the Fort (2025) has lots of potential to be a genuine crowd-pleaser, with a fun premise which feels quite similar to a video game in terms of its plot and key developments. Whilst it perhaps promises more of an onslaught than it can fully deliver (and the film relies quite heavily on the dark to hide some of its budgetary SFX constraints) you can forgive this, because by displaying a thorough understanding of the right pacing, the right way to edit and – wherever it can – the requisite amount of gore, it’s able to come out feeling like a win.
The film as a whole has a childlike energy which cedes into the straightforwardly childish in a few places, no scorn intended (there’s room for a fart joke and more than a few physical gags and one-liners here) but there’s plenty of space to send up the American ideal, just without getting overcomplex. Characters are developed with a very light touch, and it never feels like filler; it’s just enough added depth to keep the story ticking along. And, at less than 75 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome, which is a key contributor to its success. Two hours of this would feel onerous. One and a bit is just right.
If I had to designate the film by its influences, I’d probably say it takes some elements from The Burbs (1989) and The Cabin in the Woods (2011), with a smattering of Evil Dead II (1987) perhaps, given the second Evil Dead film’s more overt use of humour. Whilst it can’t compete with those titles in terms of effects, and yes, does feel like it wants to from time to time, it’s still a nicely entertaining piece of splatstick horror-comedy which the cast and crew must have loved making. In amongst the madness, it also finds time for a serious piece of life advice along the way: always read the contract.
Hold the Fort (2025) had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Wednesday, July 16th.