Review by Ben Bussey
Ever wondered what would have happened if Brad and Janet in Rocky Horror hadn’t had car trouble right by Dr Frankenfurter’s place, but instead ran afoul of a demonic biker gang, with Janet kidnapped as an offering to Satan and Brad left for dead, only for him to return as an angel of vengeance? Yeah… can’t say I’ve spent too long contemplating that particular question either, but now that you mention it, I can’t deny it sounds like the starting point for a perfectly decent microbudget horror comedy neo-grindhouse exploitation B-movie type thing. And so it is with All Hell Breaks Loose.
Plot-wise, I’ve pretty much told you all you need to know already. Following a mini-massacre of hipsters around a campfire, we meet our Brad and Janet figures Nick (Nick Forrest) and Bobby Sue (Sarah Kobel Marquette) at their quiet, guest-free wedding (they discuss their reasons for doing it alone, but my gut feeling is because it was way cheaper and easier to shoot that way…) Nick’s clearly a mild-mannered kinda guy, but he’s going to get in touch with his inner beast real soon, as that same evening our burly biker bad guys Satan’s Sinners show up, shoot him down and abduct Bobby Sue for their own diabolical purposes. However, a mysterious white-clad stranger in a stetson shows up, gets Nick to brush off those bullet wounds as if they were bird shit, and pops a gun in his hand. That’s right… Nick’s gonna kick arse for the Lord!
It’s funny; I wasn’t totally sold on James Bickert’s Dear God No! when it first came out in the UK, but the fact that it was the first film that came to mind when I saw the trailer for All Hell Breaks Loose may well reflect how deeply Bickert’s film has embedded itself in the consciousness since. Love it or hate it, Dear God No! is as perfect an example of the whole neo-grindhouse sensibility as you might find, and there’s no denying its influence can be felt here; no surprise, given it largely centres on a bunch of belligerent bikers who spend most of their time drinking, watching strippers and inflicting random acts of violence. Still, some viewers may be pleased to hear that All Hell Breaks Loose doesn’t get quite so harsh: hard drinking and vicious unprovoked attacks are there in abundance, sure, but rape is out of the picture – though this is not to say the women in the film are not sexually abused at all, given they’re forced into stripping by threat of violence. All that said, is it necessarily a selling point for a gory grindhouse film to be a bit more politically correct? Perhaps not. But those who found Dear God No! left a bad taste in their mouth may find this marginally more palatable.
Still, let’s not write off All Hell Breaks Loose as nothing more than a direct retread of Dear God No!, as it has plenty of nice little quirks of its own. For one thing, any ‘lost movie from the 70s’ pretence goes out the window right away, given we have a guy wearing an Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘Governator’ T-shirt and another guy who cries “Wolverines!” while running into battle. Sure, there are 70s-isms aplenty, and 80s-isms too for that matter, but I don’t think there’s any mistaking it for a 2010s movie; that self-conscious retroism that arguably began with Rodriguez and Tarantino has, almost paradoxically, become a modern aesthetic. I think the key thing that sets All Hell Breaks Loose apart, though, is the presence of a central male hero, an unequivocal good guy who we can root for; not an archetype we always find in grindhouse. Nick Forrest makes for a great unorthodox hero; given he has both glasses and red hair, everything about him screams “guy who used to get bullied mercilessly every day at school,” so there’s definitely some fun to be had seeing him get some payback. That said, it’s hard to take this as a straight-up hero vs villains tale, as Satan’s Sinners are just a bit too likeable for that. Even their sadism has its charm; after all, one of their number is dubbed Pedophile Pete, not because he’s a kiddie fiddler, but because he likes killing kiddie fiddlers.
Adding to the air of absurdity is the Biblical edge, Satan’s Sinners being quite literally bikers from Hell, and the old cowboy in white being – well – God. Perhaps unsurprisingly this doesn’t pave the way for much deep theological debate, but there are some pertinent questions raised about where the line is drawn between good and evil. More importantly, the supernatural angle allows for some bizarre, physics-defying death scenes, boasting pretty impressive FX for such a clearly cash-strapped production.
This whole wave of neo-grindhouse film remains divisive, and those who haven’t been won over by it so far probably won’t be swayed by All Hell Breaks Loose; but for those who, like myself, have been a bit on the fence about it, this is definitely one of the better entries in the subgenre, and a very respectable debut for director Jeremy Garner and writer The Vocabularist (and I say that as someone who tends not to like cartoonish psuedonyms).
All Hell Breaks Loose is currently looking for distribution – we’ll let you know when we hear more.