Hellbent (1988)

 

Director: Richard Casey

Screenplay: Richard Casey

Cast: Phil Ward as Lemmy; Lyn Levand as Angel; David Marciano as Mr. Tanas; Cheryl Slean as Sally; James Orr as Spike; Phil Therrien as Duke; Stan Wells as Jones; Leigh Dego as Jane

Ephemeral Waves

Hey Lemmy, are you going to eat that burger, or wear it?

Major Spoiler Warnings

With a love song called Van Goh's Ear being one of their few original songs, a punk band performing in a club, grinding by, finds itself with the potential deal with Tanas (David Marciano), a shady figure whose sense of corruption is found, as the band plays, with a shooting he sets up at the same time. Not only a normal shooting, but at Christmas, with a motorcyclist wearing a Santa hat and beard, with a machine gun, hired to assassinate a man and wife leaving their child an orphan. Tanas can inexplicably appear uncalled for offering a mainstream contract to Lemmy (Phil Ward), head of the band, his base a strange strip club with topless women are bound to strange art installations, and wheelchair bound Vietnam vets ranting about Agent Orange in front of the dancers, a den to hide his shady operations with drugs and murder.

Tanas is a Satan figure, dangling a Faustian contract for Lemmy, literally for his immortal soul in Tanas' red lit chamber. The irony is that neither side seem competent, and this comes to the strange tone of Hellbent, a kitsch eighties tone which ultimately helps the film win me over after its initial rocky start, one which eventually it takes risks and gets compelling adds the bow to what succeeds. Lemmy and his band only get particularly good when they sell out, and unfortunately by then, with Tanas' henchmen frankly as incompetent, everyone's on a destructive trip. Tanas wants Lemmy, and his fellow member and love interest Angel (Lyn Levand) to go on a downward spiral, whilst his own men including a philosophical one whose only contributions is to rip off when the legend of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat¹, the other a sex deviate drunk he introduces Lemmy to getting high on cough syrup with hard liquor at the same time.

No one is going to leave this great, when the band was an amateur one who are not great at the beginning, even when they cover the Appalachian folk song Oh Death onstage, but the tragedy they will get into, involving firing firearms in the recording booth, and the kidnapping of a child whose mother will become an angel of vengeance over alongside her slain husband, will make Hellbent the most fascinating of American indie curiosities. Genre is vague here, which is for the better, and yes, I cannot talk of this without the late eighties fashion access and colour choices, from red skeleton earrings, and earrings everywhere even on the men, to red cling film sex dungeons which comes from the same aesthetic tangents of Rinse Dream films and late eighties excess. The film's tone wildly swings directions between goofy to serious, from men inexplicably bringing watermelons to a punk concert to yet having a compelling plot where, yes, Tanas is going for the cruellest if contrived revenges for a grievance he had for Lemmy and his band.

[Major Spoiler Warnings]

Tanas is actually Satan or a devil, the supernatural suddenly kicking in at the finale, adding a final touch that worked for the film and its strange air when the phantasmagoric erupts in the conclusion. That this all resolves around Lemmy's band having mocked him onstage is itself the kind of eccentric touch which works. That this ends with the curious touch, after all the happens, with Lemmy being reincarnated as a folk hippy preaching goodness and salvation adds to the many curious touches of Hellbent.

[Major Spoilers End]

There is a lot to Hellbent which is absurd - Satan's plot, if like this, would be undermined if a punk band bothered to play like Motorhead, or to a lesser extent a more energetic punk band from this era, rather than kill a snake onstage, especially as they had managed to get the riffs quicker and better beforehand. This is however a film where the female coroner, at a crime scene, proudly and blankly informs a newly christened widow of how her husband was precisely shot in the head, so Hellbent is clearly made with a sense of humour. The film is just one of many from the decades of independent genre cinema from the United States, and the amazing thing is that this is another I have found which is just as interesting, managing to have a story which is compelling. Director-writer Richard Casey had previous made a film Horror House on Highway Five (1985), which is held as being just as weird, maybe more so for a slasher film with a fake Richard Nixon masked killer. With no other feature films in his career after, baring a return with Horror House on Highway 6 (2014), sadly we lost an idiosyncratic voice just in Hellbent. It is a shame as Hellbent does exhibit all the personality (and eccentricity you would wish from such a film). Certainly, the tone, once it figures itself out, works in Hellbent's favour; with the soundtrack filled with obscure but good punk/post-punk music, and performance art appearance to everything, this has its own compelling logic that wins you over. We can only presume, since it is entirely of its era, we had enough to enjoy here and any more would spoil it.

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1) Or when Alice Cooper, very early in his career for him and his titular band, accidentally got a chicken ripped to shred by a crowd because he failed to realise they do not fly and chucked it into the audience.