-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!
Directed by Pierre De Moro
Written by Aaron Butler (as Vincent Mongol)
Starring:
- Ray Sharkey as Silk
- Judy Landers as Susan Walker
- Marjoe Gortner as Dr. Dane
- Richard Cox as Ron Stevens
- Edy Williams as Vera
- Terry Moore as Sidnee Hammond
- Mary Woronov as Dr. Ellen Fletcher
- Robert Z’Dar as Brad (credited as Robert Darcy)
Rating: 
What an eccentric exploitation specimen, and what a weird way to thrill and shock in this equal parts schizoid and sleazoid women-in-prison flick set inside a mental hospital. It adheres slavishly to the tawdry routine of the sexed-up subgenre. Yet this is just a storytelling expediency, a misleading framework stretched into the more practical ground of its dutiful implementations. Hellhole harbors extraordinary aspirations and I think it hits just the right note when it decides to be that late entry into the women-in-prison genre that doesn’t quite feel like one.
Pierre De Moro’s free-flowing filmmaking endows the usual sex and violence content squeezed into a genre equivocation with a chameleonic adaptability seldom seen in this kind of clear-cut exploitation. Right when Susan (Judy Landers) witnesses the horrifying murder of her mother at the hands of a nasty hitman, we assume the groundwork has been laid for this offbeat little shocker. It has the trappings of a pedigreed slasher, but suddenly when our shell-shocked protagonist becomes amnesiac after witnessing such a heinous crime and experiencing a painful fall from being chased by the sleazeball who killed her mother, we move out of the slasher trajectory and get into the women-in-prison scenario, but in a psych ward.
It’s all sapphic smut and whacky fun, but once again the narrative shifts gears and directs its tonal motivations into a lurid and horror-filled thriller of clinical experimentation by introducing Mary Woronov as the sadistic Dr. Fletcher. Whether this is a nod to Louise Fletcher’s evil performance as the stern nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or not, I relish the idea that Woronov may be playing an exploitation rendition of her. Although she shares more sadistic fetishes and authoritarian horniness with Dyanne Thorne’s Ilsa She Wolf of the SS, the clinical coldness is more reminiscent of Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched. Meanwhile, as Susan tries to figure out how she lost her memory and how the hell she ended up in a mental hospital, all sorts of sexploitation goodies ensue unabated: mud sex, badass naked women fighting in a shower, ecstatic sex, hardcore substance abuse, and lobotomizing torment.
Through jarring transitions and shifting story motifs, Hellhole grows darker and more murderous until we cross into the confines of the titular location and all hell breaks loose. It’s a hell of a ride I must say, but the fact that you are accompanied on that ride by one of the strongest B-cinema casts makes it all the more special. I mean Robert Z’Dar – cinema’s second most badass chin after Bruce Campbell – playing one of the burly guards at the asylum is consistently entertaining to watch. In the end, Hellhole is a random assortment of trashy 80’s cinema. Moreover, the fact that there is no 35mm negative in its original form renders it an even more difficult film to classify and judge; it remains faulty in its creative endeavors and utterly schlocky in its execution. But even in its truncated form it retains all the delights you can possibly imagine from such a specimen of American exploitation.
