As you watch Pierre De Moro’s Hellhole, every bone in your body, every cell in your being is telling you that it’s rubbish, that it’s no wonder that De Moro’s three-film career ground to a halt with this, but… Well, it’s so luridly entertaining that you really can’t be too hard on it.
It’s a bog standard women in prison film really, with Judy Landers as an airhead pursued by a killer who’s after some papers (to be honest I’m not sure that it was every really explained why) who winds up suffering amnesia after an fall and is incarcerated in a women-only sanatorium (which comes equipped with a fully functioning hair salon if all those beautifully crafted, if scarily big, hair styles are anything to go by – it definitely has a mud bath for some reason). There, she’s pursued by the killer and subjected to insane experiments in the Hellhole by a deranged female medic.
So it’s clearly not the plot that makes Hellhole so ridiculously good fun to watch, so what is it? For a start, it ticks so many of the expected exploitation boxes that it can’t fail not to disappoint – human experiments, plentiful gratuitous nudity, shower scenes and lesbianism, a leather-clad, moustachioed hitman (much more about him later), blondes with big hair and tiny hot pants, dreadful 80s fashions, Mary Woronov as a sinister doctor, hair-pulling catfights… This film pretty much has the lot.
On top of that, there’s a cast of low budget stalwarts enough to bring a tear to the eye of any self-respecting exploitation fan: the aforementioned Woronov as the deviant doctor conducting strange experiments in the titular Hellhole; Marjoe Gortner as her sidekick; Edy Williams from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and so many others; Robert Z’Dar in an early role; even Ilsa herself, Dyanne Thorne; and, bizarrely, Terry Moore, the heroine of Mighty Joe Young (1949); all backed up by a bunch of people you’ve never heard of before or since but who all look and act like they belong in a porn movie.
But the show is stolen by Ray Sharkey, an actor with a decent track record behind him who somehow managed to survive giving one of the most extraordinarily bad performances you’ll ever see and carve a low key but prolific career right up to his death from AIDS in 1993. Here, he plays Silk, the least menacing killer in cinema history, who has a penchant for camp leather gear, strangling victims with a scarf, hanging around in tight-fitting underwear (the sensitive among you will find this scene tough going) and taking Polaroids of his blonde bimbo inmate girlfriend. His over-the-top performance and wild appearance (his haircut in the film’s opening scene’s is quite astonishing) make Hellhole a laugh-a-minute guilty pleasure.
He’s certainly a lot more charismatic than top-billed Judy Landers, US TV’s resident blonde bimbo throughout the 80s who got by on her slightly odd good looks and impressive physique in lieu of any personality, charm or acting talent. She’s no different here, woodenly reciting the dreadful dialogue and trying hard to work on more than one facial expression (she doesn’t really succeed).
Elsewhere, technical credits are about what you’d expect for this sort of thing. The lighting and photography are flatly functional rather than atmospheric (cinematographer Steve Posey had lensed the Linda Blair vehicle Savage Streets (1984) the year before and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) in the same years as Hellhole), while Jeff Sturges’ score simply regurgitates the usual drones and stabs that we’re used too from 80s low budgeters – boy, did those guys love their crappy drum machines and Yamaha DX7 presets…
Two years earlier, scriptwriter Vincent Mongol (a daft pseudonym for sometime actor Aaron Butler) had written the women-in-prison “classic” Chained Heat (1983), which probably tells you everything you need to know. Hellhole has all the same situations, the same terrible dialogue and the same let’s-just-stop-everything-for-a-few-minutes-of-nudity-from-nowhere pacing as the earlier film. But when you’re looking for a aimless, mindless thrills, that’s pretty much all you want really.
Hellhole is certainly not going to make it to anyone’s can’t-live-without list, but if you’re in the mood for some low brow exploitation nonsense, it won’t steer you far wrong. There’s so much to enjoy here – from Sharkey’s bizarre performance (the film tends to die a bit when he’s not around), to the hilarious dialogue (“Where’d you hide the papers? In the sauce??!!” from Sharkey, who else?), to the fabulous cast of exploitation faves to Landers looking great in a nurses uniform but struggling with everything else.
At the top of this review, I noted that director De Moro only had a three film career (the others, if you’re really interested, are Christmas Mountain (1981) and Savannah Smiles (1982)) but that’s not entirely true. Although he started Hellhole, he apparently didn’t finish it, that honour going to Tom DeSimone, director of such gems as Hell Night (1981), Reform School Girls (1986) and Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988).
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