Hellblock 13 (1999)

Last night, I'm surfing through Tubi & came across this film titled Hellblock 13. Reading the plot itself, It was an anthology film. Now, I haven't seen an anthology film in awhile so I decided to check it out. The only recognizable name in this film is Gunnar Hansen the original Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. From the get-go, it's a low budget film and I don't have any issues with that. The biggest issue I had is the writing and the acting. In a low budget film, you'd come to expect bad acting, but the acting in this is terrible. I'll go through the 3 stories one by one and give my opinion on it.

Story 1 - A woman drowns her kids because her boyfriend doesn't like kids and the kids come back for revenge. It would have been a good story if the acting was a little better, and don't get me started on the costumes for the kids. I shook my head at how bad it was. For a guy who claims to not like kids, he seemed more concerned about them than his girlfriend.

Story 2 - A woman gets revenge after being abused by her redneck husband from the local witch who lives across the street. The acting in this one is even worse and don't get me started on the name of the husband (Joe-Mark) which made me laugh every time his name is brought up. When you have dialogue like "He hit me with a porterhouse steak, I can't take it anymore". I have to laugh at the absurdity of it. 

Story 3 - A biker gang on their way to Mexico perform a bizarre ceremony in a graveyard and we all know what happens in those situations. This story made no sense whatsoever. All over the place, just extremely bad.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good anthology film but in order for that to work. It has to have good writing and Hellblock 13 has none of that. I also love low budget films and I can appreciate the effort put into them as well. Hellblock 13 is just plain bad. Maybe I'll revisit it down the road if I need a laugh at the terrible acting. Before I end this commentary, Troma the studio behind The Toxic Avenger movies, made this movie. Now, they do make good films that are bad but their stuff in the 90's is extremely bad and I wonder how & why they chose to distribute this?

1/5


 

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