HELLINGER/HOLY TERROR

Billed by MVD Visual as a "double bill from Hell", here we have two no-budget shockers from director Massimiliano Cerchi.

The fun kicks off with 1998's HELLINGER. No, it's not a demonic spin on DILLINGER.

Rather, it opens with a flashback sequence in which young Melissa (Kelly Goldstein) is still mourning the loss of her mother, and thus terrified of the dark. Her father (Stephen Steel) rather unkindly takes umbrage to her eating noisily at the dinner table and threatens to turn all the lights out and let his fictional bogeyman 'Hellinger' get her.

Only, Hellinger (Wayne Petrucelli) actually appears for real and dispatches of the father, thanking Melissa for resurrecting him by virtue of her belief in his existence and claiming the murder was his way of saying thank you.

Unsurprisingly, she grows up to be a little fucked up. When we meet her 20 years down the line, her inept psychiatrist Ross (Robert Cummins) does little to help her - he's unconvinced that Hellinger ever existed. Still, at least Melissa's grown up to be a hot blonde filly (Shana Betz).

She's still plagued by visitations from the pasty-faced Hellinger, said to be a fallen priest condemned to Hell for all eternity but now able to kill in our world thanks to Melissa's psychic connection to him. Or something like that.

Could Hellinger be responsible for the grisly murders occurring locally? It's a line of investigation that detective Kendall (Artie Richard) eventually has to consider. He's Melissa's cousin, you see, so he knows better than anyone about her ongoing troubles with the demonic priest that she's convinced exists for real.

That's pretty much the plot of this 74-minute oddity. En route there are other distractions such as a Mafioso-type reverend eager to get Melissa involved in his weekly sermons, her boyfriend who just happens to have a murderous hobby of his own, and one too many monologues from Hellinger - a cross between Voldermort and Pinhead - about how "darkness is good", everyone mean to Melissa deserves to die and so on.

The story is, as you can see, nonsensical. It's not told very well either, making HELLINGER often disjointed and borderline incomprehensible. Still, it's short, fast-paced and often surprisingly stylish for a shot-on-video effort from the late 90s.

A couple of sex scenes are crow-barred in awkwardly, though at least one is hilarious in that Betz straddles a lover enthusiastically, apparently naked, while holding a sheet strategically around her midriff. Alas, the sheet falls and we see plainly that she's still got her panties on. Oops.

Gore-wise, the film delivers the goods in old-fashioned practical style. Some of it's rather rudimentary but mostly effective nevertheless. And if you want sick, how about this completely gratuitous scene that occurs midway through the film: one character abducts a woman from the street, punches her repeatedly in the face and then bites her tongue out to prevent her from screaming while he rapes her, gorily gnaws out her cunt (really!) and then flips her over and fucks her up the arse.

HELLINGER was pretty bad but oddly compelling at the same time. The acting is often dire, photography is overly dark and the screenplay was presumably written by monkeys (it was actually scribed by Gino Udina), but a regular supply of gore and boobies kept it entertaining. Just.

Oh, before I forget, a special mention must go to Richard, who is introduced as the take-no-shit rebel of the picture. Ho ho. At times he looks like a young Jim Van Bebber. But more often than not, his look - albeit heavily tattooed - is somewhere between a young, "Ride the Lightning" era James Hetfield and the Cowardly Lion from THE WIZARD OF OZ. He also gets his own theme tune, a sort of up-tempo blues riff, which is pretty hilarious in its repetition. Not exactly the stuff of hard-knocks!

HOLY TERROR follows. This 54-minute pot-boiler was made in 2002, although it feels more primitive than HELLINGER.

It begins with juddering video footage of a nun (Katy Moses) laid on a bed mid-exorcism. Her face suddenly transforms into something resembling a deflated jacket potato, thus signifying that all efforts to rid her of the demon inside have failed.

Then we meet sunglass-wearing landlord Kane (Michael Brazier), who tends to the apartment in which the nun died. He rents it out on the cheap to David (Charlie David) and Julie (Beverly Lynne), a young swinging couple.

As they invite two more couples round for drinks and a spot of making out with one another, David and Julie have no idea that Kane has set them up as fodder for the killer nun. Oddly, as their housewarming party progresses, none of the guests think to flee when they each suffer nightmarish hallucinations concerning the sinister sister.

And then the killings begin...

If HELLINGER was poorly shot and suffered from muddled storytelling, HOLY TERROR is so inept that it makes its predecessor look like a masterpiece. Ugly standard definition videography suffers from murky natural lighting, ill framing and horrendously sloppy editing. The acting is piss poor, the story explains NOTHING, and the FX - what little there are - are unintentionally hilarious in their inability to even remotely convince.

Running the risk of sounding like a sexist pig, by far the best thing (only good thing?) about HOLY TERROR are the good-looking females who get naked for extended scenes here and there. Playboy model Lynne rubs blood into her boobs while in the shower: yes, that's the highpoint of the entire film.

MVD Visual's region 0 DVD presents both films uncut and in their original aspect ratios, which appears to be roughly 1.40:1. Both transfers are sourced from video origins so expect limitations: images are often soft, framing is ugly, noise is at times evident in darker scenes. But, all in all, they actually hold up quite well. Once the women get naked and the gory fun starts, you tend to forget that the picture quality isn't of a Multiplex-pleasing standard...

English mono audio is okay throughout, though there are times where background noise - wind etc - muffles dialogue. This isn't a flaw in the disc's mastering, of course, more a symptomatic problem of how the sound was recorded on these films.

A gory animated main menu page opens proceedings. This gives you the option to select either film to view, although there are no scene selection menus on offer.

Cerchi's films are cheap and badly made, but in the most enjoyable way. HELLINGER exhibits style and ambition, admittedly, as well as its fair share of gore. HOLY TERROR, meanwhile, is so inept that you'll be hard-pressed to take your eyes away.

And that's a recommendation of sorts...

Review by Stuart Willis