Hell Hath No Fury (2006)

"HELL HATH NO FURY is the new film from Creepy Six Films (Vampires vs. Zombies; Human Nature) - A horror anthology that's a balls-out bloody and erotic mix of stories in the style of horror anthologies like The Hot Blood Series and Tales form the Crypt. Spiced with liberal -and very gory- doses of wicked inspiration from classic revenge films like Ms. 45, I Spit on Your Grave, Irreversible, and Last House on the Left, Creepy Six Films' Hell Hath No Fury is a funny, sexy, gory, disturbing and exciting ride into an insanely twisted world where the women scorned exact their vengeance like never before."

Well, you can ignore that load of nonsense for a start. "Hell Hath No Fury" is yet another Canadian cheapie that looks as if someone just got a video camera for Christmas and decided to make a horror movie... or in this case half a dozen of them!

I'll give them credit though. The two hours of stories are mostly quite entertaining. As a portmanteau with a wraparound it was just as hit and miss as all the other anthologies I've ever seen but when it was good it was very good indeed.

Unfortunately when it was bad it was truly awful. Three stories failed abysmally. The first story "One Night Stand" doesn't make a whole lot of sense and has no real ending. "Kim the Psycho Girlfriend" was also a pointless three or four minute short that just had a girl discovering her husband's love letters from his secretary and going suitably berzerk. Of course it gets bloody but it just seemed to be a waste of film. "Three Degrees Kelvin" was presumably meant to be a piece of comic relief in the middle but I just found it boring. Some guy gets a visit from his future self but there's no real purpose to it at all except to say that all relationships break down eventually. I didn't see how it fitted in with the rest of the "horror". If "Hell Hath No Fury" lost these three stories, it would improve things considerably.
Forget also the wraparound "Night Shift at the Coffee Shop". That's only there to join things up and, although it provides a nice ghost story at one point, is pretty disposable even when coupled with the vampire story that mercifully ends it.

But back to the good ones. "Anna Lynn" is a tale about a retarded girl who is unwittingly forced to kill her beloved brother. She won't let his spirit go so he ends up possessing one of her new "friends" to get his revenge on his real murderer. I enjoyed the performances in this one. It reeked of acting school classes but isn't that always the way with these things? I just found the girl being a dog quite amusing though.

Then there was "Prey". This story had a neat ending to it. The cop who gets raped is also a hypnotist and (while being raped) puts her assailant under so that when he is "triggered" he ends up cutting off his own dinkle then stabbing himself in the neck. I didn't find the sex scene all that erotic (though parts of it were meant to be in spite of the context!) but I did really fancy Jennifer Angiers for some reason. She's not the most beautiful woman I've ever seen or anything but she was quite sexy even when covered from head to toe in blood.

The biggest and best story though is "Torched". It's another rape story with the victim getting revenge and is like a mini version of "I Spit on your Grave" but even gorier. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so nasty since "Baise-Moi" even if, technically, the effects aren't up to much. The nurse (Michelle Boback) who gets raped isn't all that attractive either (unlike her co-worker - Tamara Pender) but that's besides the point (as rape is supposedly a power thing and has little to do with lust). Her revenge on her assailant is terrible. When she is attacked a second time, she tazers the would-be rapist, ties him up, blowtorches him all over, throws syringes in him, gives him a hard on and sticks more syringes in his dinkle... and blowtorches his bollocks! If that wasn't enough, she then gets a junkie with AIDS to come round and bugger him!!! Then she finds out, after he dies, that he isn't even the one who actually raped her to start with! Oh dear...

The gore scenes in "Torched" sound better than they were. Flesh melting like candlewax gave away what was actually used to make it look that way - as it probably was candlewax. Lots of goopy fake blood was overused too in every segment to hide things like heads getting bashed in rather than to emphasize them. It just didn't look at all realistic. Some of the make-up effects were quite good though so, once again, it was all swings and roundabouts.

The main problem with the whole movie was the overuse of flashbacks and flashforwards which made the good stories a bit confusing and rendered the bad stories even more unintelligible.
Characterisation was pretty much incidental except in the case of "Torched" and even that was uneven. A damn good try was made at it though by Michelle Boback. Generally the acting was ok for what everyone had to work with. Let's face it, this movie was hardly ever destined to be a classic.

I think, if you have the patience, you'd enjoy "Hell Hath No Fury". Because it was so inconsistent I can really only give it 3 out of 10 but it kept me amused for a couple of hours and that's what really matters.