This movie's reviews would have you think it was absolute trash. It's not. It's not good, don't get me wrong, it's just not that bad either.
The 90s were a wasteland for horror. The genre bottomed out in the 80's due to a mixture of bad press and lowest common denominator filmmaking, and this certainly falls into that category. It's a movie made by kids in their early 20s about a psychotic professor (the always great John Saxon of Enter the Dragon, Tenebrae, A Nightmare on Elm Street 1, 3, and 7, and From Dusk Till Dawn) who has accidentally mastered the ability to control people's minds. So, he does the next logical thing, builds a weirdo family of mutilated Hellraiser knockoffs and returns to the college campus that turned on him to exact revenge.
Again, not a great movie. But not a terrible one either. There's enough weird visuals, John Saxon evil (never one to phone it in, he does enough self-important evil maniac to satisfy his fans) and general weirdness to keep die hard horror fans interested. But the thing is the 90's were something of a dead zone for horror. There were a few great movies (In the Mouth of Madness, Scream) but, generally, they were weird, disjointed garbage. And this movie is certainly is that.
Relative to lousy straight-to-video movies, it's above average, but still not good. I've seen both the director's cut and the theatrical version and, honestly, there's not much difference. A few character beats and that's it. I didn't hate it and there's much worse but the movie only works as a time capsule or as an interesting example for fans of B-list icon John Saxon of what happens when he plays a power drunk psycho. A few decent visuals, mid-level gore, and one tacked on nude scene. Watch if you dare...
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Kolobos5118 July 2019
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capkronos21 August 20031969- "The Nietzche Experiment;" a US government scientific experiment has created a superman drug to induce telepathic abilities. The problem is it's headed over by a mad doctor (John Saxon) who's not above trying to cover up the grotesque mutations that ensue.
"20 Years Later," Saxon is still at work with the chemical, and four surviving mutants (his "children") attack and kill coeds at The Kant Institute of Technology. A reporter and others set out to stop the madness.
The main problems here are that most of the violence is offscreen (the best FX are saved for the ghouls), the film is overpopulated by boring college kid characters (most of whom can't act) and the script stinks (and is often downright senseless). The direction is flat and uninteresting aside from some minor Dario Argento-inspired sets and basic lighting tricks, which somehow fail to impress in this context. Still it's entertaining to see David (DAWN OF THE DEAD) Emge in a rare appearance and Saxon does what he can with his limited screen time. Aside from those two, the film is entirely forgettable.
Score: 3 out of 10 -
poolandrews1 October 2006Hellmaster takes place at the 'Kant Institute School for the Gifted' where gifted teenagers go to school I suppose. However the school has a murky past as some twenty years ago a mad professor named Jones (John Saxon) conducted illegal experiments on the students using a drug he developed which would increase & enhance their psychic abilities, unfortunately the drug only succeeded in turning the teenagers into mindless zombies (how did they tell the difference?). After all those years Jones is back & he has been using his drug to create a horde (OK about three) of zombies from the homeless which he controls & hopes will help him turn the entire world into zombies which he, well, controls. For some reason Jones thinks starting at his old place of work is a good idea & it's up to students Shelly (Amy Raasch) & Drake (Edward Stevens) along with bitter journalist Robert (David Emge) to put a stop to Jones plans for world domination!
Written, produced & directed by Douglas Schulze I personally didn't think that much of Hellmaster. The main problem is the script which doesn't make a whole of sense, there are many plot holes & things which don't fit. For a start I was never convinced the entire world was in jeopardy, surely with the military might of the world we could have coped with an ageing John Saxon & a few mouldy zombies? The plot is inconsistent & there are ideas here which just come & go with little regard for continuity. The script takes itself far too seriously considering the subject matter & tries to say some things about religion & the homeless, unfortunately it doesn't do a very good job. The film has a reasonable pace to it but when it's all so confused, dull & forgettable what's the point? The teenage character's are your typical soulless idiots who should have the word 'victim' tattooed on their foreheads, I also thought Saxon as the main villain just wasn't threatening or menacing enough but that's down to the script again rather than Saxon himself who does the best he can with thin material.
Director Schulze tries to do a Dario Argento & light everything with bright neon a bit like Suspiria (1976), unfortunately Schulze is no Argento (their names shouldn't even be spoken in the same sentence frankly) & the results are somewhat underwhelming to say the least. There's not much in the way of tension or atmosphere either. To give Hellmaster a bit of credit where it's due some of the special make-up effects are actually fairly impressive, the zombies certainly look good & there's a couple of decent, if underused, human melting effects.
I'm pretty sure that Hallmaster had a low budget which didn't help, I think some of the ideas here are a bit ambitious for the budget & as a result they just don't work. I'm not sure what made Saxon agree to appear in this, then again considering his filmography I guess he'd appear in just about anything for rent money. Emge will always by know as 'Flyboy from Dawn of the Dead' & it doesn't look like time has been kind to him as he seems to have put a bit of weight on since Dawn of the Dead (1978). Amazingly he has only appeared in four films with this being the final one to date, so much for a big comeback. Trivia: I've actually met him at a film fair but before I'd seen this.
Hellmaster is a bit of a mess, it didn't really do anything for me. If I was to call it average I think I'd be being overly generous. Not worth your time or money. -
BA_Harrison16 June 2009I apologise in advance if this comment isn't very enlightening, but after watching the DVD, reading the blurb on the back of the box, and checking out what others have to say, I still don't know what Hellmaster is really about. Terrible editing, a confusing script, and dark cinematography, plus a plot that is almost impossible to fathom, all go to make this one a bit of a head scratcher.
I understand that the great John Saxon is some kind of scientist who has developed a drug that he tests on homeless people, and that David Emge (Flyboy from Romero's Dawn of the Dead) is trying to stop him; I can see that a bunch of students are being offed by Saxon's mutated guinea pigs (who have silly names like Joey Monkey Boy and Bobby Razor Face), but why they are doing so escapes me. Beyond that, though, I haven't a clue.
Why are the mutants all disfigured in different ways? Where did the killer nun come from? Who painted that big spiral on the wall behind John Saxon? How did they find such a dreadful actress to play the little girl (she's all grown up by now, so I don't feel too bad criticising her performance)? These are just a few of the questions you'll find yourself asking about this execrable excuse for a horror film.
Oh well, at least there are some silly gore effects, and hottie Amy Raasch, who reminds me a bit of a young Jennifer Connelly, gets stripped down to her undies (the whole gubbins, sussies and all) and then takes off her bra to flash her thruppennies! -
Coventry4 October 2006When you're an avid fan of a certain B-movie star, you inevitably also have to struggle yourself through tons of irredeemably bad low-budget movies simply because your idol made the unwise career choice of starring in them. For instance, being a fan of Jeffrey Combs caused me to suffer movies like "Cellar Dweller" and "Lurking Fear", and I felt the need to endure "Dracula 3000" and something called "Revenant" only because I like Udo Kier. Now, I'm an even bigger admirer of John Saxon than I am of Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier combined, and thus even pure crap like "Hellmaster" becomes fundamental viewing! Big, big, BIG mistake, as this is a hopelessly retarded horror movie and even Saxon's sinister performance can't save it. The script of this thing is completely senseless and dumb, yet somehow it has the pretension of being an ambitious and even intellectual tale of terror. Saxon occasionally appears as a demented professor who tested a newly invented mental drug on a bunch of homeless people back in 1969. Things went a little wrong and the guinea pigs turned into deformed monsters. Now, more than 20 years later, he's back in the catacombs of a university for gifted people (yet, all the students are rather stupid) and he hopes to pick up his experiments. Our nutty professor is hindered by an obtrusive journalist (David Emge) who lost his wife to the drug as well as by some redundant students. The structure implemented by director Douglas Schulze is terribly annoying. Pointless flashbacks are followed by present days events and then stupidly blend with hallucination scenes and sub plots. It feels like Schulze wants his viewers to connect the pieces of the puzzle themselves, but you just don't care about it enough to do that. Quite a few gory murders are committed by the freak-monster shown on the DVD-cover (some kind of crossover between Hellraiser's Pinhead and Pumpkinhead), but I never really figured out whether he was one of the homeless guys or one of the fresh student species. John Saxon acts on automatic pilot, as if he very well realizes it's an inferior production, and the rest of the cast is downright abominable. This piece of junk somehow managed to gather a small fan base, but my advise it so skip it, even if you consider John Saxon to be a demigod.
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Johnny_West3 April 2024This movie has some great scenes. The story is not very good, and the movie does not flow very well, but thanks to the miracle of fast forward, you can enjoy all the fun scenes and make up your own story.
David Emge of 1978's Dawn of the Dead is one of the good guys. John Saxon, who had a long and distinguished acting career is the evil villain, mad doctor. He invented a serum injected in the base of a victim's neck, that steals their souls. It also turns them into evil zombies of a sort.
Mama Jones is the evil nun, played by Ron Asheton of Iggy Pop and the Stooges fame. The guy with all the scars on his face is played by Eric Kingston. He had a very short career, but he does a really good job as a psychotic killer in this movie. Neil Savides plays a creepy little zombie boy, and he is excellent and super-creepy. There are a couple of other satanic zombies in the cast, and they all do a pretty good job of being creepy and scary.
Robert Dole plays the good professor who is trying to stop John Saxon. Emge, Dole, and a couple of students (Amy Raasch and John Croteau) are all trying to stop the satanic rights, but all of the good characters have issues with each other, and are not fighting together. That is one of the flaws that makes this movie more choppy and confusing than it had to be.
One bright spot is Dave Dixon, the famous Detroit DJ who also became a famous Night Owl movie host in Miami, makes a cameo here as the radio announcer. -
Backlash00715 January 2002Hellmaster has a few things going for it. The best is that it scored two good horror names in the cast: John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and David Emge (Dawn of the Dead). The second best is the storyline involving Saxon as an insane professor experimenting on the homeless and his college students with a drug he calls the reward. David Emge plays opposite Saxon as the hero who's been tracking him for years. After his "death", Saxon returns to campus twenty or so years later to further his experiments. He and his army of the homeless drive around in the Happy Face Bible School bus with a huge cross strapped to the grill. It's the creepiest bus I've ever seen. There's a great scene where one of Saxon's minions is driving around a campus security car dragging the guard's bloody body. There is also imagery of bleeding walls, mutant junkies, and scarification. Hellmaster has the making to be a good horror movie but most people find it hard to get past the terrible acting (other than Saxon). And there are a few other stupid elements in the movie. Like why would a college student carry around a whip, people in trouble saying Mayday, and other atrocities. I don't know if it was the film it was shot on, but sometimes it feels like a home movie too. Eighties horror fans should still enjoy, I know I do.
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At the "Kant School for Gifted Students" (I am sure pun intended) a former instructor is using chemicals/drugs to gather souls of students. He has done the experiment 20 years ago, and now has returned with a small group of homeless followers, of which one guy looks similar to the more popular Pinhead.
The film is designed to be campy and an 80's style slasher, but doesn't accomplish much. The film is uneven with no character introduction of build up. Characters pop in and out at random with little of the film making sense. While there are some good individual scenes, when they add up the sum becomes less than the individual scenes.
Parental Guide: Nudity -
lost-in-limbo11 June 2012You could say "Hellmaster" is one of those forgotten, daft on-the-cheap b-horror films, which gains ones interest with cult actors like David "Flyboy" Emge from the original "Dawn of the Dead" and the always suave John Saxon. The premise sounds like it can be fun, but you don't expect a good film. You just hoped to be entertained. It does that well not at all times. What starts off rather interesting and ghastly (as I was thinking it's like something out of Clive Barker's mind), despite its randomly crude handling soon it becomes a boring muddle of aimless occurrences, a real lack of exposition shows from its clumsy script and fragmented editing only confuses even more. Then tack on its preachy religious subtext. The drearily hellish activity takes place on a campus with a terrible history, as Saxon plays the demented professor Jones who tests out a drug on the homeless which genetically disfigures them turning each homicidal as they follow him back to his university in their bus of doom. They serve him, as his known as Papa (???) to them. Waiting for him is a reporter (Emge), who did the story on him that unmasked the horrific experiments he was doing on the students on the campus in the past. Now Dr. Jones is back, he plans to experiment again on a new lot of students while his army simply loiter around injecting themselves or having some fun with a use of sickle but Jones might have met his match as one of the co-eds has psychic abilities. It's completely nonsensical and choppy (Jones has projectile powers?), but where it stands out is its competent use of make-up effects and there's some creativity within some sequences. I liked the campus setting, where the director tried to install Gothic atmospherics with his use of neon lighting or at times a lack of it amongst dark, shadowy corridors. Does it work? Not all the time, but some attempts have effective visuals. Jolts are cheaply done. Performances are mainly lousy and forgettable. Saxon seems to be sleepwalking through it, Emge looks all lost and Amy Raasch is capable enough as the heroine. While it seems to cop a real shellacking, this quickly made production has few, if clunky thrills.
"They're coming." -
NowDoINotLikeThat5 October 2006Blimey! 100% wack film through and through.
Can't quite work out if if this film was intentionally going for some award for worst direction ever.. Never mind any or the lack of budget -the film is still inexcusably terribly shot ; the continuity in the camera shots and edits simply baffles at times will leave you thinking :- what? where he go? how did he get here? is this the supposed to be the same room ?etc..
Anyhow , the story ....well yeh thats a bit of a baffled , head-scratching completely uninteresting non-starter as well. Some evil old teacher ...and hes got a few zombie ex-pupils ...has returned to his old college ..and....something Whats with the evil midget again?! Woeful stuff on any and every level!
One vague bit of interest is the bloke from Dawn Of The Dead is in it yet he looks as embarrassed and confused as any viewer will. -
jamesbourke591 October 2005I remember reading about this movie, when it was reviewed in Fangoria back in the nineties, after that I had pretty much forgotten about it, that is until I'd discovered that a small company was selling it for peanuts on Ebay.
I mulled over whether or not I should buy it, even at the price of peanuts, for one simple fact. I'm a huge fan of horror movies, down through the years I had indeed watched the good, the bad and the indifferent and usually I find myself swayed by a good looking cover if nothing else appears on offer.
Such was the case with this little number, although yes I had read the brief synopsis I found myself suckered in by the cool looking character on the front of the cover.
Now this I have to say, upon reading what the movie was about and looking at the trailer before actually watching the movie itself, and I was drawn to the notion that this movie resembled such classics as 'The Dead Pit' 'The Dead Pit' and 'The Convent, perhaps for certain themes or ideas present in the trailer if not the movie itself.
The actual running time of this U.K. release that I watched was 85 minutes which by all accounts ran about seven minutes shorter than the director's cut. Did this one fact halt or hinder my enjoyment of this low budget horror yarn? In all honesty any movie that suffers at the hands of the censors will always suffer when it comes time for the true horror fan's enjoyment, and perhaps this attributed to the lack of cohesion that I felt towards the movie.
The movie began promisingly, however that notion appeared short lived as each and every scene that followed failed to engage my interest, and no moment during the movie did I want to switch off as with every film and the unified effort that goes into making it should always warrant some kind of respect.
However, as good as the film looked, the director's choice of using sharp looking blues and red colours throughout the proceedings certainly gave the film a lush look, certain other technical aspects of the film let it down, notably in the sound department, at certain points in the film I had to turn the movie up full blast much to the annoyance of my upstairs neighbours.
The acting in the movie was pretty decent, for a largely unknown cast they didn't descend into that cue card form of reading their lines.
Of course with any film of this nature, star power is the name of the game, B movie king pins like Fred Olen Ray and Al Adamson where past masters at giving genre veterans much deserved screen time, in this case the mere presence of John Saxon and David Emge was indeed for me at least the proverbial crowd pleaser.
In saying that, both performances were fleeting and pivotal to the movie's storytelling progress, Having glanced at John Saxon's filmography and having watched much of his output down through the years, I found myself thinking, did this fine actor of such genre fare as 'Cannibal Apocalypse'have a hefty bar tab to pay off, although the same must be said for that of the appearance of David Emge, who although not prolific in his output did at least leave a lasting impression with his performance in 'Dawn Of The Dead' as well as playing one of the freaks in Frank Henennlotter's 'Basket Case 2'.
Although I have lambasted the notion that these two fine actors have appeared in this movie, and the fact that certain technical aspects of the movie might have let the movie down, it must also be said that the script written by Douglas Schulze himself was really lacking in every department, a total lack of flare and characterisation, if you are going to make a fine model of a bad screen villain at least give him something good to say and at the very least make him speak with a modicum of sense.
After having watched this movie, my head was buzzing for all the wrong reasons, hence the reasons for this review the star rating attached for this movie is attributed to the fact that I had just viewed the 1 hour and twenty-five minutes version, that and the presence of John Saxon.
Other than that I pity the poor fool like me who parts with his pennies, for he is the chump who will sit and suffer just like i did 2/10 I think i'll go and watch 'Street Trash' instead. -
donkey_dick8 December 2020I have a feeling the directors cut which is what I saw is a lot better than the 90s version. Has a lot of cheesy lines but also has a lot of creepy scenes and cool lighting. Plus Ron Ashton as a psycho nun! If seeing Ashton as a nun is not enough for anyone to like it then go watch some modern crap because you just won't get it.
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thetackettbunch20 September 2020It's a fun film. Good story, good gore. John Saxon is great. It really captures the horror of the early 90's in my opinion. The antagonist characters are quite creative. I was surprised at how much I liked it. My wife even watched parts and had input. She doesn't watch horror. I also really liked the score. It's well done.
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Stevieboy66630 July 2017I knew that this was going to be bad, I'm one of those geeks that actively seek out such trash. Even the back cover was bad, stating that John Saxon had been in Dawn of the Dead & that David Emge had been in A Nightmare on Elm St! The dumb plot has already been covered elsewhere on this page, so pointless repeating it. Obviously done on a low budget the picture is very dark, the sound often muffled, there's plenty of bad acting (even Saxon & Emge put in weak performances, possibly down to embarrassment) but there is a fair amount of violence & cheap looking gore. Without Saxon's presence I'd have scored it less, he's the sole reason why I generously award this rubbish 3/10
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mschw196421 April 2004At last, this films gets a rework that it so richly deserved. Way cooler than the '92 cut. Douglas Schulze has proven that you can make really cool horror films on a shoestring budget, without sacrificing production value. Mike Goi's cinematography and color palete are reminicient of Dario's masterpiece "Susperia". Saxon is dead on as the insane college professor (we've all had a share of these types in our lives!) and David Emgee adds a "Kolchek-the Night Stalker" coolness to his role as the investigative reporter. But who can forget Ron Asheton of "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" dressed as a psychotic nun! If you dig creepy, stylish horror films, this one is for you!
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RatedVforVinny8 December 2019One of the very worst horror movies, with very little merit and even less credibility. avoid. It was a toss up between a one or two star rating.
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Bezenby12 October 2016I can't decide whether I liked this one or not. It's a bad movie alright, what with the terrible acting, bad make up and such like, but it's also got John Saxon and David Emge in it, it's not boring, and it's quite short. Love the way the DVD cover credits them with the wrong movies! Paves the way for things to come once you stick the DVD in.
Main problem with the film is that it's too dark and you can't see what's happening most of the time! I know it's meant to be a Hellraiser rip off (with a bit of Prince of Darkness maybe?) with some guy (John Saxon), turning up at a school where he was doing experiments in order to finish what he'd started, and going head to head with Emge and a bunch of students 'insert standard movie review here'.
Some of Saxon's 'evil laugh' acting made me cringe even though I'm a big fan of his Italian stuff. There's bit and pieces here of a good bad horror film but something's missing that I can't quite put my finger on for some reason. It's just generally crap, not made well. I dunno. -
manchester_england20049 January 2009I spent just £1 buying this rubbish from the local pound shop. I can say without reservation that this was a catastrophic error on my part as I feel as though I've been conned big time.
HELLMASTER was released in the UK on the Hardgore label that is stocked within Poundland stores. On this label carries many straight-to-DVD and other low-budget horror movies, most of which are or almost are entirely unheard of. Many of these movies actually turn out to be good in the "so bad it's good" sense such as ZOMBIE CHRONICLES or GHOUL SCHOOL. Sadly, HELLMASTER is not one of them.
HELLMASTER has the simplest of plots - a mad professor develops a drug that turns people into zombies. He was forced to leave the college where he taught and did his research. At least I think that's how it goes. 20 years or so later, he comes back and is hellbent on world domination. Most of the action (using that term very loosely here) takes place in the college. Several people get killed by the professor's minions, who were homeless people that the professor tested his drug on. The professor also has a strange looking syringe device attached to his right arm and he seems to be using another drug to provide himself with satanic hypnosis powers.
John Saxon plays the professor in question. And you can tell he's strictly in it for the money. You can almost feel his embarrassment coming across in the character. He must have had lots of debts to pay off at the time he signed on the dotted line for this part. His performance is absolutely superb and the scenes with him in it are genuinely worth watching. But there aren't enough such scenes. He gets no more than 15 minutes of screen time and the movie moves along at a snail's pace when he's not on the screen. Mr. Saxon can't save the movie.
Next, David Emge. He plays a janitor or something who was once a news reporter until the professor killed his wife and somehow lost him his job. He also looks embarrassed by this production and it is a massive climbdown from the popular DAWN OF THE DEAD. He gets to do a few cool things, like firing loaded syringes with a crossbow to kill the zombies! Honestly that's what happens! I'm not making this up! Once again a good performance but Mr. Emge can't save the movie either.
The guy who plays Razorface (can't find his name) gets to do some funny stuff, including a really funny fight scene. He kills people for no reason at all and he's almost played as though the character were acting autonomously. It would have been interesting if that had really been the case because a nice conflict situation could have arisen between him and the professor. But sadly, Razorface is revealed to be just another one of Saxon's minions and his character descends to sidekick level by the time he reaches the college.
The rest of the actors are the usual talentless rejects employed for this kind of movie. There's not really anything worth saying about them. For the most part, their characters are the usual moronic teenagers found in slasher flicks.
As for other aspects of the movie. The lighting is terrible. You can barely see a thing without turning up the brightness level on your TV set. There are some really funny one-liners such as "I'll leave you alone...with the lesser." But there aren't enough of them. And the photography appears similar to a TV show rather than an actual movie.
The movie is simply not scary at all and doesn't have anywhere near enough action to be considered "so bad it's good". In short, it can't be accepted as a serious horror movie, but neither can it be accepted as an unintentional parody of zombie movies.
Overall, a waste of time and not even worth the pound I wasted on it. -
nev_the_bassist30 October 2008A few weeks ago my wife and I saw this film on sale at the local Poundshop along with some other "budget" DVDs (Aenigma, Nutjob, The Red Monks, Turkey Shoot, etc.) and for the fun of it, we decided to part with a quid and buy it, thinking it would be a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off. If we'd have known what we were letting ourselves in for (not that we expected much to start with) we wouldn't have bothered! First off, with names such as David Emge and John Saxon, you would expect quality. Sadly by name value itself, they cannot save the next 80-odd minutes of pure crap that vomits itself onto your TV screen.
The supporting cast is pretty well useless. Made up of nobodies whose acting skills would put a sack of potatoes to shame and I won't even talk about the shambles of a story.
Admittedly I did watch it with a smile, but this was a smile of disbelief due to how badly the film is badly written, not to mention the bad edited with audio levels all over the place. All in all the shiny little disc would make a rather nice coaster for your mug of tea.
Poor film and was a waste of a pound. -
Vivekmaru4530 November 2010Writer/director Douglas Schulze was inspired by Clive Barker's Hellraiser and wanted to do the same here.
So he sets about creating a makeshift plot with plenty of holes in it. The film is set in the night and so the photography is in the dark and you will have to turn your TV's brightness up in order to see some of the mutants in the film.
I don't think you even reach the half-way point of the film before you fall asleep, drill some holes in your head or smash your TV set in sheer desperation.
Why John Saxon signed up for this (possibly he was in desperate need for money), I don't know. Anyway he has a small role in the film and only appears at certain instances in the film.
Plot: College Professor Jones (John Saxon) uses some students as guinea-pigs, injecting them with a drug that mutates them. These mutants are obedient to Jones and he uses them to weed out some more subjects for his experiments. The term "survival of the fittest" seems to be the theme here, or "mutants vs humans" in an all out battle for survival.
I have written this review as a final word NOT TO SEE THIS FILM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. As a horror viewer for over 25 years and I have seen at least a 1000 horror films, my message is again - STEER CLEAR OF THIS ONE.
Points 1/10 = garbage.
P.S if such a film was directed by Barker himself or Romero or Cronenberg - it would have turned out very differently. In the end it is the DIRECTION THAT COUNTS. -
JoeB13112 July 2021The only explanation I can come up with for this film was that it was some special effects house doing a demo film, and the plot, such as it is, was an afterthought. Let's do all these gross effects.
So the plot is that a member of The Fraternal Brotherhood of Mad Scientists, Local 666 created a drug that turns people into monsters 20 years before, and all these monsters were living in the basement of Pompous University until the usual collection of 30-somethings playing college kids let them out.
The rest is a bunch of kills meant to show off effects work, with no coherency in the plot at all.
And again, this would be fine, except, John Saxon, you've done so much better, man! Okay, you died in 2020, but you were so much better than this tripe. -
Leofwine_draca7 November 2020HELLMASTER - originally entitled THEM - is a cheap and cheesy B-movie from 1992, shot in a real-life asylum in Michigan standing in for a school. It has a small cast headlined by John Saxon (barely more than an extended cameo) and the little-seen David Emge, of DAWN OF THE DEAD fame. Saxon is a master villain who travels around in a van with a bunch of ghoulish demonic characters who spend their time murdering unsuspecting students; Emge is a vengeful grief-stricken victim bent on avenging them. There's some gratuitous nudity here and lots of gooey, sticky special effects, but the quality is in short supply and between the action this drags.
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cainschildren24 October 2006A fascinating and all together original horror film that is receiving a second life on DVD in 2006. John Saxon and David Emge give stellar performances in director Douglas Schulze's freshman effort. The film has an incredible and creepy mood ( a trademark strength of Schulze's see Dark Heaven). This film plays better than the 1992 version shown on HBO/Cinemax. When you realize Schulze has cast legendary rock guitarist Ron Ashton from Iggy and the Stooges to plays a Psychotic syringe wielding Nun - you know to check your high brow criticism at the door. The film is a 90 minute visual journey that takes incredible chances and is actually a comedy wrapped in the facade of a traditional horror picture. 5 stars out of 5. Can't wait to see the sequel.
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udar5525 October 2007A Michigan-lensed horror flick featuring John Saxon and David Emge ("Flyboy" from DOTD), this one shows potential but eventually just falls apart. In the 1960s, Prof. Jones (Saxon) is conducting an experiment on some coeds that goes horrible wrong. He develops a drug that turns them into mutants. He is stopped (or so we think) and flash forward 20 years where it all starts again with 80s students. This one is a real oddity. I can't for the life of me remember what the drug Saxon developed was supposed to do. On the plus side, Saxon has an interesting group of mutated helpers (a mutated boy, bald schoolgirl, nun, and homeless man nicknamed Razorface - Pinhead anyone?). Saxon gives a fine performance but is only in the film for 15 minutes tops. And Emge is good as the Reggie Bannister character who is hunting down the mad doc who killed his family. The rest of the cast is blah.
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thecityscarecrow13 February 2022I saw the movie last night for the first time.
The Negative- The story is a bit all over the place. It could've been more interesting with a couple of rewrite
- the violence is mostly off screen, which is a bad news for someone who enjoy special effect.
- The character on the cover of the film is not super present. He looks good, but he's not very threatening and mostly a side character.
- John Saxon, to me, is a bit off, but in a weird way. He's the best actor on the set, but his heart doesn't seem into it. He delivers his line fine, but doesn't seem like a real character. He does the job, but no passion.
- The acting is a bit weak. It's not cringey bad (if you've seen a lot of b movies, there's definitely worse) but no one really made me care for his/her character.
- With a title like Hellmaster, I was expecting demons, but it's more "zombies" controlled by a mad scientist. So I was a bit disappointed, but now I know that the original title was Them.
The Positive- The make up is good. There may be not much gore, but the make up of the characters and the little gore we got was well done.
- the production value is great and the photography is really cool. There's definitely some inspired shot and some very cool lighting, especially with the colours.
Overall, it's not a film I deeply enjoyed but it's not that bad either. It can be a good Sunday night watch.