Hell Hath No Fury
More accurately known (by me…starting now) as either ‘The Canadian Penis Massacre’ or ‘Pardon Me, But Your Hypodermic Needle Is In My Urethra’, Creepy Films’ 2006 Hell Hath No Fury is a wild, uneven women’s revenge anthology film that focuses (for the most part) on one thing and one thing alone-
SEVERE PENILE TRAUMA!
Okay, maybe not. In truth the penis-shredding occurs late in the film. But once you see it…yeowch. It’s hard to forget.
Hell Hath No Fury appears to have been cobbled together by taking a few short films produced over the span of a few years, and then tying them together with a wraparound story.
Director Vince D’Amato helms a few segments- the aptly titled One Night Stand, the blink-and-you-miss-it short Kim the Psycho Girlfriend, the strangely homoerotic wraparound Night Shift at the Coffee Shop, and the outrageously demented Prey.
D’Amato has help from directors Rob Carpenter (Anna Lynn), Peter Speers (Three Degress Kelvin), and Ryan Nicholson (Torched).
The shorts vary in production value. If I had to guess, I’d say that Hell Hath No Fury was produced as a vehicle to showcase D’Amato’s Prey and Nicholson’s Torched, with the other segments thrown in to lengthen the film’s running time. Nothing wrong with that, as Prey and Torched are strong, gory shorts. And while none of the other segments reach those lofty, messy heights, none of them are horrible either. Only one of them, Three Degrees Kelvin, seems out of place, but it has more to do with the subject matter (time travel? parallel realities? what?), than it does any sort of god-awfulness.
But at the same time it takes awhile for Hell Hath No Fury to even get to it’s wraparound story, which is confusing as all get-out. At least two segments pass before we arrive at a diner, where a big black cowboy and a skinny white stranger strike up a conversation that becomes the rest of Hell Hath No Fury’s stories. The white guy claims to be waiting for his angry, vampiric girlfriend. The big black cowboy appears to just want to share some stories of women done wrong. At some point I found myself giggling because the two guys are obviously hot for each other, which I don’t think was in the script.
Once the format of storytelling gets established, Hell Hath No Fury is at times an entertaining hodgepodge of violence, rape, and bloody justice. Making an exploitation film about rape is always tricky- especially in a film which features a rapist shooting a hole through a victim’s leg, only to have a little magic time with the bullet hole afterward. What Hell Hath No Fury does correctly, though, is it really lets the ladies get back at their abusers. Did I mention the penis mutiliation? Did I? Trust me, the bastards get what’s coming to them. It’s like a Big Top Circus of sexual violence.
There is some strong stuff here. The gore gags and make-up effects are well done, especially in Torched. Ryan Nicholson has extensive effects experience, and he shows it off in his segment. Prey has some nice moments as well. Too bad the digital video quality varies so widely from segment to segment. I’m usually not one to criticize DV grain as it’s an unavoidable feature of the independent film landscape, but the sometimes vast differences between segments here only highlighted for me the fact that these shorts were produced at different times by different people with probably no idea that they were going to be combined into a single themed release.
As you can probably guess, this film isn’t for everyone. The lighthearted segments (Night Shift, Kelvin, Kim the Psycho) just don’t blend well with the oddness of Anna Lynn or the bleakness of Torched. And while some attempt is made to have elements cross over multiple segments, overall the film is just too disjointed and schizophrenic for its own good.
The acting also leaves much to be desired. Michelle Boback acquits herself well in Torched- she’s playing the most complex character in any of the shorts and she does a fine job. But it’s the only performance that I can single out from what, seven shorts? Not a good average.
In the end Hell Hath No Fury is, if nothing else, worth seeing for the two shorts Prey and Torched. Like me, you might be fascinated by the bizarre unpredictability of the rest of the film, but chances are most viewers will find themselves hitting ‘Chapter Skip’ more than a few times.
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