THE PERSONAL TAKE: HELL'S COMING FOR YOU
Author's Disclosure: I'm friends with Mark Savage, the director of Hell's Coming For You, so it wouldn't be fair to me to present this piece as a typical unbiased review. Instead, please consider this a essay that reflects on his new film in a personalized manner outside the usual film critique.
Establishing an identity as a filmmaker is a necessity but it can also be a straight jacket. The commercial film business doesn't allow for journeyman filmmakers the way it used to. Once you've proven you can do something successfully, the financiers and distributors will ask for more of the same with just enough of a tweak to keep the formula fresh... and don't try to mix styles or genres, either. One filmmaker, one approach, one stream of profit.
However, some directors live in defiance of those dictates. In fact, I know one of them: Mark Savage. He's been making features since the mid-'80s and the thread connecting them all is a refusal to limit himself to a single style, genre or mood. Not only across his filmography - within individual films themselves, too.
That is the case with Hell's Coming For You, his most recently released film. It opens in a distinctly Mark Savage kind of way, with a family enjoying an idyllic day by the water that is interrupted in a visually striking manner by a car driving across the shallow waves before the men inside it massacre the family with high-powered guns. Beauty gives way to surrealism, which gives way to grim brutality.
The young boy who is the only survivor of this massacre is Liam Gunter Hell (co-writer Dillion Dilligaf). He is paralyzed from the waist down but grows up to be a prolific, well-paid assassin. We're reunited with him as he decides to retire, moving to a suburb and even taking interest in Amanda (Tonya Todd), a single mom who has bad luck with boyfriends.
However, his plans change when he tracks down the hospitalized ex-assassin (Patrick Kilpatrick) who killed his fiancée. He reveals to Liam that he was the target, not the woman he loved - and that the hit was paid for by a group of former colleagues who wanted him out of the way. With the help of loyal protégé Edward (Tim Chizmar, also a co-writer), he hits the road to close this overdue account for vengeance.
That might sound like the plot progression for a standard action potboiler but as the description of the opening scene should have indicated, Savage and company aren't interested in hitting the expected marks in a safe, commercial manner.
Despite a premise that lends itself to a fast-paced plot progression, Hell's Coming For You instead takes a more meditative approach. The first forty or so minutes focus on building out the character of Liam rather than trying to jump-start the revenge scenario.
Script and direction are savvy enough to weave in beats of violence or sex during that time to maintain interest and establish the danger and allure of the main character's world but this opening section plays like a character study of someone who straddles two worlds: one lurid and dangerous, the other a 'normal' one where he tries to reestablish himself as a regular citizen. In Savage's trademark style, he never pushes his lead to atone for his past, nor does he encourage us to pass judgment on what's happening.
Even the rendezvous with the dying assassin, a story beat that would normally be used to fire up an audience, instead plays out like a philosophical exchange. Said moment benefits from an excellent performance by Kilpatrick: he's best known for playing heavies in action fare but gives a beautifully understated performance that fits the oddly thoughtful approach of that scene perfectly.
The remainder of the film delivers the expected action but still manages to go its own way. Some of this is built in: Liam has to operate from a wheelchair so the action scenes are stylized in a way to make this plausible in the context of the story. However, there are also baroque touches that take things over the top, like a showdown in a bondage club with a wrestling ring that also incorporates a leather-clad goth girl who does spark-shooting tricks with power tools as the fight goes on. Also unique are the flashbacks to the demise of the hero's fiancee: in a memorably distinctive choice, the assassination is conducted between two hot air balloons(!).
Needless to say, the end result ain't your dad's revenge action opus - but if you've seen enough of those to know their conventions by heart, Hell's Coming For You provides an interesting alternative to the form. Savage makes some interesting choices, like having Dilligaf give a very still, internal performance that gradually opens up while much of the supporting cast, especially the other assassins, deliver big, stylized performances (fans of Savage's past work should look out for Trista Robinson of Purgatory Road playing the psychopathic alternative to a 'manic pixie dream girl' here).
There will likely be limitations on the audience that Hell's Coming For You finds because of its willfully different style... but one also gets the feeling that Savage and his collaborators wouldn't have it any other way. Somehow, he's figured out a way to get features made and released that are cost-effective yet give him the room to mix styles in any way he wants and toy with the conventions of the genres he likes in exploratory ways. However, he also remembers to make his films polished and is too disciplined to allow them to veer off into dull self-indulgence.
I hope he continues to fly his freak flag. The genre world needs more of that and less of its pre-packaged predictability.