Despite a wave of murders of priests, Father Aaron (Shawn Scarbrough) drives cross-country to his old friend Jack (Larry DuBois), now a big time Hollywood star. Jack needs priestly help rather badly indeed, for his Hollywood success is based on a deal with the devil. Though, to be fair to Jack, he’s shied away from paying his demonic debt via human sacrifice. Now, the demon wants to collect Jack’s own life and soul, mostly by sending goons against him to try and kill him.
It takes a while until Aaron believes his old buddy’s story, particularly since Jack tends to leave out unpleasant details like why he has half a dozen corpses in his cellar, but after an incredible scene of barely understandable demonic cookie monster babble from a possessed and some undead action, he’s fully on Jack’s wavelength. Turns out Satan and company are attempting the hostile takeover of Earth, and only Jack and Aaron can stop their vague plans in an equally vague way. Or something.
Matt Jaissle’s shot-on-16mm regional (Michigan) horror movie is quite the thing. It has the same kind of charm other films of its era and style can develop, though it is far from the kind of movie the best regional horror films from earlier decades were. Its feel is rather that of a SOV film that somehow stumbled into better technical opportunities. It is a very charming movie, however, highly energetic and of the kind of huge (therefore pleasantly misguided) ambition that attempts to create a movie apocalypse on a budget of a couple of ten thousand dollars, pulp invention and Evil Dead love.
A lot of this plays out like a cheap-shot action movie, with our buddy heroes murdering a lot of possessed homeless people as well as a bunch of guys in ski masks with “exotic” weaponry (Satanic ninjas!?) in sometimes awkwardly but never boringly staged action sequences, when they are not listening to the gurgling possessed or making their way through the country side. There’s a scene that creatively rips off the Ash vs Hand bit from Evil Dead 2 with a demonic hand that randomly comes out of a bible Aaron is reading to calm down, an incredible moment where a chainsaw is actually used for what it was made for during a fight, as well as a psychotronic/psychedelic flashback sequence with weird noises and negative effects that alone would be worth the price of admission.
Back from Hell has a lot of other joys to recommend it: be it the performance of DuBois, whose line delivery manages to be at once monotonously bland and totally over the top, which goes great with exposition about SATAN, Aaron’s exasperation about their body count, or the wild swings the plot takes whenever things threaten to calm down for too long.
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