Recensioni de* critic*

Directed by Bruce McDonald, who made 2008's unusual and very effective Pontypool, Hellions is for the most part an above-average supernatural horror with a nice sense of escalating terror.

It's likely a lot of horror puritans will take aim at its shift to the supernatural as Hellion's undoing. I'd argue the opposite. Sure it departs from The Strangers-esque trajectory it opens with, but the set up was a fake out; McDonald doesn't want you to have fun, he wants you to be about as uncomfortable as Dora is and, for the most part, he succeeds.

One hopes that Bruce McDonald's heart wasn't in Hellions. At times, it's feeble enough to be mistaken for backyard filmmaking, except that it lacks the joy—the getting-away-with-something giddiness—of kids remaking Halloween with a consumer-grade camcorder.

Bruce McDonald's "Hellions" is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract. Though it carries the conceptual boldness of his ingenious 2008 zombie riff, "Pontypool," the pic has a neither-here-nor-there quality that keeps it from succeeding as a Halloween gorefest or as a feminine nightmare writ large.