Portal to Hell Can’t Quite Deliver the Splattery Fun its Title Promises

From the beginning of writer-director-cinematographer Woody Bess’ horror comedy Portal to Hell, which premiered this weekend at Slamdance Film Festival, it’s easy for a devoted genre geek to imagine exactly how this premise might have been handled by one the subgenre’s luminaries if it had arrived in the late 1980s. A lonely sadsack who hangs around his depressing, grimy laundromat in L.A. is suddenly confronted by the titular portal to hell, which has appeared neatly within one of the washer-dryers, emanating flames and a pulsing orange glow. When a demon emerges and cheerfully informs our burnt out protagonist that he’s here to drag his kindly old neighbor to hell, our audience proxy makes a deal to instead offer up the souls of three local “bad people” in exchange, so the old man can live.

The stage is clearly set for a bloody farce in which our hero will be forced to kill and kill again, but with the best of intentions in mind–a recipe for a classic splatter comedy. Fred Dekker of Night of the Creeps could have directed this exact logline. Ditto Stuart Gordon, or Brian Yuzna. Frank Henenlotter would have turned in a particularly ribald, scuzzy version of the story, echoing 1988’s Brain Damage. But what Portal to Hell actually gives us is significantly more confused in its intent–competently staged and effectively shot on what was probably a tiny budget, but discordant in tone and unevenly performed. It’s a concept that wants to sell itself as an irreverent splatter comedy, but it doesn’t have the guts–literal and metaphorical–to deliver something so lowbrow. And in its efforts to expand its pathos, it loses sight of delivering the genre goods that should have been its highest priority.

These inconsistencies all stem initially from the film’s confused tone, which is aiming for wry and deadpan, but too often settles into “vaguely disinterested” instead. The way that characters react to the portal’s appearance and continued existence–it just sits there in the laundromat for days or weeks–is perplexing, and it sets the tone for everything that occurs. Everyone treats it with a matter-of-fact disinterest, as if portals to hell are simply commonplace occurrences. Perhaps in this world they are, but nothing we see or hear gives us any reason to believe this. It’s treated by the surly laundromat operator (Romina D’Ugo) as a minor annoyance, nor does word of its existence lead to any sort of measurable public curiosity. It’s just, you know … a portal to hell, in a dryer. One that sometimes has the burned, blackened hands of the damned reaching out of it. No big deal. Dime a dozen.

That nonchalant approach is echoed by the performance of star Trey Holland as Dunn, a workaday debt collector who first witnesses the portal’s arrival. Dunn is oddly obsessed with his cancer-stricken apartment neighbor Mr. Bobshank (Keith David, gravelly and willing) for reasons unknown–he just idolizes the cantankerous old man, but is powerfully awkward in his attempted interactions with him. Well really, Dunn is simply awkward with everyone when the script requires him to be, but then inconsistently drops that social anxiety in other moments. Holland’s performance has an unexplained childlike earnestness to it that reads almost like someone on the autism spectrum, making him incapable of reading a vibe or responding appropriately, which leads to him vastly underselling moments like first encountering a demon from hell in a dark alley. The film is full of him having oddly genial interactions with characters who should by any standard be more prickly or outright hostile toward him, like he emits a field that results in stilted performances within 20 feet. But one thing is certain: He wants to save Mr. Bobshank, so unbeknownst to the guy he makes a deal with the demon to provide other damned souls in his stead. Unfortunately, Portal to Hell can’t decide if the audience is meant to perceive the carrying out of this bargain as funny in a darkly misanthropic way, or a weighty, soul-wrenching sacrifice that Dunn is forced to make. It tries to halfheartedly do both–to deliver wacky deaths, but also make Dunn grapple with the ethics of those deaths, but the latter in particular is difficult to take seriously while Holland goes through the motions in an oddly insubstantial way. In any given moment, you struggle to divine whether the writer-director expects you to be laughing or reflecting on the cruel vagaries of modern life.