Simply Perfect

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

If you know a bit about German cinema, you will agree that the 5-year-old "Hell" is not really a film you'd expect to come from Germany. Science-fiction is a rarity in the German-speaking countries, horror and thriller not so much though. The bravery to take on new areas, however, is the only thumbs-up I can give writer and director Tim Fehlbaum here. This is his second full feature film and easily his most known work so far. Eidinger, Herzsprung, Winkler and Erceg are somewhat known in Germany at least and this may be the reason why. It certainly is not the quality of this film. I always thought Hannah Herzsprung was a pretty weak actress, mediocre at best, but sometimes downright bad. Neither the script nor the co-stars are helping much in this post-apocalyptic drama. This is especially disappointing as the setting offers the possibility of a truly atmospheric film. It was not achieved. In the end, I can only say that i am glad the movie does not run for 90 minutes even and if you cut 6-7 minutes of credits, it's really short. This does not have to be negative. It means a film is more essential like that and there is an uncountable number of really good films out there which are very much helped by a low runtime. This is not one of them sadly. The acting, the story and the overall outcome are all fairly underwhelming. Thumbs down and I do not recommend the watch. No idea why this movie scored so much awards attention, even at really prestigious ceremonies like the German Film Awards. I guess, for some people being different means being good. But for you it shouldn't Only worth a watch if you really love the genre. Or then you may be even more disappointed. Better stay away.

I enjoyed Hell but found it a little frustrating as it could have been so much better. It would be fair to describe it as 'sparse'. The film's name wasn't translated (it would have been "Bright") but I think "Hell" was the correct choice there.The basic idea is a nice twist on the usual post-apocalypse flick. It is not a big-budget action/adventure movie, instead relying on good scripts, creative direction & well-developed characters. Up to a point that is. It ends up being largely a vehicle for the popular German actress Hannah Herzsprung.The characters were never really filled in, especially the two male leads. I thought Herzsprung was somewhat older 'til I checked IMDb & found she was only 30 when she made this. Most of the time in Hell she has a worried look on her face. She is really the only character developed at all.I liked the idea behind the contrasting bleakness but in practice not so much. The lighting was either extremely exposed or extremely dark which I found annoying to look at after a while. Despite the extreme sunlight which has scorched the entire landscape no-one seems to get very hot, either in the car or running in lots of clothes.I think if they had made it 15mins longer & fleshed out the characters a bit more it would have been better also. Worth watching however.

The marketing might make much of Roland Emmerich producing involvement, but while this low-budget German survivor story is set the day after tomorrow but it's about as far from The Day After Tomorrow as you can get. The sun is flaring and Earth's temperature has risen ten degrees. A group of survivors, led by tough Marie (Hannah Herzsprung), make their way toward the mountains, toward water. As with John Hillcoat's The Road, this is a tale about the day-to-day fight for survival after a nameless cataclysm has befallen the planet. But while Hillcoat's film was perennially chilly, writer-director Tim Fehlbaum's is all about the lethal glare of the sun. The conceit of the characters having to avoid direct sunlight seems like an affectionate nod to Kathryn Bigelow's vampire classic Near Dark. It adds an intriguing extra dimension to many scenes. The film begins as a fairly standard waste-crawler, but gradually turns into a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style nightmare, as Marie and her sister find themselves the prisoners of a ghastly family, led by a monstrous matriarch, horribly rational and literal in her attempts to ensure her family's survival. Fehlbaum draws impressive intensity from the actors and delivers a series of tense set-pieces. In the final act I feared events would lurch into torture porn territory, but on the contrary, it's at this point that the films characters properly emerge, and the humanity of the piece comes to light. What could have been a film about cannibalism is actually about sisterhood. On a technical level, the film is well shot. But the editing is at times of the chaotic variety: needless rapid cutting. I guess this technique is meant to bring across the thrill and confusion of the moment, but for me the filmmaker is giving us a sense of the experience at the expense of us actually understanding what's going on. Not a trade worth making, in my opinion. There's nothing much new in Hell, but as a refined, engrossing amalgamation of well-worn ideas, it hangs together nicely, all the way up to the disappointingly sudden ending.

Picture this: you've been barely surviving in a post-apocalyptic over-heated world for 3 long years. People have become savages, fighting violently over food and water which are extremely scarce. You are aware that malicious humans lurk everywhere. You drive along, and suddenly you nearly crash into an obviously man-made roadblock. Do you really stop to look around? Do you actually scatter, have a stroll? Do you leave a young girl in the car alone? Doesn't this look to you like a very obvious trap? It should - but certainly not to the morons in this movie. They get played over and over like a bunch of ninnies by a family of semi-retarded hillbilly cannibals!The movie has a very bland, unappealing look, a great problem with most modern (horror) films. If you're colour-blind, you miss out on nothing - the movie has only two colors; green for indoor scenes, and yellow for outdoor scenes. Yeah, I get it; the Sun has expanded, it's very hot all the time, bla bla bla. The temperature went up by 10 degrees, not bloody 100 C! The indoor greenish hue is almost a coincidental or at the very least ironic tribute to "Soylent Green", an old non-greenish movie that must have exerted some influence on this movie's creators. Speaking of which, that was no surprise at all. The stench of cannibalism followed this movie from the very start; it was obviously going to play a role at some point. And yet another such movie presents cannibals as people with super-human strength and skills. But eating human flesh doesn't give you any such powers or we'd all be munching each other by now, right? Where did these people develop such dexterity, speed, and even web-throwing skills? I have seen seasoned Texan cowboys who'd be jealous of the precision with which these man-eating buffoons catch their prey with mere webs. Anyway, this family would have to be much larger in order to carry out such a successful operation.Nor do I find a speck of logic in a family of savage, butchering cannibals saying their PRAYERS before every meal – aside perhaps in a horror comedy directed by a young Peter Jackson. Real (ex-Christian) cannibals would have dropped the Bible and God a long time before starting to stalk, maim, butcher and cook random humans. Even though I'm an atheist, I'd have to side with the religious sheep on this one; a true Bible-hugger is less likely to start killing people for food (and not even temporarily but as a way of life) than a non-religious person, simply because a religious nut has larger barriers i.e. bigger walls to pull down in order to commence engaging in an activity that is so blatantly Satanic. I am not saying violent sects don't exist, but this is CANNIBALISM we're talking about.Besides, I see plenty of trees and other vegetation here. I don't see how this green-surrounded family had to turn to cannibalism so quickly.The older sister is a bona fide retard; she makes all the dumb decisions, one after another. Her biggest blunder was giving away the location of her wounded hence vulnerable boyfriend to a woman she'd just met 5 seconds earlier – in spite of already having realized that someone had set that roadblock as a trap. So 3 years of bare-knuckle struggling in a post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog world hadn't taught this woman anything at all? If she were really this stupid, my guess is that she would have been dead a long time before this wee cannibalistic adventure even began.The less said about her younger sister, the better. She is a spoiled, back-stabbing, dumb, egotistical little brat, and yet it's expected from us to actually care about her ongoing rescue efforts? Couple that with her group's overall stupidity and I see no reason why we should not root for the cannibals to eat them. It's not as if anyone has a future anyway in this totally bleak, hopeless wasteland. (Unless there's a sequel in which the Sun starts shrinking again - which could make for a great comedy.) Hence the predictably inconclusive ending; the plot simply had nowhere to go.Still, for a German movie it wasn't badly done. 4/10 is probably the pinnacle for them.