Hell's Ground

Billed as Pakistan's first gore movie, Hell's Ground is everything you'd expect from a teen slasher flick. Although it doesn't offer anything new, it's still a decent addition to the genre. Think of it as the "Pakistani Morning Star Massacre".

A group of teenagers lie to their parents and rent a van for an overnight trip to a concert. Sound familiar? If anything, it's interesting to watch the movie because it's the same plot you've seen in so many other slasher movies, and the director seems intent on proving that teenagers are the same the world over.

The cast is filled with horror movie stereotypes. You have the rich spoiled girl.  The lazy stoner guy.  The shy, intellectual guy with a crush.  The good girl who feels bad for lying to her mom, but who just needed to do something wrong for once in her life. And the guy who's kind of a jerk and who you'll probably want to see get killed as soon as possible.

Naturally everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The group makes fatal horror movie choices like failing to check if they have enough gas, smoking a lot of weed, taking shortcuts through the woods, asking insane people with dead things hanging from the trees for directions, and of course the cardinal horror movie sin—splitting up when things start getting ugly.

Despite the stereotypical nature of the roles the cast fit their parts nicely and I found myself hoping some of them would live. That's a fairly rare occurence in recent teen slashers, where I often find myself wishing that the killer would get around to killing off the cast a little bit faster. There's also some pretty decent gore, zombies (including a flesh-eating dwarf zombie), and the burqa-wearing deranged morning star flail-wielding killer, who is actually a little bit chilling.

Hell's Ground is a well done homage to movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre; movies which the director clearly loves. The film's biggest flaw is that this has all been done so many times before. It's decent effort from Pakistan, especially on a low budget that was apparently financed by an ice cream empire. If you like these kind of films it's a good bet that you'll enjoy Hell's Ground.