By Geno McGahee
There is a magic to the micro-budget cinema that isn’t captured anywhere else. When you get friends together with the end goal being to tell a story, it’s easy to jump aboard and support their mission. Unfortunately, some people should not be making films and some micro-budget films are just terrible. The 1993 “BACK FROM HELL” is a mixed bag but the cons outweigh the pros when the dust settles.
Jack (Larry Dubois) made a deal with the devil for success in Hollywood, but soon realized that deals with the devil never go well and is now held up in a house and fighting off demons. His old friend, Father Aaron (Shawn Scarbrough), re-emerges and gets drawn into his old friend’s world of fighting demons and testing his faith.
The first 60 minutes of this film aren’t all that bad. It’s not good, but it’s not bad. Jack proves to Aaron that there are people from all walks of life that are actually demons and must be stopped. At one point, they kill a detective and prove that he is one of Satan’s army. That scene started giving the film some momentum, but they ran out of gas shortly after.
Jack and Aaron go into a new phase of the war on hell as they take weapons to take on a cult and the film totally falls apart at this time. The fights seem neverending and padded and the little bit of suspense that they built up is shot out the window. It was really a shame that they couldn’t capitalize on what they had earlier, but I think they ran out of ideas.
(Spoilers) We end with a fight between Jack and Aaron, leaving Jack dead, but his death scene could have been reshot or re-edited. It was pretty funny to watch him launch up from the lake only to go into the dead man’s float immediately. A cut back to Aaron watching would have solved it.
BACK FROM HELL was OK. It wasn’t good by any means, but there was enough there to have hope that it could have been OK under different circumstances. I just think they ran out of ideas and had to bring it to the 90 minute mark to make it a feature. I can’t recommend this film, but if you’re a fan of micro-budget film, you may find some joy in the things that they did right and cringe at all the things they did wrong.
Rating: 2.5/10
