Hotel Inferno

For a while it looks like a playful found footage with an unorthodox formula, with a dash of John Wick in a brutal satanic framework. Unfortunately, as much as the fictional world itself is bearable, everything else sends it down the drain – from the terrible English dubbing (or whatever it was) to the stupid marathon of beating up enemies to the all-over-the-place violence, of which there may be a lot, but with the exception of two instances it has an extremely ugly video game look and is just terribly artificial. It may be enthusiastic bullshit, but it's really lame. 20 % (2022.10.01)

Warning: anyone who fainted at The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film should avoid this one. This is a dark hell where limbs, brains and blood spurts at the viewer from the screen! I avoided Hotel Inferno for many years, at the time it was made it was a film I probably wouldn't have digested, watched, or appreciated, but now my tastes have evolved enough and I'm open to new possibilities, and I was able to enjoy it. It's a very low-budget underground flick that is poorly acted and from a filmmaking standpoint it's just so repulsive that I can understand the ratings ranging from garbage to full on. On the other hand, there is some stuff here that literally has a cult-classic feel to it. Horror-wise I found Hotel Inferno quite a bit functional and intense. The story seems simple at first. A guy is tasked with going to a hotel to kill a couple in the next room, but things go wrong, he blows off the contract and finds himself in a hellish hotel labyrinth going from room to room killing mostly everything he comes across in a pretty disgusting manner. It's filmed from a first person perspective, kind of like a video game, but that adds to the authenticity and all the gore is fully shown on camera. And there's plenty of it! I was intrigued by the fact that the film also has a pretty decent atmosphere, at times it’s quite creepy and chilling due to the setting of narrow dark corridors and caves, and in the end it turns out that the background brings a lot more to the story than it might seem. The craziest part for me was probably the massacre in the forest, it had a strong sense of homage to old Italy and especially Fulci – open chests, skulls crushed, heads mashed in several ways, spines ripped out and all sorts of other craziness that the average mainstream viewer won't pick up on, will vomit, be disgusted and maybe even be taken away. For the most marginal audience ever, but those who have perverse tastes will find it to their liking. I don't know myself whether I liked it or not, but it definitely left a mark on me and I probably won't forget it. 7/10: (2021.03.09)