Movie Reviews : Underground ‘Hellbent’ Surfaces at Midnight

“Hellbent” (now showing weekends at midnight at the New Beverly) is a low-budget, punk-rock horror-gangster parable with one of those stories that seems better on reflection than it did while you were watching it: basically “Faust” set in the L.A. sleazo-rock scene. In the movie (Times-rated: Mature for sex and violence), an evil black-clad manager named Tanas (get it?), whose thugs sniff industrial strength solvent and spout existentialism, claims the soul of a would-be rock star whose life spins out of control, heading toward heavy-metal doom and folk-rock purgatory. In a parallel plot, a pistol-packing mama, widowed by the satanists--or is it “tanasists?”--runs amok.

The decor is dark, dank and red. The acting is standard underground spoof-style: everyone emotes idiotically, tongue-in-cheek, in emulation of all the dumb movies they’ve had to watch. (The Groundlings’ Phil Therrien is sort of funny as a sleaze “Clockwork Orange” derbied torpedo--which qualifies here as a minor triumph.) The sound track is underground too: The local bands heard include the whimsically named Trotsky Icepick, Angst, Drowning Pool, Gone and the Angry Samoans.

Writer-director Richard Casey, who’s done videos for Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult, claims goremeister Herschel Gordon Lewis (“2,000 Maniacs”) and Ed Wood Jr., the King of Bad, as two major influences. But you can’t think out that kind of style, nor can you fake it. In badness as well as goodness, sincerity and feeling count for everything.