Fantasia International Film Festival 2024 –The Adams Family have a streak of interesting and experimental films, be it 2021’s Hellbender or last year’s Where the Devil Roams, which felt like a German Expressionist nightmare. Their latest, Hell Hole, is a wild creature feature with an environmental message.

Directed by husband and wife John Adams and Toby Poser, who also star in the film as Emily and John, the film is set in a Siberia. It follows the woeful fate of a fracking company headed by Emily and John. When the group uncovers a 19^th Century soldier essentially frozen in time, they realize parasites inhabit his body.

Once unearthed, the tentacled beasts infect one person after the other, unleashing gnarly monster mayhem. It must be stated how cool the practical effects and creature designs look. These come courtesy of FX guru Todd Masters and his studio.  Really, these slimy monsters are the true stars of this film. The special effects crew did a good job making them look quite terrifying, especially when they worm their way into noses and ears.

The cast is rounded out by Max Portman as Teddy and Olivera Perunicic as Sofija. She’s a college student/intern who’s all kinds of nerdy and has a major crush on Teddy. This adds additional levity to a film that otherwise does have an obvious environmental message about the ways that we ravage the Earth and how the Earth continues to evolve and resist us. These younger characters, though, especially Sofija, do represent a care for nature and deep appreciation for biology and evolution that the older generation and Emily especially simply don’t have. Maybe they’ll be left tending to the Earth.

This message, though sometimes heavy-handed, is delivered best at one point by a bit of speechifying that a scientist on the crew, Nikola (Aleksander Trmcic), gives to Emily. His words condemn human carelessness but praise nature and the process of evolution. Emily, however, dismisses it and quips that she voted for Bernie. It’s her callousness that Nikola rails against. It’s the film’s most powerful sequence that brings the message home, more than the many shots of thunderous fracking machines.

Besides the messaging, this film is still a horror movie with creatures that slither from host to host. In that regard, it’s a heck of a lot of fun and makes the environmental aspects easier to swallow. They’re packaged inside all the gore and frequent blood spurts. This filmmaking family continues to craft some of the most interesting contemporary genre movies with a punk rock edge and sense of danger. Hell Hole is a blast from start to finish. Its tentacled monsters dominate the runtime like a true, old-school midnight monster movie.

Following its premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Hell Hole will stream on Shudder on August 23.