Sundance Review: Bruce McDonald's Unconvincing Halloween Horror 'Hellions'
Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald is known for his willingness and ability to nimbly switch between genres and styles, gamely tackling everything from psychological thrillers like "Pontypool" to musical comedies like his fabled "Hard Core Logo" (championed by a young Quentin Tarantino), and directing a whole host of Canadian television in between (including, of course, "Degrassi: The Next Generation"). With the Halloween-set "Hellions," the journeyman director makes a bid for iconic horror and comes up short. What aspires to be a reproductive horror classic along the lines "Rosemary's Baby" ends up feeling like an overlong, slightly bloodier episode of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" or maybe "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" goes to hell.
"Hellions" begins like any other spooky horror movie: an attractive young girl named Dora (Chloe Rose) canoodles with her slightly-wrong-side-of-the-tracks...