Hold the Fort
Writer/Director: William Bagley
Cast: Chris Mayers, Haley Leary, Julian Smith
I love a horror movie that just throws you into the deep end, a story that's unconcerned with explanations or qualifications and much more focused on cutting straight to the darkness. So I was delighted when, just a few minutes into Hold the Fort at the Fantasia International Film Festival, monsters just started …showing up.
Hold the Fort is not the flashiest movie of the festival, or the scariest, or the biggest, but it does rank among the most charming and consistently entertaining I've seen not just at Fantasia, but in horror cinema this year. It's one of those movies that seems destined to be a Saturday night party movie, one of those films you gather with your friends to watch to simply bask in the macabre glee of it all, and I can't wait for more people to see it.
After a brief prologue that establishes we are in for some wild monster action, the film introduces us to Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary), a city couple who've finally achieved their dream of being homeowners. Lucas is thrilled that they've found a big, new house in the suburbs to call their own, but Jenny's not so sure leaving the city behind was the right call, and her suspicions are only heightened when they meet Jerry (Julian Smith), the pushy head of the local HOA, who invites them to a party at the clubhouse that night.
When the couple arrives to meet their new neighbors, they find that the party is actually a pre-game ritual for something unique to this neighborhood: Once a year, a portal to hell opens and the residents have to fight off hordes of monsters until sunrise. Everyone's used to it, they've got a system worked out, and they've even hired a badass mercenary to help with the really tough stuff.
The problem? Lucas and Jenny didn't read their HOA agreement, so they have no idea what's about to happen.
Hold the Fort is 74 minutes long, so it wastes absolutely no time in delivering the goods. Writer/director William Bagley establishes key character traits in the first 10 minutes, then unleashes hell on these people just trying to live a life they can be happy with. The key themes emerge quickly, especially as Lucas, saddled with the unexpected responsibility of handling the neighborhood weapons cabinet during the monster onslaught, realizes that he's simply not the man he'd hoped he would be, and a new house in the 'burbs can't fix that on its own.
This idea, coupled with Jenny's reluctance to embrace a different way of living, is a well-worn piece of modern horror that's been around since the dawn of suburbia. You see it in everything from Poltergeist to Joe Dante's The 'Burbs, and there's a reason it works: Because we all understand the anxieties that come with living in a new place, the sense that we're supposed to commit fully to a "fresh start" even if we don't feel it, and the nagging feeling that there's always a catch to whatever new life we've arranged for ourselves.
These themes never really go away, but what makes Hold The Fort so much fun is its ability to take those ideas and wrap them in the kind of mayhem that fans of Evil Dead II, Dead Alive, and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil can appreciate. Though it's working with a relatively low budget and a tightly controlled runtime, the sense of constantly unspooling, gore-fueled madness is there throughout, as wave after wave of monsters come crashing into the clubhouse and resident after resident is affected in increasingly unhinged ways. Thematically it's a great nod to the sense of overwhelm we feel when we're trying to get used to a new home. But practically, thanks to a cast that fully commits and a director who's clearly having a blast unleashing hell on said cast, it's just round after round of horror-comedy bliss. If you love goopy, relentless fun, don't miss this one when it arrives in your neck of the woods.
