Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The bravest and most powerful soldier in this mythical kingdom, which seems to be made up of about fifteen people, is Kleitos (Scott Elrod), which sounds a lot like Cletus, which I actually like better as a name so that’s what I’m gonna call him. Cletus is engaged to be married to the beautiful virgin bride Demetria (Amanda Brooks) in short order and he has let us know, in no uncertain terms, that he’s gonna tear that up on their wedding night. If only Cletus had tapped that earlier, like any normal man would’ve done, then there would have been little need for us to suffer through the rigmarole that was ‘Hellhounds’.

Cletus’ best friend and warrior in arms is the chin-fro sprouting Theron (J.A. Woods) and he has let the virgin bride know that she has chosen the wrong dude to puncture that wound. So sick in love is Theron with Demetria he poisons her on their wedding day before Cletus even gets a chance to do what he probably should’ve done months ago. Mind you we only keep mentioning this because Demetria’s intact hymen is the driving force behind this movie. It’s a bit complicated but Cletus has to go see this mystical woman called The Seer (Indra Ove), named as such because she sees stuff, and through a series of odd events she sees Demetria running around the caverns of hell. How could this be? I mean the woman is a virgin and all and has never done nothing to nobody so why is she in hell, outside of the fact as we will learn later that she is super annoying? Well apparently virgin’s don’t die very often in this neck of the woods and when one does expire, Hades stakes his claim and has marked Demetria to be his new Persephone.

Well we can’t very well have that so with the permission of Demetria’s father, King Leander (Ben Cross), Cletus, along with his as yet known traitorous best friend Theron, loyal warrior Andronikus (Andrew Howard) and baby brother and

scholar Nikandros (Adam Butcher), it is Road Trip time as they take Demetria’s body to the gates of hell to reunite her soul with her physical being and bring her back to life. Some other unknown warriors have tagged along for the trip but where I come from we call those Scrubs and they will do little except get in the way of the poorly animated Hellhounds that we will soon meet.

It is a perilous journey for Cletus and his crew, I mean they are going to hell for goodness sakes, with the strange thing about this set of events being that getting in and out of hell was the easy part. Go figure.

To be completely honest with ‘Hellhounds’ directed by one Ricky Schroeder was pretty damn bad. Absolutely terrible. And I can’t even tell you that it is so bad that it’s good or anything like that. What I am going to tell you is that I saw the mega million super duper big budgeted Hollywood flick ‘Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief’ which had story elements that were similar to this much lower budgeted movie and ‘Hellhounds’ was way more imaginative than that movie. ‘Percy Jackson’ was a better movie, but only because of the special effects, and of course because it probably would be near impossible for it be worse.

The main sin committed by ‘Hellhounds’ is that was dreadfully, dreadfully dull. I had started watching this movie a little late at night and it completely put me down for the count. Seriously, I didn’t believe I was tired before I started watching this movie but by the time our team of erstwhile travelers made it out of hell it was clear that I wasn’t going to make through the long haul, and thus I had to pick this one back up the next day. Though one would think that making it out of hell with the fair damsel in tow, in addition to being more exciting than it was, should also signify the end of the movie, but I think director Schroeder realized that watching people walk through dark tunnels for ninety minutes just wasn’t going to cut it , and he would’ve been correct in that assumption because I have walked through areas of my city that were way more harrowing than what this rendition of Hell represented. The boredom situation improved a little bit once they made it out of hell and started walking around ‘the kingdom’ but not by much.

I guess my main problem, since I didn’t feel the same love for the Princess that Cletus apparently was feeling, was that an awful lot of people sure did have to die to get this woman out of hell. Like everybody. Including the Seer who was like the best actor in the movie. We hated to see her go. There are other issues with the movie but man, there’s nothing to gain by piling on ‘Hellhounds’, yet another one of these extremely suspect RHI Studios creature features. Out of respect to Ricky Schroeder who we will mercifully give a ‘Silver Spoons’ pass, we’re just going to say that there might be better ways to spend your time than sleeping through ‘Hellhounds’. That’s all we are going to say. Mad love Ricky.