Review

A collaboration between Pakistani director Omar Ali Khan (a noted horror buff who runs the informative Hot Spot website) and British producer Pete Tombs (author of the "Mondo Macabro" book on international horror cinema and owner of the DVD label of the same name), Hell’s Ground is actually a fairly straight-forward low-budget horror film, as it relates the creepy tale of five attractive teens (three guys, two girls) who pile into a van to travel to a rock concert and subsequently get lost in the woods. Soon the quintet runs out of gas, and they wind up encountering everything in the jungle from zombies to sinister hitchhikers to a psychotic family living in a shack.

Khan is adept at generating suspense and pouring on the gore (the film actually owes more to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre than Romero’s undead movies), but the film’s main thrill is undeniably the surreal cultural tension at work. This seemingly standard horror movie takes on a unique quality with its talk of Muslim prayers, its Urdu titles and Islamic iconography and the fact that the main villain wears a blood-soaked burqa instead of a butcher’s apron - and who knew that five kids from Islamabad would be so obsessed with getting stoned?

Hell’s Ground may be the only horror movie you ever see from Pakistan, but it’s a good one.

 -- Travis Crawford