HELLCAT (2025)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: Brock Bodell
Writer:   Brock Bodell
Producer: Brock Bodell, Andrew Duensing, Nate Eggert
Stars:    Dakota Gorman, Todd Terry, Liz Atwater, Jordan Mullins, James Austin Johnson

Review Score:

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Summary:

With no memory of how she got there, a captive woman wakes in the back of a moving trailer whose driver claims she is the victim of a mysterious infection.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

With no recollection of what happened or how she got there, Lena Orchard wakes from unconsciousness to discover she is locked in a camper trailer being towed by a pickup truck down a deserted country road at night. Experiencing sudden convulsions as well as pain in her bloody mouth, Lena also sees she has a grotesque wound spreading up her arm.

Over a speaker, the truck and trailer’s unseen driver identifies himself as Clive “C.S.” Peters. A hunter, Clive claims he found Lena at her remote campsite and, recognizing a supposed infection, now has less than an hour to get her to a specialist, Dr. Janikowski, for treatment at Sacred Heart Hospital. Lena contends she is merely experiencing pain from a pregnancy, and accuses Clive of poisoning her, which he denies.

Lena angrily questions why Clive took her phone and won’t let her go. Clive tells Lena they can’t bring anyone else into the situation because he doesn’t want to risk an outbreak.

Lena starts trashing the trailer in frustration. To calm her, Clive offers to make a phone call on Lena’s behalf. Clive calls Lena’s father Stuart, but Clive is only able to leave a voicemail. Despite Lena trying to shout on the message that she was kidnapped, Clive offers to call Lena’s mother Kathy. Lena reveals her mother died tragically when Lena was sixteen.

Lena finds a photo of a woman with a girl. Clive identifies them as his beloved wife Becca and troubled daughter Ollie. Clive tells a story that reveals his deceased wife’s nickname was “Hellcat.” He also tells Lena his relationship with Ollie hasn’t been the same since she was attacked while at college.

Distressed to discover Clive is able to watch her, Lena pulls down a security camera. The camera sparks a memory of Lena alone at her campsite, using her phone to watch old family videos that tearfully remind Lena of her parents.

Lena demands to know exactly how she got there, but Clive claims he can’t tell her. Lena vaguely recalls seeing a hunter while she was camping. From various materials lying around as well a story he tells about an encounter with aliens, Lena suspects Clive is a crackpot who believes in conspiracy theories.

In the trailer’s refrigerator, Lena finds syringes containing a sedative. Clive tries passing off the needles as his medication. Lena also feels herself inexplicably drawn to a piece of bloody meat in the fridge, which makes her uneasy.

Lena hears another young woman, later revealed to be Clive’s daughter Ollie, moaning from a semi-concealed compartment. Searching cupboards for keys to unlock Ollie, Lena finds a stash of silver bullets, one of which she puts in her pocket.

Finally finding a set of keys, Lena attempts to unlock Ollie’s door. Having stopped his truck, Clive unexpectedly interrupts Lena by putting a gun to her head from behind. Clive pulls Ollie out of the trailer and demands that Lena take her place in the compartment. Lena refuses. Clive screams at Lena to stop touching his things before he goes back to driving.

Resuming communication over the speaker, Clive assures Lena he still plans to get her to Dr. Janikowski. Inside the compartment where Ollie was imprisoned, Lena finds a blood-soaked mattress, shackles, and an empty syringe.

Seeing headlights from a passing car, Lena scrawls the words “help me” into a window. Clive is forced to pull over to deal with a concerned couple, Sally and Clarence, in the other vehicle. While Clive talks to them, Lena attempts to use an Alexa-like device to initiate a 911 call. When that call cuts out, Lena tries phoning her friend Diane, but the call seemingly goes to her mother Kathy’s voicemail instead. Even though Kathy is dead, Lena records an emotional plea for help.

Lena tries alerting the couple outside the trailer by screaming she was kidnapped. A commotion ensues when Sally and Clarence confront Clive. Lena hears gunshots followed by silence. From a crack in the door, Lena glimpses the couple falling to the ground and assumes Clive killed them. Clive issues a threatening warning to Lena before going back to his truck.

Lena’s violent convulsions bring a concerned Clive back to the trailer again. Lena viciously bites Clive on his hand. Clive bandages his wound upon returning to the truck where Ollie is bound and unconscious in his passenger seat. Accusing him of capturing women, Lena taunts that Clive is in the same boat as her now that he presumably suffers from whatever virus she may be infected with. Worried for himself as well as for Lena, Clive reveals the supposed specialist he is taking them to, Dr. Janikowski, is actually a disgraced veterinarian working underground out of Gollyworld amusement park.

Clive turns on his favorite radio show, a conspiracy program hosted by Jasper Deville. A frequent caller on the show, Clive calls Jasper to confess he captured a woman in Tennessee whom he believes is a werewolf. He now needs Jasper’s contact info for Dr. Janikowski, whom Clive learned about through Jasper’s show.

Jasper goes to a commercial break so he can privately talk to Clive off the air. Concerned by Clive’s admission that he kidnapped a woman, Jasper urges Clive to contact the police. Jasper disheartens Clive by revealing Dr. Janikowski doesn’t exist and his radio program is merely meant for entertainment.

Jasper resumes the show. Taking Clive’s claim of having a captive werewolf seriously, a caller threatens he will find Clive soon. The caller also advises Lena to dump all the silver she can find, prompting her to flush the bullets down the trailer’s toilet.

Ollie regains consciousness. Distraught over how dire the circumstances are now, Clive cuts Ollie free from her ropes.

Lying on the bloody mattress, Lena thinks back on a motivational message her mother recorded for Lena after Kathy learned about her imminent death. The memory causes Lena to break down.

Clive pulls over to confront Lena at gunpoint. Lena insists she is not a werewolf. Clive has a tearful moment recalling his wife, confessing he’s never actually harmed anyone, and saying he doesn’t know who he is anymore now that his wife is gone. Clive gives back Lena’s phone, apologizes, then leaves her by the side of the road.

Lena calls her father to tell him she loves him. The call cuts out abruptly.

Impersonating a police officer, a werewolf hunter named Peters pulls up. Offering a ride, Peters tells Lena he found the couple from earlier and they are supposedly still alive. Lena gets in the patrol car’s backseat. Peters is suspiciously silent when Lena asks to go to a hospital.

Peters calls Jasper Deville’s radio show. Lena’s suspicions about Peters’s true identity are confirmed when he uses the show to declare he found Clive’s werewolf and plans to take care of the situation himself.

Lena observes that the moon is full. Several of her teeth also fall out. Lena still claims she is merely pregnant and Clive simply poisoned her. Peters counters that Lena really is a werewolf who is on the verge of transformation. Lena projectile vomits. Peters pulls over.

Clive and his daughter catch up to the police car and exit their truck. Peters holds Clive and Ollie at gunpoint as the two men debate whether Lena is a werewolf, which Clive no longer believes because he thinks she should have changed by now.

Lena breaks out of the patrol car. The commotion distracts Peters. Clive ends up shot in his stomach during a struggle with Peters over the gun. Ollie comforts her wounded father while Peters chases after Lena.

Peters confronts Lena at the edge of a lake. From a distance, Clive rescues Lena by shooting the fingers off Peters’s hand.

Lena reunites with Clive after he slumps to the ground. Clive admits that the girl with him is his daughter. Every full moon, he chained up Ollie in the trailer so she didn’t hurt anyone, but on this evening, she got loose and bit Lena. Clive wonders if Lena might not have been bit deep enough to become infected.

Seemingly succumbing to the infection, Lena doubles over in pain, but she actually gives birth to a baby girl that Clive helps deliver. Clive and Lena see that the monstrous infant is covered in hair. Both of them still smile. Clive apologizes for scaring Lena before slumping over in apparent death.

With dawn breaking, Lena returns to the road cradling her baby. Ollie offers Lena a ride even though neither of them know where to go. As they drive away, Clive’s license plate is revealed to read “Hellcat.” Unbeknownst to the women, Clive unexpectedly reanimates back at the lake.

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Review:

“Hellcat” covers a long length of the distance it travels simply on the strength of its compelling setup. Unable to remember how she got there, leading lady Lena wakes from unconsciousness to discover she’s held captive in a camper trailer racing down a deserted road. Using a speaker to talk to her, the unseen driver of the truck towing the trailer identifies himself as Clive. Clive claims he found Lena alone at a campsite, afflicted with a deadly infection spreading throughout her body. If Lena doesn’t get treated within the hour, she’ll surely suffer. Lena sees a worrisome wound spreading up her arm, but she believes her pain is from pregnancy, and suspects Clive must have poisoned her for some sinister purpose.

Lena isn’t just locked in this trailer. She’s now locked in a terrifying game of secrets and lies with a mystery man. Meanwhile, viewers find themselves locked in a tightly contained thriller powered by the performances of two main actors, one of whom remains a disembodied voice for a fair stretch of the film.

Some stomach-sensitive viewers may also find themselves suffering from mild cases of motion sickness. The truck and the trailer are on the road after all, so “Hellcat” makes sure the Spartan scenery rarely settles. Appreciative applause goes out to the grips, or whomever it was, who presumably had to keep the small set repeatedly rocking to simulate movement.

Kudos are also awarded to Dakota Gorman for her sympathetic portrayal of an emotionally unsettled yet determinedly resilient heroine. In “Hellcat’s” earliest scenes as Lena, Gorman must maintain a level of elevated anxiety that puts her in a perpetual state of panicked panting. She may not be engaged in action-intensive stunt work, yet the role requires a physical commitment to constant expressions of exhaustion, frustration, concern, and outrage rather than letting a common character coast by on routine dialogue delivery.

Lena isn’t always isolated during the introductory act. She occasionally has a few scattered visions of other people appearing in the camper with her. They aren’t exactly hallucinations. They’re more like memories that manifest from her mind to add a quick bit to her background, like a flighty friend, a grieving father, and Lena’s comforting mother.

They’re also one of the wise ways director Brock Bodell briefly breaks up the monotony of seeing the same things over and over. Bodell seems to be aware of how much his premise inherently restricts “Hellcat” on a visual level. Mercifully granting a reprieve to those who feel the constricting claustrophobia of being stuck inside the same space for an extended amount of time, “Hellcat” not only keeps the set shaking back and forth, the camera comes up with a few creative cuts to make it look like the box is bigger than it should be. Perhaps too big considering the new discoveries Lena continues making, though that’s preferable to repeated shots of an animal head mounted above a bed, which “Hellcat” shows about ten too many times.

The mystery creates enough intrigue to keep an audience engaged without worrying too much about details arguably lacking in logic. Clive gradually tells a few short stories that reveal he has a daughter as well as an unusual obsession with alien-based conspiracy theories. Armchair sleuths can now collect a few clues to go with their questions and start coming up with their own ideas related to what could really be happening here.

A few ticks past the halfway point in the 90-minute runtime, the possible truth finally comes out. This is when “Hellcat” hits a fork in the freeway where invested viewers will stick with the story’s direction while others start staring distractedly out the window. Along one road, “Hellcat” hits some bumps in the form of typical tropes such as a monologuing villain and a struggle over a gun leading to someone getting shot in the gut. For those traveling the other path, however, it won’t feel like charity to look the other way on a couple of the cliches so they can look more intently at the acting, particularly from Terry Todd as Clive, when “Hellcat” becomes surprisingly emotional in several unexpectedly moving moments.

“Hellcat” can’t be classified with a subgenre because doing so would spoil its reveal. Instead, “Hellcat” can be described as a confined chamber thriller whose quality acting and strong suspense put a lot of gas in the tank despite a small cast and low budget. Naturally, not everyone will agree there’s enough fuel to get the film across the finish line. But graded on a curve for indie horror, “Hellcat” impresses enough to earn respectable marks, especially when compared to debut features from first-time directors that usually aren’t as consistently competent or as thoughtfully staged as this one.

Review Score: 75

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