Holy
Hell
Directed
by: Will
Allen.
I find cults utterly
fascinating, mostly because I want to know how people find themselves under
their spell in the first place. When I watch a film like Holy Hell, and here
the Cult leader – named Michel (at least at first, he’ll have more times in
time), talk about his beliefs, and nature, and on and on, I feel my eyes
rolling so hard they practically fall out of my head. How are people like
Michel able to convince so many people to follow them, especially since it
doesn’t seem like he has all that much of a belief system to cling to? Will Allen,
who directed the film, which is made up of footage he shot during the 22 year
period he was in the cult – beginning in the 1980s – interspersed with
interview footage with people, who like him are now former members, really
should have been able to answer that question. The problem is though that it
never really does. For a film that is directed by a former member – one who was
close to the leader for decades, who was perhaps his chief propagandist, who
ends up being both a victim of the leader, and complicit in other
victimization, we never really get a sense of who the hell Allen is. It is the
type of gaping hole at the center of a supposed first person documentary that
the film cannot recover from.
The opening scenes in the film
show Allen as a movie loving kid – remaking (or ripping off) his favorite 1970s
blockbusters with his Super 8 camera. He realizes he is gay – his parents
aren’t over excepting of it, and then all of a sudden, it’s the 1980s and he’s
in the cult. It starts out in California, with a small group who worship
Michel, who gives strange talks about life, love, sex (he doesn’t like sex),
physical perfection (no fatties allowed here), etc. He puts them all through a
lot of ballet classes, and demands perfection from everyone. They will spend
months rehearsing elaborate ballets that they will perform once, for
themselves, and then never again. Unlike a lot of cults, this one doesn’t live
altogether on a compound – but have their own homes and jobs, although Michel
does encourage them to cut off all contact with their family, and they are
required to go to weekly cleansing sessions with him – for $50 fee of course.
Authorities in California start to get suspicious, so Michel hits the road –
eventually winding up in Texas and sending for his people. He gets paranoid
around the time of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians – although again there
is no compound, no guns, no child brides, so people pretty much leave them
alone.
We know from the beginning that
something is wrong here – something doesn’t quite feel right from the start
(hint, it’s about sex – it’s ALWAYS about sex), but the movie takes a shocking
long time to get to that point. It’s painful to hear the stories about what
happened when we eventually do to be sure. Yet, what’s missing is any sort of
real introspection on behalf of Allen himself – of how he allowed himself to be
suckered by Michel in the first place, and why he stayed so long. His
documentary is hurt by the fact he admits that every time Michel yelled, he
turned off the camera, so while there is a lot of footage of Michel being goofy
and creepy – there isn’t very much of this dark side we hear about.
Movies about cults, especially
those from the inside, need to show the audience what it was like on the inside
– make us understand why people started, and why they stayed, even when things
turned bad. Holy Hell doesn’t really do either of those things – and the film
doesn’t really work as a result.
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