A group of wealthy teens sneak out of the house to see the hardest rocking band in Pakistan. They pile into a janky van and head out through the country. But, as we all know in horror films, rarely is a road trip a straight line. Now someone has gotten bit by something strange and the gas tank is empty. It’s a terrible place to get stranded. A bloodthirsty maniac is on the loose and a mysterious disease has swept across the villages, turning people into flesh-eating mutants. The locals have nicknamed the area—that’s right—Hell’s Ground.
From there, Hell’s Ground takes a page from ye olde Texas Chainsaw Massacre playbook and victims are lured into a dilapidated shed and butchered with rusty blades, saws, and shears. But instead of a leather mask and a filthy apron, the killer wears a white burqa that could definitely benefit from a good stain remover.
While derivative, Hell’s Ground is fun and goopy. Sure, it takes pages from basically every classic horror film from The Hills Have Eyes to People Under the Stairs. But you know what? That’s OK. We don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes a plain old wheel and a bucket of popcorn is what we want. Then we’re free to enjoy the unsettling visuals: chicken feet and dead bats hang from branches, flies buzz around half-decayed corpses, and garbage and pollution litter the muddy banks of a fetid stream. Even the side characters and extras are disturbing; they have wild hair, empty eyes, and a frenetic energy.
But Hell’s Ground is smarter than it lets on: there’s commentary about class and how the modern world has left so many people behind. The mix of both English and Urdu is a clever way to show the divide between the haves and the have nots. The teens’ privilege cannot help them because in the jungle among zombies and maniacs, everyone is equally fucked. There are also themes about how development has poisoned the environment, the trappings of modern life, and the role of a young woman in Pakistani society, which is to say, a wife. The messages in the film don’t feel overly heavy handed because it’s done through visuals and simple dialogue.
Writer/director/producer Omar Ali Khan funded the movie with money from his chain of ice cream restaurants called The Hot Spot, and Pete Tombs from Mondo Macabre co-wrote and produced it. Even though the film screened abroad, it struggled against censorship in Pakistan. The government, turns out, doesn’t love Muslim serial killers, drugs, gore. Khan proclaims that Hell’s Ground is the first Pakistani zombie movie, and I believe it. Most of the films that come out of Lahore tend to be syrupy song-and-dance-boy-meets-girl romances. Hell’s Ground is an outlier. After some editing, it finally passed the censors and was released in Pakistan to become the first feature-length shot-on-video film ever released in the country. Not too shabby from a guy with an ice cream shoppe. Hell’s Ground is low-budget horror done well: smart and fun with goopy make-up effects, severed heads, grotesque imagery, and the universal fear of being chased by a guy swinging a mace.
