HELLACIOUS ACRES: THE CASE OF JOHN GLASS (2011) Review

Directed by: Pat Tremblay

Starring: Navin Pratap, Jamie Abrams, Paula Davis

So far most of the Bloody Disgusting Selects films have been pretty decent and so far they have been a bit of a mixed bag. However, HELLACIOUS ACRES is by far the most bizarre release to date. It’s a low-budget (VERY low budget), post-apocalyptic tale which centers around John Glass as he embarks on a mission to fix the Earth’s ruined atmosphere. It involves a lot of walking and a lot of talking and not much else.

John Glass awakens from a long, deep slumber and finds himself in a world which has gone through not only a third world war but also an alien invasion. Consequently the atmosphere is not breathable but luckily John has a special fully-enclosed Power Ranger outfit which allows him to get around just fine. After getting the low-down from the computer-voice in his suit, John discovers that he has been awakened so that he can located certain installations to find codes which will help clear up the atmosphere. He barely remembers anything about his past and has no idea why he has been chosen but nonetheless he puts on his walking shoes and gets going. What follows is a lot (and I mean a LOT) of talking and explaining as he consults his super-suit about how to eat without taking off his suit and other mundane things like that. Along the way he meets other people both hostile and friendly and suffers from an unfortunate run of bad luck all to the soundtrack of some kind of amateur sludge metal. He is pursued by aliens and armed lunatics and it seems that anything that can go wrong does go wrong.

Even though John seems to have a bad case of terrible luck I found it pretty hard to feel sorry for him. I think it’s because he seems to complain about absolutely everything, in fact that’s one of the things that really got on my nerves with this movie. The other thing was the seemingly huge amount of time where nothing happens. And in fact by the time the credits rolled I still felt like nothing important had happened during the whole film. The running time of around an hour and 40 minutes could have been reduced quite a bit to make this a more smooth film but as it is there are a lot of times where it just drags.

And the entire film is shot with this grainy, washed out look which I assume is meant to add to the atmosphere but was probably chosen to help cover the low quality of everything. It's nice that the filmmakers have tried something different but in the end I don't think it quite worked out.