Director: Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews, Michael Hoad
Writer: Michele Pacitto, Jordan Rockwell (Screenplay)
Starring: Sarah T Cohen, Abi Casson Thompson, Frances Katz, Ricardo Freitas, Ryan Davies, Serhat Metin
Plot: A fallen MMA fighter must win a netherworld no-holds-barred death tournament against man, beast and demon to save her soul.
Runtime: 1 Hour 18 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: HellKat starts when Katrina ‘HellKat’ Bash (Cohen) loses her latest MMA fight, leaving to go on a soul-searching trip. Katrina doesn’t realize she has made it to the netherworld, seeking a bar for answers, she learns the reality of the situation she is in.
Katrina is in the middle of the road to hell, needing to fight to escape, not just people, but monsters and creatures a like, each one becoming more deadly as she reaches the end, if she can make it.
Thoughts on HellKat
Characters & Performances – Katrina Bash is an MMA fighter who has lost her latest fight, putting her star status down the drain, losing the creditability her name once had. She finds herself in a bar, cleaning for tequila, before she learns that she is in the netherworld forced to fight for a chance to make it out of her destination. Sarah T Cohen is the strongest of the performers in this film, she is the most grounded of the characters we meet here. We do end up meeting a lot of different colourful characters here, be it the man running the fights, the all-knowing barkeep or the creatures we meet setting up the fights. The problem with most of these characters it that we just don’t get to see how deadly they can be, we tend to see the big bad creatures defeated too easily, not giving us a person we want to see Katrina get her hands on.
Story – The story follows a fallen MMA star who finds herself in the netherworld, needing to fight her way through the different amounts of enemies placed on front of her to escape. This story could well have been massively entertaining, we know the fights could be massive, entertaining everything, while the tagged idea of escape the netherworld would be the stepping stones to escape. This is the reason why so many fighting movies work, we know the basics, each fight offers a different more deadly challenge, but this doesn’t deliver that factor. We start slowly with too much time in the bar, dealing with Katrina learning where she is before we get into the combat ready area. This story ends up being easy enough to watch, but you feel it could have been so much more.
Themes – HellKat gives us a fighting movie that doesn’t hit the full heights of the wild over the top concept, it never commits to going big, trying to have the fights in a ground environment, which is often lite badly for the most part again holding back the full concept.
Final Thoughts – HellKat is a film with so much potential that only ends up not living up to the potential it could have shown.
