‘Hellcat’ is a Nasty Little Horror Mystery That Sputters to the End

There is something immediately unsettling about waking up injured in the back of a moving trailer with absolutely no idea how you got there. That is where Brock Bodell’s Hellcat drops Lena Orchard (Dakota Gorman), and thankfully, the movie does not waste much time letting her, or us, get comfortable.

Lena has a nasty wound on her arm, no obvious way out, and a disembodied voice coming through a speaker telling her she is running out of time. The voice belongs to Clive Peters (Todd Terry), who insists Lena is sick and that he is taking her to a doctor who can help before whatever is happening to her becomes irreversible. Naturally, Lena assumes she has been kidnapped or trafficked. Fair.

She tries escaping, bargaining, manipulating Clive and figuring out exactly what the hell is happening. Then she discovers Ollie (Liz Atwater), another young woman hidden inside the trailer and chained near the door. At that point, every explanation Clive has offered becomes even harder to trust.

The first half of Hellcat works because Bodell understands the usefulness of withholding information. Who is Lena? Why was she taken? What happened to her arm? Is Clive actually dangerous, or is Lena refusing help from the only person who understands what is happening? For a while, I genuinely wanted answers.

The limited budget is also used well. Most of the film takes place inside the trailer, production design becomes incredibly important, and the cramped, dirty environment gives the story texture. Bodell turns confinement into tension instead of simply making the movie look cheap. Eventually, though, confinement becomes confinement.

There is only so long you can keep asking questions before I start wondering when we are going to get to the damn point. A recurring mounted fox head initially adds to the movie’s weird little personality, but as the mystery begins revealing itself, even that motif starts feeling less intriguing.

The second half is where Hellcat loses some of its bite. The narrative gets messier, certain revelations do not land as cleanly as the setup promises, and a late twist feels more gimmicky than genuinely shocking. I am also getting exhausted with horror films teasing transformation and carnage through implication and allegory. Sometimes I want the movie to stop being coy and show us what we came to see!

Bodell is credited as writer, director, producer and editor, which is dope, but it may also explain why the film occasionally feels like it needed another set of eyes. Low-budget filmmaking requires people to wear a ridiculous number of hats, so I get it, but separation can be useful. Someone outside the filmmaker’s own head might have recognized where the mystery needed tightening and where the ending needed another pass.

Still, Hellcat mostly works as a scrappy little genre exercise, the kind of low-budget ingenuity we highlighted in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It has tension, a strong central mystery and enough nasty surprises to keep things moving, even when the destination does not always justify the trip.

Hellcat is available now on Shudder and VOD.