Hell and Back

Roll up some of that good good with a few of your degenerate friends, crack a beer, and roll this film. It's entertaining and funny. Don't expect an academy award. Watch willy's wonderland with this and your friend won't leave the couch.

You wonder what the attraction is for the makers for "Chicken Run", "Box Trolls" and for the Bro Comedy "Hell and Back" to stop motion animation. It's not as if going through the painstaking and laborious process automatically yields a visual character superior to less labor- intensive production methods. So why not just make it a cartoon? Anyway, the plainly descriptive-titled "Hell and Back" lifts the way Satan from South Park is rendered whole, gives him "Breaking Bad's" Bob Odenkirk's voice and drops him in a bro comedy. There he trades the standard bro jokes (mostly homosexual panic quips) with the slackers who inadvertently fall into his underground realm. None of it is terribly entertaining but there are enough laughs to make it all fairly innocuous.

I did love the fact that the movie was a stop motion animated film, and it does have a few laugh out loud jokes, plus it is a nice Hard rated R as well, filled with mostly really dirty jokes.

But overall, the movie is pretty weak. That may explain why I did not hear about it until I just happen to past the movie theater and saw the poster. Especially, considering what an all star cast of voice overs that are featured in the film, like Susan Sarandon and Bob Odenkirk.

The animation is actually pretty dull and unattractive and only a few jokes really stood out while the rest were stale.

I think I was expecting something like Heavy Metal, and was surely disappointed with what it really was, a lame stoner flick, which would not be so bad if maybe Cheech and Chong were the guys battling their way out of hell.

This film is very well done. Its a dumb comedy for smart people. The people writng the bad reviews are also the ones that review local soup kitchens and taco bells. There are big names in comedy and people think this is not funny? The IQ of the country has plummeted over the last 20 years, so I'm not surprised people complained about this one. I love how offensive this is and i really really love how badly it upset people! That's actually the best part of the movie.

This film is very well done. Its a dumb comedy for smart people. The people writng the bad reviews are also the ones that review local soup kitchens and taco bells. There are big names in comedy and people think this is not funny? The IQ of the country has plummeted over the last 20 years, so I'm not surprised people complained about this one. I love how offensive this is and i really really love how badly it upset people! That's actually the best part of the movie.

I really wanted to like this film a lot, but as the film progressed that got harder and harder to do. Every step of the way the film tries to be as raunchy and as inappropriate as possible. Which would have been fine if the Raunchy/Inappropriate humor was funny, but about 85% of it just isn't. It's the kind of jokes that I use to make with my friends when I was in middle school, when I first started understanding what all those dirty words meant. That kind of humor is just not amusing enough to carry an 1 & 20 minute film.

The one thing that the film did have going for it is the animation, the settings all looked really good. Hell was cool, Satan looked awesome, and characters were all very well done. Unfortunately the voices for the most part just don't seem to fit. There were a few times where I kind of felt like I was watching one of those you tube videos where people dub over children's cartoons in an effort to be funny.

I enjoy animated stuff aimed at adults, however it seems like for the most part it just doesn't work when it comes to films. There are plenty of great animated TV shows for adults (Archer, South Park, Bob's Burgers, etc) but when I try to think of great animated movies for adults the only one that really comes to mind is South Park: Bigger, Larger, and Uncut. "Hell & Back" had a lot of promise, it's filled with very funny people doing the voices for the characters and the premise seemed like it opened up a lot of room for very funny situations. However, the previous reviewers were not wrong about this one.

This wasn't absolutely horrible, but it just wasn't good. It was entertaining enough to keep me watching but most of the jokes just fall flat and the comedians who lended their voices to the film are mostly wasted on a very poor/unfunny script. I wanted to like it, but I just didn't.

4/10