To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story (2017)
**** (out of 4)
This here is an excellent documentary that has Kane Hodder talking about his career in front of the movie camera as well as the various tragic events that led to him getting roles in films like the FRIDAY THE 13TH series as well as the HATCHET series.
If you're a fan of slasher movies then you'll known who Hodder is but I'm not too sure how much of his story you'll actually know. I'll admit that I really didn't know too much about him outside of what I knew about the making of various films he appeared in and that's why TO HELL AND BACK: THE KANE HODDER STORY was so great. Not only do we get to know about his stunt work, which led to him getting to play characters like Jason Voorhees but we also get to know what happened before that.
A great portion of the running time is devoted to an event that happened to Hodder when he was twenty-two years old. I'm not going to ruin what happened for those who don't know but there's no question that the stuff dealing with this event is the highlight of the film. Not only do you learn about these things but it helps make more sense of how he handles his work on movies as well as how he deals with his fans.
There are a lot of familiar faces who show up for interviews including Adam Green, Robert Englund, Danielle Harris, Bruce Campbell, John Carl Buechler, Sean S. Cunningham, Sid Haig as well as others including some of Hodder's family members. All of the interviews are extremely good and entertaining but a the same time there's no doubt that the highlight are the interview clips with Hodder who gets to tell his own story.
Throughout the story there are countless clips from his movies and this here is a major plus. There's no doubt that horror fans are going to love this documentary but I think Hodder's story is strong enough to where even outsiders will be entertained by this film.
