This turned out to be a surprisingly good thriller; minimalistic and quick paced, and visually well done. Set in a near-future world devastated by a 10 °C rise in temperatures and blinding sunlight, everything looks very much the part of the post-apocalyptic setting. Good cast, too - Hannah Herzsprung and Stipe Erceg, both stellar in The Baader Meinhof Complex, also do a good job with the sparse dialog here as the desperate protagonists searching for the last of the water. Not your usual Hollywood sci-fi fare with million-dollar C.G.I. and flashy explosions but still taut with enough action to keep you on edge. More reminiscent of the French New Wave Horror movies like Alexandre Aja's High Tension and Xavier Gens' Frontier(s), only this is a much quieter film without all the gratuitous gore.

I expected much more from a project that included Roland Emmerich-especially since he has been involved with such amazing movies like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow etc. I think that a daytime high of somewhere around 160 F would only spur the German's on to come up with ways of dealing with the situation rather than causing their entire society to implode into something resembling a giant junkyard. I would have thought that such a scenario would have been the perfect opportunity to use a soundtrack in a Tangerine Dream Sorcerer vein but there was nothing resembling a soundtrack unless you consider the obligatory inclusion of the only German top 40 song ever to be on the top 40 in the west: "99 Luft Balloons" which appears in the form of it being the CD of choice for a girl of about 14 in the film. Being kidnapped by cannibals as the focal point of the plot in a movie with this kind of scope is a serious anticlimax. Aside from the washed out with light approach to depicting the day side of 'a world gone to heat hell' there is little else in the way of anything special visually in this movie. It is really more of a cinematic burp than a movie. it comes in at under 90 minutes which I think defines a half effort rather than a full effort. The acting is OK-but given that the entire film takes place in something like three square km's of nothing, acting skills can't brighten up this dull dull dull script.

Check on any review of the German film 'Hell' and it'll tell you that it's a film 'of two halves.' I can't really add much to that.Set in the near future when the sun has scorched the Earth, leaving only a few survivors to scour the land for what they need most - in this case, water. We meet four of them as they travel across Germany, unable to set foot in the sunlight and doing much of the travelling at night, as they desperately look for the fabled mountain range where it still rains.The first half is pretty good. It takes the whole 'can't go out in the sunlight' idea and introduces many nice touches, i.e. how the characters have developed new patterns of living, plus how they ingeniously find various ways of getting more water (out of pipes, using cloths to soak moisture off cave walls and so on). Plus the acting is good. Everyone plays their part well and there isn't a Jar-Jar Binks among them (in other words, hideously annoying and unbearable to watch).However, the second half kind of slips up on itself and turns the whole thing into a simple 'escape from the baddies' movie. It even comes complete with 'running through the woods' scene. Plus the idea of being unable to go out in the sunlight kind of gets forgotten about. The sunlight suddenly plays no real part in the second act, even to the extent that the characters are somehow able to run about it in with no real side effects.What starts off excellent, just ends up being okay-ish. It's definitely worth watching, even if it's just for the nice atmosphere created and decent first half. If you fancy a German subtitled version of The Road, give it a try.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

A German post apocalypse movie ? Last time I saw something resembling one of those movies was Wim Wender's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD . You remember that don't you ? The world ends in three hours and everyone stands around discussing the human condition in a film so dull , pretentious and talkative you'll be thinking that Michael Bay is perhaps a misunderstood Orson Welles in comparison so I went in to HELL with some trepidation . No need because whatever its faults HELL is a unpretentious mainstream international horror movie that one rarely sees coming out of Germany That said it is heavily flawed and ill thought out . The premise involves solar flares that has scorched the Earth destroying civilization and making it impossible to stay out in the sunlight for any length of time while at the same time evaporating the reservoirs and food chain . Or has it ? This is the major flaw of the film it's never consistently explained what effect this has on individuals or human society . A character claims two hours exposure to the sun light is near fatal but this scenario collapses when given serious thought . Early in the film two characters haggle over swapping water for petrol and one character replies to the other he'd get more " in a city " . So cities still exist in this post apocalyptic world ? The logic behind the plotting revolves around the idea there will be water in the mountains and if you suspend disbelief for long enough you can perhaps see the logic in this to a degree but too often the storytelling draws attention to the ludicrous nature of the plot . The reality is human beings would die without water in three days . If the taps in the cities stopped working the human race would almost certainly die out before people would consider cannibalism to survive. It's also illogical to assume that only a handful of people have come up with the bright idea to head to the mountains . This is what's known as contrived plotting and HELL is full of these contrived plot turns Some people have referred to this movie as " A German version of THE ROAD " . They're right to a degree but I was also constantly reminded of 28 DAYS LATER . The original premise of the solar flares becomes quickly forgotten the same as the infected become forgotten about in Boyle's film as both films share a common ground of " Would a woman prostitute herself in unpleasant circumstances to simply survive ? " . HELL doesn't really explore this idea too much as it's trying to be a commercial horror movie and to be fair for a low budget horror from Europe it did manage to keep this audience member involved in this segment . Like 28 DAYS LATER it does often feel like its two films stuck together In summary HELL is an uneven mixture of good and bad . One can't help thinking the producers had two films . One film featuring civilization collapsing due to solar flares and another featuring a backwoods brutality tale featuring mountain cannibals and merging the two to come up with one unsatisfactory movie . If you're a fan of the horror genre you'll like it and it's good to see a German film that doesn't feature either war guilt or introspective pretentious brooding . But like so many other horror films you also can't help noticing how dumb situations and characters in this genre can be