ep317: Hellbender (2021)

Now that the table has been cleared from HANKSgiving but before we dive into the rest of our holiday fare, we are taking a break from festivities to highlight one of our favorite movies of 2021! Winner of the Knoxville Horror Film Festival’s “Palme D’Gore” (as well as Best Direction, Screenplay, and the Audience Award), HELLBENDER is the story of a mother and daughter living in seclusion in the Catskill mountains as the mother attempts to protect her daughter from the truth of their witchy heritage. This micro-budget indie film puts a unique, visually-arresting, and deeply emotional coming-of-age spin on your typical witchcraft lore by centering it around a parent-child relationship (and some kickass music!), and was written/directed/starring/practically everything else-ed by real-life family Toby Poser, Zelda Adams, and John Adams (https://wonderwheelproductions.com). We highly recommend checking out HELLBENDER on the festival circuit, if you get it a chance, or when it hits Shudder in early 2022. If you enjoy this review then stay tuned because we're very excited to announce that we’ll be interviewing the Adams family on our next episode! So wrap up that bass solo, finish your grubs, and be careful where you trespass because it’s time to dust off our review of HELLBENDER!  If you enjoyed this episode, come join the Video Monsters crew on Discord!! Hangout episodes are live (and unedited!) every Tuesday night starting around 9:00pm EST. Listen and chat along with us in the Discord chat and we’ll even give you a shoutout on the episode!  Video Monsters is brought to you by the Chattanooga Film Festival and Central Cinema in Knoxville, TN. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or online at chattfilmfest.org and centralcinema865.com. Links for each of these can also be found on our pages, so be sure to follow us at videomonsterpod on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well.  music for Video Monsters by Evan Simmons