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A quintet of teenagers - good girl Ayesha (Rooshanie Ejaz), poor boy
Simon (Haider Raza), dopehead OJ (Osman Khalid Butt), easy-going Roxy
(Rubya Chaudhry) and macho Vicky (Kunwar Ali Roshan) decide to skip class
and make it to a rock concert somewhere in the countryside by van ... but
soon enough, they are losing their way when taking a shortcut, are
attacked first by zombies - one of which bites OJ - then a weird
hitchhiker (Salim Meraj) ... and when their car later runs out of gas,
they are really fucked. Vicky, who tries to get to a nearby workshop for
soem gas, is brutally slaughtered once he gets there, Roxy makes it to the
shack of a weird woman (Najma Malik), who at first seems friendly enough,
but then Roxy finds out she collects skulls. And she has a burqa wearing
daughter who swings a medieval weapon - a spiked iron ball on a chain - a
little too well ... ouch. OJ, who has been apparently infected by the
zombie bite, simply escapes, which leaves Simon and Ayesha to find out
what's going on, find petrol, and make their way out of here. The good
news, they do find petrol, the bad news, the burqa woman catches up with
Simon and ... ouch. Ayesha on the other hand manages to dispose of both
the burqa woman and her mother, and she manages to fuel up the van. But
unfortunately she also manages to track down OJ, who by now has turned
into ... well, I won't give that away, but I think you'll be able to
guess. For years now, Pete Tombs and his DVD-label Mondo
Macabro have supplied fans with rare films from the trashy side of
world cinema, and they can't be credited highly enough for this - and now
Tombs and his company have gotten into film producing, producing a
Pakistani gore film (the first gore movie to come out of this country,
according to the ads). The outcome is ... disappointing and enjoyable at
pretty much the same time. Disappointing because whoever expected Hell's
Ground to be a sort of Citizen Kane of exotic horror will be
... well, disappointed. Still, taken by its own terms, Hell's Ground
is enjoyable enough, a very Pakistani take on zombie and slasher cinema
with obvious references to films like Texas
Chainsaw Massacre and the like, that is in several scenes so
over-the-top that it avoids looking just like any other recent slasher
films from wherever, and that doesn't take itself seriously enough to
become annoying (without ever going all-out comedy). Only the repeated
references to the Pakistani Dracula
adaptation The Living Corpse
(an earlier Mondo Macabro release) seem a bit out of place,
actually.
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