For many people, the concept of a homeowner’s association seems like something akin to hell on earth. In William Bagley’s Hold The Fort, Lucas and Jenny are a young couple who think they’ve finally found their dream home, and their HOA is actually the only thing preventing a hell on Earth, as their neighborhood is built over a portal to Hell that opens once a year. They’ve had the bad luck to move in just before the annual battle between the denizens of the abyss and the neighborhood.
Such a premise seems difficult to mess up, and indeed Bagley works magic. His vision of a Rockwellian neighborhood besieged by witches and ghouls is a Raimi-esque romp, a classic castle siege horror film in which a small band of survivors barricaded in a town hall are fighting to see the sun rise, is injected with just enough humor to be entertaining instead of overwhelming. This film doesn’t try to be anything more than it has any right to be, and it maintains a zany and endearingly juvenile energy through much of the run time. Much of the humor comes from the townsfolk being largely unphased by the increasingly monstrous creatures; what would induce horror in most people seems to, at best, mildly annoy the citizens of Gruber Hills. And Lucas and Jenny are the perfect audience surrogate all of this, reacting in terror when witches lay siege to the hall as opposed to the rest of the town who simply see this as another battle.
Hold The Fort isn’t particularly scary, and that’s fine. It’s got enough well-crafted humor to make it worth a watch, and enough terror and fear absolutely qualify as a horror film. If you enjoy Evil Dead and Monster Squad or wonder what The Mist would’ve been like without the super heavy emotional devastation, Hold The Fort is the perfect film for you.
