After dabbling with made-for-TV movies like My Babysitter's a Vampire (*shakes head*), director Bruce McDonald returns to more straight forward genre fair with Hellions. This is a film I've been looking forward to since I enjoyed the director's previous work with Pontypool and am up for almost anything set during or around Halloween. It's just unfortunate that Bruce was working with a terrible script, because the visuals were there, but any kind of competent story wasn't.

So the flick starts simple enough with a teen girl named Dora, who recently discovered she was pregnant with her boyfriend's baby. Conflicted about the situation, she stays home on Halloween to hand out candy to the kiddies while she mulls things over. Though, she'll soon have to put her personal life aside when a group of creepy costumed children begin to terrorize her for no apparent reason. One would think this is just another home invasion thriller, but it becomes more surreal and dreamlike as it progresses, making it feel a bit more artsy than your average horror pic.

Aside from the evil kids, the movie primarily only follows the Dora character while she tries to survive the night. The local doctor appears at the girl's house for no apparent reason and Robert Patrick pops up a couple times as the sheriff, but next to that it's just all about the girl, which is fine if you're okay with just following a single character. The practical effects were decent and the look of the film was interesting since it had a pinkish tint due to it taking place during the blood moon. The look of the costumes and the evil kids themselves were also effectively creepy, but that's where the positives end.

There are quite a few problems with the movie (like how characters will pop out of nowhere), but the biggest issue is the fact that the story makes no sense. You'll likely end up wondering WTF is going on more than half the time and when the reasoning behind all this is revealed it'll damn sure warrant another WTF. Sure all the plot-holes and weirdness makes a little more sense once the twist is revealed, but the ending is still so bad that you want to just throw something at the screen and curse the filmmakers for wasting your time!

Hellions started off with potential and offered some effectively creepy villains, but then it became clear that the filmmakers had no idea where to take things. Had the flick delivered a more competent story and a better ending then this might've been a decent effort, but as it stands it's just plain bad.