Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass Takes This Apocalypse and Shoves It

Hellacious Acres: the Case of John Glass is not a movie for everyone.  It is a movie for those of you who embrace the absurd, enjoy a little arthouse in your science fiction, or watch the SyFy channel’s Saturday night movies.  If you’re the sort of person who might tune in for one of those offerings, then this is a movie you should try to track down. 

The basic premise is that a man—John Glass, he is told—awakes in a barn, alone, in a suit he can never remove and only the prerecorded words of a computer program to tell him who he is, where he is, and why he is.  His mission?  To help begin restoring the world by activating three different checkpoints to tell whomever might be listening that someone is alive on the surface of the world.  His assets?  His brains, his strength, and…well, that’s about where his assets end.  John stoically sets out on his quest, and just when his mission begins to seem impossible, he begins to recognize that it might also simply be pointless….

Hellacious Acres is one of the most hilariously depressing post-apocalyptic movies of all time.  It took a bit of watching for me to parse that out; at first I wasn’t sure where the film was going or if it was taking the long way of getting there by design or by mistake.  There came a moment, however, about 45 minutes in, where the scene was simply so ridiculous, unexpected, and tragicomic that I realized my inclination to laugh was not an accident—the scene was meant to be funny.  Which meant perhaps that overlong opening also was, and the long tedious stretches of endless walking, as well.  Having decided that intention to the film, I watched the rest with a smile and thoroughly enjoyed it.  The director succeeded quite well in making a movie about a world that is worse for its emptiness than any amount of monsters could accomplish.  (That sort of dreary mundaneness reminded me a bit of the afterlife in Wristcutters: a Love Story, actually, and any time you can make me think of that movie you’re going to come out ahead).

I can’t talk really about specific plot points due to the spoilers aspect, which I’m trying to be sensitive about here because this movie has not been widely screened or distributed (Bloody Disgusting Selects/The Collective has picked it up, but it isn’t out yet).  The movie does play out a nice three-act structure and come to a resolution that, having been reached, seems the inevitable sum of events.  Also, the pacing is consistent throughout—to be fair, slow throughout, but that’s part of the humor and overall mood of the film—so the conclusion doesn’t feel rushed or underdeveloped.

The movie is an independent film, in the truest sense, and that does show in some of the sets and special effects.  The film itself is presented in a somewhat scratchy letterbox, like some kind of retro home movie footage.  I found it a rather ingenious choice, because it both disguises that home-shot quality indie films sometimes have and gives the story a look of neglect and disrepair, even in the equipment used to record the events.  Some viewers may find the look obnoxious or too cheap/independent for their tastes.  For me, it was a really clever way to solve a common problem.

As I said already, this movie isn’t for everyone.  It was for me.  It had the right mix of black humor, existential despair, and soul-crushing circumstances bound up in a creative packaging to push my nerd-girl buttons.  I really enjoyed this movie and found it a creative and original take on an overused trope of the SF genre.  If you’re a hard-core SF movie fan—especially to all of you who recommended Primer to me in my best of the aughts list!—then remember the name Hellacious Acres and make the effort to watch it if you find it playing near you at any point.   

Also…if you want to know more about the film you can check out my exclusive interview with writer/director Pat Tremblay!