Documentaries that focused on a single individual can fall
into two camps – one is that it’s too pretentious to actually say something serious
about the subject or two it tells a well-rounded and comprehensive look at the subject’s
life and career both the good and the bad.
Unfortunately, the second one only actually happens when the subject has
already passed on. So it is with great
pleasure that To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story (2017) belongs in the
second type and Kodder is very much still alive.
For those of you who are not familiar of who Kane Hodder is
(and I doubt there is a single horror fan who doesn’t know who he is), Hodder
is a stunt actor/stunt coordinator/actor most famous most famous for playing
the immortal Jason Voorhees in four of the Friday the 13th films as
well as the character of Victory Crowley in the four Hatchet films (the forth
film called simply Victor Crowley). In
addition to this Hodder has worked on a ton of films including Demolition Man
(1993), House (1985), Se7en (1995), and Spawn (1997), to name a small few of
the films.
In this film Hodder goes into intimate details about being a
young child who was abused to an early accident where he was horrendously
burned to his current recovery and insistent on always helping others. This is reiterated by a huge cast of actors
and fellow crew members who relate their stories of working with Hodder on very
productions. Some of the people featured
included John Carl Buechler, Sean S. Cunningham, Bruce Campbell, Robert
England, Adam Green, and Bill Moseley, with is just a small sampling of the
people interviewed.
Directed by Derek Dennis Herbert, this could have easily
been a talking heads documentary about Hodder but the stories these people tell
show a brighter like on Hodder as a person and Hodder’s own recollections shed
a light on how he overcame so many elements in his life that would have crippled
other people. This is not just a film
about the man and his work but a film that gets into the deeper character of a
man who has continuously faced challenges head on and never letting anyone or
anything decide his own fate other than himself.
This is an amazing story of an amazing individual that has
had a profound effect on the horror genre and horror fans in general and this
is a great film that expertly separates the myth from the man.
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