The cursed skydiving movie.

Film needs an equivalent of the internet’s rule 34 for horror that says that if something exists there will be a horror movie about a cursed version of it. Cursed video tape, cursed home movies, cursed home, cursed dildo, cursed children, cursed banana custard filled croissant. You think of it, it will become the object of a horror flick over the course of the next hundred years.

But today we’re here to talk about Hex, a film about a cursed skydiving maneuver. Here’s how I think Hex went down, Hex was originally supposed to be two films. Director Chris Johnston whose previous work involves sound department stuff on films like Jiro Dreams of Sushi thought that this was going to be a feel good film about a loner who discovers the powerful bond of friendship through a group of other skydivers. Other director Andy Malchiodi, whose previous work includes absolutely nothing, assumed that after the two met to watch The Grudge (the American version) that the film they were working on was clearly a horror film about a cursed vagina. After drawing in three rounds of rock paper scissors in a row, the two combined their ideas and just did a film about a cursed skydiving move.

Hex stars Kayla Adams as Sarah, a woman who skydives alone because of her family trauma and also doesn’t get along well with her mom. She meets a group of skydivers really keen on getting her involved in their next dive despite Sarah having no experience doing team maneuvers. Their plan is to do the Hex, a supposedly cursed skydiving trick that requires six people and is apparently cursed on account of all the people who have died after attempting it. The trick goes wrong and Matthew Holcomb disappears mid-jump with nobody understanding what happened to him. Is it the curse? The curse of the skydiving move? God I hope so.

You’ll notice I’m referring to Matthew Holcomb as his actor name and not the name the movie gave him, which is Payson, which is not a real name. Take a drink every time the film has a character say Payson and you get second hand embarrassment. You’ll be dead before the third act. After Payson disappears, the rest of the crew start dropping one by one to odd circumstances. Can Sarah figure out what’s going on and stop the hex before it’s too late? Nah. This is a horror film.

One positive I can say about this film is that it has great cinematography. There are some pretty good effects like when a ghost character walks behind a tree and the camera in one continuous shot walks up to reveal he’s disappeared. The skydiving shots are all fantastically done, clearly the team has experience in skydiving and whoever was handling the camera in those scenes knows how to shoot such a sequence. It would have been easier to do a crappy green screen, but they actually went into the air to shoot these scenes. It takes a lot of confidence and skill to pretend to be a dead body dangling from a plane on a stuck seatbelt.

Hex is one of those films that you go into assuming it’s going to be a shlocky horror film with a stupid premise, and it is. There’s a lot of heavy idiocy in this film’s writing courtesy of writer Hans Rodionoff who wrote Lost Boys: The Thirst, which is not a film about lonely dudes subscribing to Only Fans. There are a lot of really bad, very gaping plot holes in this film like Sarah’s relationship with her father and how everyone else in the town seems to know the circumstances of his death except for her, as well as the Hex and the story behind it.

Still, it’s not as embarrasing as Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The last half hour is the most interesting this movie gets. Despite some of the idiocy there are a few well thought out set ups and payoffs.

Don’t watch the trailer because it basically spoils the ending.

Rating: B

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