PopHorror Let's Get Scared
From the brilliant minds of writer Tony Burgess and directors Jesse Thomas Cook and Matt Wiele comes the uproarious mockumentary film The Hoard, a hilarious look at modern reality television that takes a wildly horror twist. Burgess might be best known for Pontypool, a powerfully inventive spin on zombie films, but he has collaborated with Cook and Wiele on a number of exceptional films over the years, including Septic Man, Ejecta, Hellmouth, Hexecutioners, and many more. So I was super excited to see this newest venture before it makes its anticipated world premiere this Sunday Nov 25th at Toronto’s vaunted Blood in the Snow Film Festival. So, how does The Hoard stack up?
This film follows the exploits of a production team determined to create a pilot for the ultimate reality television experience, “Extremely Haunted Hoarders”. This team of misfits is made up of Professional Organizer Sheila Smyth (Lisa Solberg), Hoarder Expert/Psychologist Dr. Lance Ebe (Tony Burgess), ex husband and wife Paranormal Investigators Caleb and Chloe Black (Ry Barrett and Elma Bergovic), and our Renovation Experts Derek “Duke” Jago (Marcus Ludlow) and “The Falcon” (Justin Darmanin). The group is called upon to reform an extreme hoarder, Murph Evans, who has amassed several condemned homes around the town of Rockford, OH.
The team has 48 hours to cure Murph of his hoarding addiction, and get his many properties up to code, or the Rockford authorities will step in and start seizing the properties. But what the team expects to be a simple routine intervention proves to be anything but, and things quickly start to unravel. With time running out, the unexpected surprises start to mount up, and the tension and turmoil building within the group hits the boiling point, and finally erupts in a totally insane finish you’ll never see coming.
The Hoard is absolute hysterical insanity from beginning to end! The execution is magnificent, delivering a pitch-perfect spoof of reality shows like Hoarders and Ghost Hunters, with the endlessly inspired lunacy of This is Spinal Tap, my personal all-time favorite comedy, and the gold-standard of mockumentaries, and cap it all off with an unexpectedly bloody horror twist. It’s a nonstop barrage of laughs from start to finish. The jokes and one-liners come so fast and furious, you could watch this over and over and probably catch something new every time. The performances are all absolutely fantastic, and the chemistry between all these characters is spectacular. And when all hell breaks loose in the last 20 minutes, the splatter matches the laughter in a hugely rewarding climax that is just balls to the wall brilliant!
I’m a huge fan of Tony Burgess and the Foresight Features team, so I had high expectations for this one, and it exceeded them on every level! This is easily one of the best horror-comedies I’ve ever seen, in fact I’ll go out on a limb and say the best. The writing is spectacular, the tone is perfect, the hilarity is side-splittingly relentless, and the gory eruption at the finale caps it all off superbly.
Anyone attending this year’s Blood in the Snow Film Festival, where The Hoard makes its world premiere this Sunday the 25th, this needs to be at the top of your must-see list, and any lover of horror-comedy NEEDS to add this to their collections once released. I didn’t think any horror-comedy this year would top Ahockalypse (still insanely brilliant, also a must), but The Hoard just sky-rocketed to the top of the horror-comedy heap! Essential!
