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To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:51 am
by ChrisReynolds
This Kane Hodder documentary was one of the better movies I saw at Frightfest. Even if you don't know and don't like Hodder's movies, he still has a very inspiring life story, going from spending six months close to death after a fire-stunt gone wrong to setting a world record for the longest full-body burn fire stunt in Friday the 13th VII. It's an impressive tale of dealing with huge odds and refusing to give in to fear, and Hodder is a fascinating subject, honest and raw in his assessment of his own psychological struggles and PTSD. The documentary doesn't want to say anything bad about his films: personally I don't think it matters that most of these films he's in are low quality, what matters is that he puts a lot of dedication and effort into them (clearly more than the directors and script writers did), but the documentary never touches on any aspect of criticism. Where I think the documentary falls down is moving away from Kane Hodder's struggles to involve various talking heads who don't have much to contribute beyond saying what a great guy Hodder is, or talk about unrelated stuff. There were several stories told by Hodder in the Q&A that should have been in the doc, e.g. when he went to see the doctor who almost killed him through negligence with the intention of beating him up but instead wordlessly accepting an apology and walking away. Or some more interviews with the people who dealt with him: a brief mention is made of the people who witnessed his accident, but there are no interviews with them (and the Q&A mentioned that they were in contact with at least one of these people). I'm sure these would have added a lot more to the documentary than some of the random talking heads they got in to talk about how great Hodder is at conventions.

Re: To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story

Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 8:03 pm
by TheDukeAbides
Agree with what Chris says.

Plus I could do with a lot less "looking wistfully into the distance" or "pouring sand through hands" shots but otherwise another great documentary shown at FrightFest and Hodder is a lovely man, sat near me during the screening of Victor Crowley, asked how my beer was, had random chats with anyone confused and double-taking with who was really sat at the end of the row.

Lovely man.