HELLBENDERS

****! CONTAINS SPOILERS AND BLASPHEMY

What's lamer than comedy swearing? Answer: comedy swearing by authority figures who really shouldn't be cursing and oathing. In this instance it's priests who constantly toss the F-word around like it's the word "spirit" or "holy" or "the". Because it's supposed to be funny. And it's not like our priests just swear like Terrence and Phillip: they get drunk, smoke weed, steal, fight, punch people, cheat on their wives, verbally abuse pretty much everyone, take their Lord's Name in vain and behave like massive dog-collared dicks. Because it's supposed to be funny.

Hellbenders concerns a special squad of hilarious misfit priests (led by Clancy Brown) who have already consigned their souls to Hell through their vile behaviour and will, in the event, allow themselves to be possessed by demons and thus take them off to Hell with them when they die. During what looks to be a fairly routine demon-killing, they discover that a seriously powerful evil demon named Surtr is planning to unlock the portal between Earth and Hell and allow all the other demons through to wipe out humanity....

Much of this plays like a pretty feeble late-night sitcom with sweary punchlines and crude banter between the various fathers and the uptight Opus Dei wimp trying to close the frat house ministry down. Said wimp is named Clint because when written in an uppercase comicbook font that name looks a bit like a very rude word. That's the level on which it's operating and it never really bothers to try anything deeper, with the crudity getting wearing after a while and the fact that it's men of the cloth can't sustain the joke for the whole length of the film. Occasionally amusing but it gets stale very quickly.

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