Take a mindless, murderous psycho, throw in copious amounts of beautiful men, put them all in the West Hollywood Halloween festival, and you've got "Hellbent" - truly a superb gay slasher flick! It was great watching a formula slasher flick where the homoerotic subtext was elevated to supertext, and seeing scantily-clad hunky men running for their life instead of buxom babes in bras.<br /><br />The story starts out - as all slasher flicks do! - with a couple having sex in a car the night before Halloween, who then get killed by a mysterious, beefy psycho (because we all know that sex kills in slasher flicks). Enter our hero, Eddie, with a heart of gold and a weakness for rough trade, and his friends Joey, Chaz and Tobey, who are planning their night out at the West Hollywood Halloween festival.<br /><br />Parking at the very spot where the two guys were killed the night before, they encounter the psycho on their way to the festival, and unwittingly make themselves his obsessive targets. We follow them (while the killer follows them as well) as Joey searches for his jock crush, Tobey explains to everyone he doesn't usually dress in drag, Chaz parties very hard, and Eddie tries to connect with Jake, the bad boy he wants to get to know better. Of course one by one the killer gets them, in various creative and bloody ways, but you have to stay right to the end to find out who survives - and who gets the boy! Don't go in expecting a backstory on the killer, or why he's out stalking gay men, or too much depth overall - it is, after all, just a quintessential, formulaic slasher flick, just with a queer twist. It's also fun (without being campy), the acting is good, the boys are hot, and it's a suspenseful and thrilling film that takes itself seriously as a real slasher film. See it when it comes to your town!