South of Hell Mountain

1971
R
1h 27m

IMDb RATING

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After planning to just rob a gold mine, an outlaw and his two sons end up killing all of the miners. While fleeing to Canada, they stop at a small cabin in the woods where they find a woman ... Read allAfter planning to just rob a gold mine, an outlaw and his two sons end up killing all of the miners. While fleeing to Canada, they stop at a small cabin in the woods where they find a woman and her stepdaughter living together. What happens afterwards is told through the memories... Read allAfter planning to just rob a gold mine, an outlaw and his two sons end up killing all of the miners. While fleeing to Canada, they stop at a small cabin in the woods where they find a woman and her stepdaughter living together. What happens afterwards is told through the memories of the step-daughter, now a patient locked away in a mental hospital.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

4.2/10

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

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Top cast9

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Anna Stuart

Sally
(as Anna Stewart)

Helen
(uncredited)

Directors
- Lew Lehman
- William Sachs
Writers
- William Sachs
- Lew Lehman
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Storyline

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Trivia
William Sachs' first official "fixing" job. He was hired after producers fired director Louis Leahman for shooting a film they considered meandering and senseless with no plot. They gave Sachs scattered scenes of a robbing and murdering cowpoke's budding romance with a young woman, but there was no backstory, so he racked his brain to connect the dots. He came up with a spine for the movie, where the girl is in a mental hospital, and the guy comes to try to get her memory back, and that's what he shot as new footage. He then used flashbacks out of what was already shot.

Connections
Referenced in The Big Box: A Christmas Story (2010)

User reviews7

Review

Featured review

Insurgent little western-genre outcast with mild horror trappings...a weird one.

A man and his two sons rob a gold mine, killing several people in the process. High-tailing it to the Canadian border, they happen upon the off-road home of a young lady and her sleazy sexpot step-mother. The young girl falls in love with one of the robbers, and various situational weirdness ensues. The vague, under-developed story is expounded during flashbacks the girl has from a squalid sanitarium. These highly malapropos scenes are uproariously over-the-top, and look like some filthy nightmare from the Inquisition.

A head-spinning, ultra-trashy obscurity which seems to want to be set in the old west, though it's impossible to ascertain exactly what the time period actually is, SOUTH OF HELL MOUNTAIN is essentially a misfit dissenter from the ambit of western/melodrama films, but the demented, extrinsic asylum sequences border characteristically on grindhouse horror. Too well-groomed to categorize as "awful", its wandering inconsistencies and stylistically vacillating chaos lead me to believe that there were too many chefs involved in preparing this particular dish.

Uncurbed fans of cultish films should really give this one a bit more attention, mostly for its schismatic peculiarity...it's such an odd-one-out that it becomes strangely appealing as a defenseless bad-movie curio.

4.5/10