Escape from Hell | Through the Shattered Lens

The 2000 film, Escape From Hell, tells the story of two doctors.

Dr. Marissa Holloway (Emily Jo Tisdale) believes that there is a Heaven and that there is a Hell and that, at the end of your life, you go to one of them. The film lets us know, early on, that she’s right by letting us into the mind of a good but irreligious family man who is on the verge of death. At first, the man sees himself heading into a shining light but then, suddenly, he’s plunging into flames! That’s right. The good man who loved his family and helped people out and who never did anything wrong to anyone still went straight to Hell.

Dr. Eric Robinson (Daniel Kruse) doesn’t believe that there’s an afterlife. He believes that everyone who says that they’ve seen either a light or a glimpse of Hell was suffering from a hallucination. He’s hostile to Marissa’s beliefs. Could it have something to do with his difficult relationship with his estranged father? Who knows?

Together, Dr. Holloway and Dr. Robinson solves crimes!

No, actually, they don’t. Instead, they star in a low-budget, evangelically-themed remake of Flatliners. After his father dies, Dr. Robinson is more determined than ever to prove that there’s no afterlife so he decides that the smartest thing to do would be to die for a few minutes and then be brought back to life by another doctor. Like I said, it’s basically Flatliners all over again. The main difference, of course, is that Flatliners imagined a New Agey afterlife with no God while Escape From Hell leaves little doubt that there’s a Heaven and a Hell and just about everyone’s going to the second place.

Dr. Robinson does originally go to Heaven and it’s a nice-looking meadow. (Apparently, he just gets to skip Purgatory so lucky him.) However, the doctor is soon informed that he doesn’t belong in Heaven so bang! It’s down to Hell that he goes. Hell is essentially a rocky place with constantly burning fires. The whole place is tinted red and looks like something you might expect to find in an old video game. Unfortunately, Dr. Robinson doesn’t get to talk to the five people you meet in Heaven but he does get to talk to a handful of people in Hell, the majority of whom are confused as to why they’re down there but who also realize that they somehow massively screwed up and will never get a chance to escape. One of the people that Robinson meets turns out to be a demon. There’s a lot of really cheap CGI that looks kind of silly but, at the same time, still possesses a certain low-rent charm.

While Dr. Robinson is learning about the afterlife, his colleagues are trying to bring him back to life. If they don’t bring him back quickly enough, Robinson, much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt will be stuck in Hell in forever!

(I should admit that we don’t actually see FDR in Hell. I just assume he’s down there.)

If you haven’t picked up on it by now, I have a weakness for achingly sincere films that feature primitive CGI. It’s easy to make fun of movies like Escape from Hell but I tend to view them as being examples of outsider art. Yes, it’s a flawed film that was apparently made by people who weren’t really sure what they were doing but that’s actually the film’s charm. The bad acting, the melodramatic dialogue, the cheap CGI, the extremely literal definitions of Hell and Heaven, and the final message that almost everyone on the planet is destined to suffer eternal torment; all of it contributes to make a film unlike almost any other (except, of course, for the original Flatliners) It’s silly, preachy, and entertaining in its own bizarre way. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the school prayer advocate who says that children who don’t want to pray can, “Simpy lower their heads and think about how they’ve got it all figured out.” It may not be good but it’s always watchable in its own twisted way.

For October, I have decided to return to the Internet Archive and further explore their collection of old MS-DOS games. I started things off by playing Richard and Alan’s Escape From Hell (1990, Electronic Arts).

Though the Archive only includes the game (no manual, no instructions of any kind), I was able to find Escape From Hell‘s front and back cover art at the Let’s Play Archive. Almost everything that needs to be known about this game’s tone and sensibility can be deduced simply by looking at these illustrations:

As for the game itself, it is a role-playing game. You are Richard. Largely as a result of your own stupidity, you and your best friend and your girlfriend have all accidentally be sent to Hell.

(Good work on including the Guns and Roses poster in the background.)

Because this is a MS-DOS game from 1990, Hell looks like this:

In the screen shot above, you are standing above a river of flame and there is a skeleton blocking your way. One thing that I quickly learned is that you should not try to talk to the skeletons. If you do, this will probably happen:

That did not work out. One of the problems with trying to play Escape From Hell on the Internet Archive is that, especially early on in the game, it is very easy to die and, without the original disk, it is impossible to save your game. Death means that you literally have to start over again, from the very beginning.

It is worth restarting, though. Once you figure out how to avoid running into skeletons, you do get a chance to talk to some of the other inhabitants of Hell. Like this one:

You also come across clues and other messages:

Eventually, I even found the entrance to Hell’s waiting room.

Unfortunately, once I got in the waiting room, I went down the wrong hallway and this happened:

Escape from Hell is not an easy game but it is worth sticking with. If you can manage to go long enough without dying, you will eventually meet some condemned people who are willing to help you out. Most of them are real-life tyrants, like Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan. It turns out that Stalin is a really good shot with a nail gun. Who would have guessed?

I am still playing my way through Escape From Hell but, from what I have seen, I recommend it for anyone who wants to take a retro trip through the underworld, MS-DOS style.