Bingo Hell Review (2021) Worth Watching?

It’s about the matriarch of a community who sees her beloved bingo hall taken over by the garish and sinister Mr Big.

Bingo Hell was directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero (from ABCs Of Death 2.5 and MÉXICO BÁRBARO), based on a script by Guerrero, Shane McKenzie and Perry Blacksheer, and stars Adriana Barraza (from And Soon The Darkness and Drag Me To Hell), Richard Brake (from Offseason, Tremors: Shrieker Island and Feedback) and Clayton Landey (from The First Power) amongst others.

When you win big, you lose big.

A bizarre mashup of Bubba Ho-Tep old folks going up against a Faustian villain.

When the local bingo hall is taken over by Mr Big offering big cash prizes, Lupita thinks something must be amiss. When the prize winners start turning dead in increasingly bloody ways, she realizes she was more right than she could have possibly imagined.

Richard Brake is a great genre actor, Adriana Barraza is an excellent actress, Gigi Saul Guerrero is an interesting, talented director, this movie does none of them any favours. It is not a good one on the Welcome To The Blumhouse/Amazon Prime roster.

Pitched as a horror comedy, there’s little real examples of either in this. From an odd start where $100 is found covered in slime, through cliched characters, mind numbingly obvious decisions, all the way to a lazily put together denouement, Bingo Hell (I’m assuming that is a play on Bingo Hall) misses every target it sloppily aims for.

There are a couple of positives, the friendships between characters seems genuine enough and Richard Brake is always a treat when he’s on form, as he is here. The problem is that’s about it for positives and when the negatives outweigh them so significantly, it’s hard not to switch off and find something else.