Turns out Hell is not a lake of fire but in fact a traumatic carnival where clowns and carnies make sport of you and really rub it in that you messed up. It's run by a big gay devil who oversees musical numbers about your sins.

Wouldn't it be delightful if instead of reading every third paragraph on this page you could hear it chanted to you in a theatrical manner with canned musical accompaniment? Yeah I might have really enjoyed a movie about a nightmare carnival from Heck EXCEPT IT'S A FUCKING MUSICAL. God. People still make these things? Didn't we fight World War 2 to put an end to musical theatre once and for all?

What makes it so godawful? I mean I like horror movies and I like music. I even like music videos and trippy musical scenes in movies like the child-traumatising stuff in Fantasia, so it seems like a horror musical ought to be utterly braingasmic. But it's not. It's so horribly not. Musical theatre somehow mocks both music and drama, and let's not even talk about musical comedy. I think it's about time someone examined the infernal processes at work here.

{Hitler pauses}...Everyone who likes show tunes should leave the room.

To begin with we have the absurdity of everyone stopping in mid-drama to perform a number. Now I understand that almost everything in fiction is in some way stylised and divergence from reality does not itself bug me. In fact I crave it above all else unless it's stupid. If it were like a fucked up horror music video I'd dig tripping with it, but the flavours don't blend. What actually happens is the movie just stops and does something else for a while every few minutes, like if you were trying to watch baseball and the players took a break for book club every other inning.

But alright, if it were really great book club then maybe I could at least enjoy it as two different and completely unrelated things, but the most fundamental problem with musicals is simply that the music is horrible. I believe that all musical styles are valid (except of course christian rock) but some lend themselves much more readily to sucking due to the simplicity of the form. I mean it's possible to write mind blowing avante garde music for instance, but for the most part people just don't, because why bother when the audience are pretentious poseurs with Emperor's New Clothes syndrome who will clap if you fart in a bucket. Or punk music, you can write hard-hitting punk music, but mostly it's just 3 chords and a bunch of yelling and nobody cares. On the other hand it takes many years to learn how to write awful classical music, so there's less of it.

In the case of show tunes, the songs are generally not so much music as background noise to correspond with people walking fast and posturing on stage. And just to make it more annoying there seems to be some regulation requiring all show music to be bouncy, frivolous and loud. At least bad New Age music is merely dull; bad show tunes are like a fire alarm in your nerve centre. Don't expect any help from profound lyrical content either, as the lines are generally just innane play dialogue pasted onto the musical substrate.

He tried to kill me with a fork-lift fork-lift

All that said, I don't actually hate this particular show in a personal sense. I sort of like the idea, and if I turn the sound off it's cool to look at a lurid Hell carnival I guess. I can endorse what they were going for here, it just physically hurt me. It's like trying to eat a big fat raw Habanero chile. I wanted to like it, but in the end I was gritting my teeth and counting the minutes, of which there are mercifully only 55 so we now know exactly how long I can stand exposure to show tunes. The movie got one thing right though: if Heck really is a musical then I sure as hell don't want to end up there.

Little play's kind of heavy handed. Instead of real sins like smoking and saying bad words, these people are thrown to Hell for some pretty mild offenses. One guy's there for being too sad about his dead infant son, and another chick is damned for having a shitty boyfriend, 'cause I guess thou shalt not be a dumb bint.