Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

popcorninhell Hell and Back is for all intense and purposes a cinematic inevitability. TV today is filled to the brim with adult cartoon shows catering to a certain male demographic trapped in a state of arrested development. The best of these shows are every bit as artful, thoughtful and entertaining as any 30-minute sitcom. Yet for every Bob's Burgers (2011-present) and Archer (2009-present) there's a cringe-worthy time-waster like American Dad! (2005-present) that threatens to derail the entire adult toon genre with gleeful insult humor and lazy references.Hell and Back is brought to you by the same stop-motion studios as Robot Chicken (2005-present) a fifteen minute sketch show involving action figures and claymation figures. The plot revolves around three underachieving friends who work at a rundown pier side carnival. Curt (Riggle) assistant manages while Remy (Swardson) works primarily on the Hell's Gate ride featuring a few cheap scares for the price of a few dollars and your dignity. Augie (Miller), the chubby third wheel of the group works as the mechanic, or at least I think he does; it doesn't really matter. What does matter is the trio come across a demonic book, Curt swears a blood oath on it, immediately renigs and is dragged to hell. Remy and Augie follow him and face demons, assorted tortures and the Devil (Odenkirk) himself to save their friend from eternal damnation.As with Robot Chicken, the animation style in this film evokes the memory of Will Vinton's Claymation Christmas (1987) only with a displeasing slurry of dirty jokes and adult situations. The same sophomoric, sporadic and anarchic humor we've seen on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup debuts on the big screen only without pathos, perspective, immediacy, topicality or energy. All of the humor is crude for the sake of being crude as if two twelve-year-old boys wrote the script and had a quota for the amounts of f***s, s***s and q****s they were required to squeeze in.Don't get me wrong, I'm no shrinking violet when it comes to crude, rude and politically incorrect jokes. I don't raise my nose at George Carlin's seven words you can't say on TV or the occasionally funny Family Guy (1999-present) gag. But crudeness for crudeness sake does not a good movie make. The film features bluntly stated dialogue discussing lewd sex acts, the shame of virginity in your 20's and one unbearably drawn-out discussion of tree rape that is brought up several times. Ironically the jokes that made me chuckle the hardest were the subtle ones such as a soul being tortured by a demon by trying to order a pepperoni pizza from a Taco Bell/Pizza Hut Express.Those of you who are a fan of ShadowMachine Films and their genre expanding TV shows will be mightily disappointed by this stop-motion slacker comedy. Despite some funny one-off jokes, Hell and Back has precious few redeeming qualities outside it's talented voice cast. The movie's dialogue is crass and confusing while it's sight-gags are obvious and undeveloped. The story is awful featuring three obnoxious leads who learn nothing from their experience; other than maybe devil's brew is delicious. The side characters are worse still including an ineffective devil, a boring tag-along in Mila Kunis's half-human, half-demon Deema, and an especially braggadocios Orpheus (McBride). Do yourself a favor, miss this trip to hell and watch a few episodes of BoJack Horseman (2014-present), a show that better represents a descent into hell. It's also so much funnier.

Neddy Merrill You wonder what the attraction is for the makers for "Chicken Run", "Box Trolls" and for the Bro Comedy "Hell and Back" to stop motion animation. It's not as if going through the painstaking and laborious process automatically yields a visual character superior to less labor- intensive production methods. So why not just make it a cartoon? Anyway, the plainly descriptive-titled "Hell and Back" lifts the way Satan from South Park is rendered whole, gives him "Breaking Bad's" Bob Odenkirk's voice and drops him in a bro comedy. There he trades the standard bro jokes (mostly homosexual panic quips) with the slackers who inadvertently fall into his underground realm. None of it is terribly entertaining but there are enough laughs to make it all fairly innocuous.

Tyler Hunt Ahh Yes, Shadow Machine has done it again. First was the instant success of Robot Chicken, and now their first Movie should be a box office hit, but today when i watched Hell and Back, I was the only one in the room. Never mind the total absence of people, the movie was extremely funny. The voice acting was spot on, The sound and backgrounds were perfect. Every single character in the movie was actually relevant to the plot, that's a bonus. If i had to say (type), a bad thing about the move, I noticed the lip-syncing was off by a bit, sometimes, But overall, I HIGHLY recommend you watch Hell and Back! I know it's a stop-motion movie, most people want actors, real-life places and realism, but we all love Robot Chicken, so basically Hell and Back is a extended, well-written episode.

Clayton Holloway (Darkhorse_Knight) Hell and Back might just be the best Stoner Comedy-Adult Claymation that takes place in Hell...only because it's the ONLY one. Okay, now to be fair with this, I will say that the voice work of this film is...alright. The jokes vary from hit-and-miss (mostly though, they miss). The adult content has been amped up so much that it feels they just broke it off to see if it can go higher. Yes, this one of the raunchiest movies I've ever seen. Not just this year, period.The story is about 3 'Bros' who work at a piece of crap of a ghetto carnival. While trying to figure out how to save it from being foreclosed, one of the main characters named Remy(Nick Swardon) locates a book of Beelzebub within the fortune teller's shack, and starts to get interested in it. Soon, his friends Augie(T.J. Miller) and Curt(Rob Riggle) show up, and Remy forces them in to some kind of satanic ritual over a mint. I wish I was kidding. Soon, Curt breaks his oath for not having a mint, and so he ends up going to Hell, and it's up to our two bro-tagonists to come and save the poor man from the Devil(Bob Odenkirk)Now, the biggest problem with the film is dealing with the likability of our main characters, especially Remy. Remy is one of the worst written character's I've seen in a movie to date. He isn't funny in his jerkiness, he's just a bloody douche. Not only is he bad, but another character named Orpheus(played by Danny McBride) is just as badly written, if not worse then Remy. And these two BOND in their overblown, flanderized nature. Also, the Devil, for being the whole 'Prince of Darkness' and all, is very underwhelming. His jokes aren't funny in the slightest, and he has this other form where he's dressed like a hipster and it's stupid as hell. or in this case, stupid as there.Jokes are a big part of comedy, and they need to be quick as so the audience can't think to hard on them, otherwise you risk having the audience unravel it and finding a sort of fridge horror behind it. Jokes in this movie drag out for too long, even the legitimately funny ones, and they feel rushed as a result. A noteworthy series of the good ones involve a suffering spirit trying to take punishments from a demon, but the punishments are really subpar and no big deal, and the demon ends it with "Heh heh, Welcome to Hell." However, those jokes are vastly outnumbered by toilet humor that feels like it belongs in a bad kid's movie, and stoner comedy that feels like the throwaway gags ripped from that movie American Ultra.However, I can't help but see some light in the dark of this film. The animation looks OK, the music is good(and that includes the songs Orpheus sings), and the design of Hell is pretty good for what they got. I also found that the implied romance between Augie and the half-succubus Deema to feel nice and a good mold breaker towards the rest of the film's mediocrity. It's surprisingly traditional given that the demon herself is literally a female sex-crazed monstrosity. But, she and Augie are the closet we get to likable characters.This is a big disappointment for me and for those who want to see a smartly written comedy. "Hell and Back", however, lived up to it's name. I wish it were better, but it's still an underwhelming, mediocre stoner film that just so happens to be claymation and in hell.