Review: Portal to Hell is Genuinely Funny. That’s Harder Than It Looks.

By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com

Portal to Hell arrives on Digital and VOD September 8, 2026, from Cineverse.

There’s something inherently miserable about being a bill collector. Nobody wants to hear from you. Nobody is happy you called. You’re probably interrupting dinner, work or whatever brief period of the day that person managed to forget they owe somebody money.

Still, somebody has to do it.

That somebody is Dunn.

Trey Holland plays him as a guy already beaten down by the routine before Portal to Hell introduces anything supernatural. The movie doesn’t waste much time either. Dunn goes to his local laundromat, discovers something glowing and generally infernal inside one of the machines and calmly tells Ed, the woman working there, “I think there’s a portal to hell in your laundromat.”

That whole opening stretch is funny because nobody reacts the way people in movies normally react to a portal to Hell. Dunn investigates it. Ed seems mostly irritated by the inconvenience. Everybody feels it out like somebody reported a plumbing problem.

That deadpan approach is where Portal to Hell got me, and I was surprised by how genuinely funny this movie is. Not horror-comedy funny where I recognize the place somebody wrote a joke and understand what they were attempting. Actually funny. A weird pause or somebody giving a completely reasonable response to an insane situation lands before the punchline even arrives.

Holland deserves a lot of credit for that. Dunn is essentially the straight man wandering through an increasingly ridiculous moral problem, but Holland never plays him like he knows he’s in a quirky horror comedy. He’s quiet, slightly awkward and believable enough that the stranger everything becomes, the funnier his normal reactions are.

I hope this gets him more work.

The premise is beautifully simple. Dunn discovers the portal, learns that a demon has arrived to collect his terminally ill neighbor Mr. Bobshank, played by Keith David, and eventually finds himself with an opportunity to save him by sending other souls in his place.

From there, writer-director Woody Bess keeps testing Dunn’s belief that people can basically be divided into good and bad. Dunn starts making decisions that seem pretty easy when they’re theoretical. Somebody is bad. Hell exists. Send the bad person to Hell.

Except people get harder to categorize when they’re standing in front of you.

That’s where the movie becomes more interesting than I expected. After Dunn has crossed certain lines, Holland lets the character change without suddenly turning him into somebody else. The fun starts draining out of what he’s doing and he has to actually sit with it. The movie is still funny, but there’s something underneath the joke now.

It also looks much better than a premise this small necessarily requires.

Bess shot the movie himself, and he makes good use of a fairly contained production. The laundromat could have been nothing more than a practical location where a lot of the story happens, but the lighting gives it personality. The orange coming from the portal works against the ugly fluorescent environment, while Dunn’s apartment gets some deliberate lighting choices of its own. 

The frame is extremely wide, and Bess actually composes for it. Characters get pushed into corners and empty space is allowed to sit around them. It feels intentional rather than like somebody just threw black bars on an ordinary image because widescreen looks more cinematic. The color grade works too.

I appreciate low-budget movies where I can tell somebody actually thought about what the thing should look like instead of stopping at whether the actors were properly exposed.

Portal to Hell has that.

The economy of the whole thing is smart too. A laundromat, Dunn’s place, a few other contained spaces, a portal and a relatively small group of characters. You don’t need twenty locations and a million dollars if the idea keeps giving you somewhere else to go.

Michael McDonald, who I immediately recognized from MADtv, turns up as David Pepperdine and fits perfectly into this universe. Casey Deidrick’s Rip is another example of what the movie does well with smaller characters. Somebody walks in, immediately has an identity, and the scene starts going somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

There’s even a running Hot Chelle Rae joke that keeps getting pushed further than I expected. It’s exactly the sort of stupid commitment this movie needs.

And then there’s Richard Kind.

Kind plays Chip, the demon involved in Dunn’s arrangement, and he’s hilarious. There’s a scene between Dunn and Chip that basically turns into two guys having a conversation over drinks, and it might be my favorite stretch of the movie.

The dialogue just works. Kind doesn’t play Chip like some terrifying right hand of Satan. He feels like a guy who has dealt with this kind of shit before and would really appreciate it if everyone stopped making his job harder. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of treating eternal damnation like something that also involves rules, negotiations, technicalities and a guy named Chip.

Keith David gives the movie its other major ingredient.

Mr. Bobshank has terminal cancer, but Bess and David don’t turn him into a walking lesson about mortality. He’s funny, irritated, crude at times and recognizably human. David has one of those voices that can give almost anything gravity, which makes it even better when he’s saying something ridiculous.

The relationship between Bobshank and Dunn is also why the movie’s emotional material works. Late in the film, the two get a quieter scene together, and I wasn’t expecting it to land as well as it did.

The movie has spent so much time screwing around with portals, demons and deciding who deserves what that watching these two actually talk has some weight. It doesn’t suddenly stop and announce that the serious part of the movie has arrived.

A lot of horror comedies get uncomfortable when they have to become sincere. Suddenly the score swells and everybody starts delivering speeches so we know the filmmakers have feelings too. Portal to Hell mostly avoids that.

The dialogue helps enormously. Ed doesn’t sound like Dunn. Dunn doesn’t sound like Chip. Bobshank doesn’t sound like any of them. Even the smaller characters usually arrive with their own rhythm instead of everybody sounding like the writer wearing a different shirt.

The film isn’t perfect. There are moments where the simple premise starts carrying a little more weight than it needs to, and some of the transition from absurd comedy into Dunn’s moral conflict works better than other parts.

But it never lost me.

I went into this with very little expectation. It was a 2025 movie that suddenly appeared in my screener inbox in 2026, and I figured I’d watch a decent little indie horror comedy, write a few things down and move on.

Instead, I kept writing some variation of “this is actually funny” in my notes.

Apparently I was surprised every time.

Woody Bess wrote, directed and shot this thing, and he’s somebody I’m going to remember after this. Portal to Helltakes a simple concept, keeps the production manageable, builds most of its comedy around character instead of constant punchlines and eventually finds some genuine emotion without crushing the ridiculous movie around it.

Holland is right there with him. Dunn could easily have become the blank guy surrounded by funnier supporting actors, especially when those actors include Keith David and Richard Kind. Instead, Holland is the reason the movie holds together.

I didn’t expect Portal to Hell to be this good, and I definitely didn’t expect it to be this funny.

Maybe Hell isn’t so bad.

Although I’d still avoid the laundromat.

6.66/10

Critical Screening was provided a screener of Portal to Hell for review purposes.