‘Hazbin Hotel’ Prime Video Series Review - Heaven And Hell

Watching Vivienne Medrano's Hazbin Hotel gives you a similar experience as watching Emma Seligman's Bottoms: The attempts at humor are filled with so many exertions that the viewer feels exhausted, not fully elated. The jokes are breathlessly thrown at you; not all of them work. Still, when they land successfully, they don't just tickle but poke at your funny bone. Two moments especially filled me with so much laughter that I was on the verge of calling an ambulance. When a porn director calls Angel Dust (Blake Roman) to resume the shooting of a film, the actor says, "I am coming," and the director replies, "No, not off camera, you are not!" When a father receives a call from his daughter, he gets so nervous that he picks up the phone and says, "Hey bitch."

There are two other jokes that look promising but do not really crack you up. One involves team bonding through BDSM, while the other comes during a show-and-tell exercise. The other rib-ticklers disappear from your mind as soon as they are over. Most of them think expletives equal to fun - that uttering words like "asshole" is enough to make us giggle. Hazbin Hotel has a restless pace. Like a well-oiled machine, it mechanically jumps from one thing to another. The scenes move so quickly that it all becomes a blur. Almost every new scene wipes out our memory of the one before. What Hazbin Hotel lacks is a sense of excitement. The excitement is replaced with chaos. The frantic activity on the screen could be mistakenly taken as a sign of animation.

It's good, then, that every episode has a runtime of 20–25 minutes. The end credits arrive just when you are about to become tired. It's also good that the plot here is simple. Lucifer's daughter and the princess of Hell, Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen), wants to tackle Hell's overpopulation problem by offering the demons a chance at redemption through the titular hotel. She doesn't like Heaven's way of dealing with this issue, as it involves the purging of sinners. Every character can be summarized with a one-line description. Charlie is an optimist with daddy problems. Her girlfriend, Vaggie (Stephanie Beatriz), is her loyal supporter. Angel Dust is a porn star who doesn't exactly love his lifestyle. Alastor (Amir Talai) is a powerful, mysterious creature. Niffty (Kimiko Glenn) is enthusiastic about pain, murder, and bugs (not necessarily in that order), and Husk (Keith David) is your usual wise bartender.

The first five episodes give you a shallow picture of these characters and this world. You feel as if you are watching a cartoon made for a grown-up kid - for the child living inside the body of an adult. The animation work is skillfully done, but the images are far from memorable. The twisty, curvy background and faces do not imaginatively leap out of the screen. Rather, they statically carry Medrano's idiosyncratic vision. You don't marvel at the images; you dismiss them with a sympathetic shrug.

Ultimately, it's the musical sequences that prove to be the forte of Hazbin Hotel. The lyrics are witty, and the music and the images dance to the same rhythms. For a moment, the series becomes lively, engaging, and awesome. However, as soon as the songs end, the energy levels drop, and you are thrown back to swift mechanical movements. This undemanding simplicity is the new trend in our movies and TV shows, which is why Hazbin Hotel will probably end up as a success. I was unsurprised to discover - through Wikipedia - that a second season is in production. It looks like we won't be checking out from this hotel anytime soon.

Final Score- [5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times
Note: The first five episodes are screened for this review.
Premiere Date: January 19, 2024 on Prime Video