HELL IN A LAUNDROMAT
This story was originally published in the May 17, 2025 Issue.
Humanity has long imagined Hell as a place apart from our existence, with fire and brimstone and sulphur in abundance, stretching on for eternity and full of anguished sinners in the throes of eternal punishment.
For Woody Bess, the line between here and there starts to blur in Los Angeles.
Bess’s Portal To Hell tells the story of Dunn, a burned out LA debt collector who becomes entangled in an ironic Faustian bargain to save his neighbor from eternal damnation by tossing three unfortunate souls, or one member of 2011 one-hit wonder Hot Chelle Rae, into the titular portal housed within a laundromat’s washing machine.
Dunn, played by Trey Anderson, makes his deal with a demon named Chip, voiced by a delightful Richard Kind and introduced to the audience by the fiery light of his bodily functions.
Dunn gets to work saving his neighbor, doing his best to assure himself that the people he condemns to hell deserve it and Chip serving as his nagging conscience.
Portal balances horror and comedy in its 93-minute run time, opting for the former more often than the latter. “I don’t know where I’m going to find two more bad people to throw in the portal,” Dunn remarks after his first offering on Bobshank’s behalf, “Everyone in Los Angeles has been so nice and genuine.”
While Bess emphasizes humor throughout the film, it ultimately is a tale of grief and guilt. Dunn, egged on by a needling Chip, frets that he himself is doomed to damnation for his well-intended actions. He ponders, perhaps a bit too late, what Bobshank could’ve done to justify three souls taking his place in Hell. And all of this activates upon his own frustrations and grief, a past hinted at through voicemail and brief visions.
The whole film has an ambivalent undercurrent for much of its runtime; the yawning hellmouth is at worst a minor inconvenience to LA locals and certainly no cause for alarm. The laundromat’s manager is more worried about getting shut down for health code violations than the potential hazard of losing customers to a fiery doom
The irony and tone at the heart of Portal here feels distinctly millennial in a way I can’t quite put to words. Perhaps its the references to Hot Chelle Rae, a one-hit wonder from the early 2010’s that serves as a plot point and fun needle drop during the film’s title sequence. Maybe its that aforementioned irony and ambivalence, playing it straight in the face of hellish absurdity in a way that mimics millennials’ own experiences growing up during tumultuous and uncertain times.
Bess leaves it to his A-Listers, Keith David (Bobshank) and Richard Kind to serve as the film’s moral voices. Bobshank tells Dunn somewhat crudely to worry about his own problems, that you can’t butt into people’s business and try to save them. Chip, on the other hand, tells Dunn that “You pick where you go…not with your actions but how you weigh your actions,” adding “there are a lot of pricks up in heaven, but it’s a lot of guys in Hell that made mistakes and they owned up to them.”
One reason if any to see Portal is its sound and cinematography; there’s a richness to the camerawork akin to that of a cinema showcase. Shots are well-constructed and Bess plays with angles, reflections, and lighting to create the film’s world. Neon hums in the film’s interiors, evoking a sense of the past in every shot, while flames crackle and glitter in the Los Angeles night.
While Portal To Hell offers brief glimpses of fiery eternal damnation through the ocular window of a laundromat washing machine, the Hell that Bess envisions is also rooted in our own doing, in the guilt and shame of decisions you wish that you could take back. It is up to us then to not get mired in it, to use it to inform better decisions rather than withdraw into ourselves.
The Mammoth Lakes Film Festival takes place May 21-25. Portal to Hell is showing Thursday, May 22 at 5:30 p.m. at the US Forest Service Auditorium
