Crew
Director/Screenplay – Michael Caissie, Story – Alexander Nistratov, Producers – Michael Caissie & Bernard Salzman, Photography – Gevorg Juguryan, Music – Randy Kalsi, Visual Effects Supervisor – Gareth Hockson, Visual Effects – Mobula, Special Effects – Nate Bright, Production Design – Sarah Upchurch. Production Company – Bulldog Bros. Pictures/Tadross Media Group/Scatena & Rosna Films.
Cast
Luke Baines (Alex), Gwen Van Dam (Mother), Tatjana Marjanovic (Vicky), Audrey Neal (Trish), Jake Marlow (Simon), Gabrielle Archambault (Patricia), Mark Wilson (Detective Watts), Michelle Pokopac (Lynn), John M. Johnson (Store Clerk), Lau’rie Roach (Peter), Jamil Khan (Ryan)
Plot
In a small Alaska town, employment nears fifty percent. Many people live in homeless camps. Alex moves among the camps selling and trading items. He offers people work and takes them home where he tortures and kills them. He and his mother then cook and eat their flesh as meat. Alex forms an attachment to some of the girls abducted and delays killing them.
No Tears in Hell was the second film as director for Michael Caissie who had previously made the horror film The Orchard (2020) and created/director the horror tv series Purgatory (2020- ). In addition, Caissie has worked as a scriptwriter with horror films such as Sin Origen (2020), Z-Force (2021) and The Devil’s Trap (2024), along with non-genre action films such as The Weapon (2023) and The Island (2023).
The credits announced that the film is based on a true story of Russian Alexander Spesivstev who lived in the Siberian town of Novukuznetsk. Spesivstev operated in the 1990s in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, a time when homelessness and poverty was rife, up until his arrest in 1996. Spesivstev would lure homeless children to his apartment where he would torture them and then he and his mother Lyudmila would kill them and eat their flesh. The two were convicted for killing four children, although the total number is believed to be much higher, as many as eighty victims.
No Tears in Hell is a True Crime film in the same sense that The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is based on facts – it is true as long as you don’t mind that fact that key details have been completely changed. The setting has been uplifted from Russia in the 1990s to Alaska in the present, while the ages of the victims has been upped from children to people in their late teens, twenties and older. Various Alaskan locations make an acceptable stand-in for Russia and look suitably wintry and desolate. Certainly, Michael Caissie does incorporate some incidents from the Alexander Spesivstev story into the film – him disposing of bodily remains into the river in the middle of the night; his inability to sexually perform back from when he had been placed in a psychiatric institution and another patient inserted a metal ball into his penis (in the belief it would make him virile).
The film quotes interesting facts from Prince Phillip’s statement of support for cannibalism to the claim the Royal Family ate human flesh. It also serves up the untrue claim that there are two million missing children every year – that’s about 0.5 percent of the US population annually. (This misleadingly quotes figures for total children reported missing with the implication that this is the number that meet ill fates. Such a raw figure don’t take into account that most of the children are found again).
Michael Caissie pushes No Tears in Hell into admirably disturbing areas. There are the scenes where Luke Baines brings Gabrielle Archambault home, she thinking he wants sex – but he can’t get it up (we get a flashback to a scene where a patient placed a needle in his penis) before he attacks her and then has her on the floor where he keeps strangling her and then bringing her around and doing it again.
The nastiest scenes come when Luke Baines has the two girls Tatjana Marjanovi and Audrey Neal made prisoner, cuffed to the radiator where he pushes a steel needle into Audrey’s eyeball, pulling it out and turning her into a vegetable. This is followed by scenes where he makes Tatjana suffocate Audrey with a plastic bag over the head and then eat her flesh. It all travels into a grim and disturbing place where most other films would hold back.
Trailer here