King Sombra's Fantastic Movie 9: Sombra's Inferno

King Sombra’s Fantastic Movie 9: Sombra’s Inferno is a low-budget animated/puppet film and the ninth installment in the King Sombra’s Fantastic Movie series. It is loosely based upon Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

Plot: After inadvertently getting himself killed by deciding to hide inside of a clothes dryer, King Sombra is sent to the ninth circle of Hell, where he is expected to remain for all eternity. However, he soon finds he hates it there (there’s no staircases in Hell) and sets out on a perilous journey to return to the realm of the living. Will Sombra be able to escape from the depths of Hell, or will he be no match for the forces of darkness who are determined to make him serve out his eternal punishment?

Why This Film Is Straight From Hell:

1. The concept of a character dying and going to Hell is a very dark and twisted premise for a children’s film. 
2. The way Sombra dies in this movie is incredibly dumb as he just decides to randomly hide inside a dryer and dies after Radiant Hope turns it on. 
3. The demons, fiends, and hellhounds are all portrayed by puppets, while Sombra and the damned souls in Hell are portrayed as animated characters, making the natives of Hell very creepy and uncanny when they’re shown interacting with the “mortal” characters. This was likely done intentionally in order to make Hell more eerie, but it doesn’t make it any less weird.
4. Like in King Sombra’s Fantastic Movie 2: Sombra Street, the puppets used in this film are very cheap and poorly made, and you can see on some of them that their parts are falling off. 
5. The trio of hellhounds that mocks Sombra when he arrives in Hell are incredibly stupid and annoying characters, not to mention the fact that they’re also blatant ripoffs of the main hyena trio in The Lion King.
6. The film suffers from an extremely inconsistent tone -- sometimes it’s more comedic, while at other times it’s quite nightmarish. 
7. The animation is crude and cheap-looking, and the animated characters do not blend well with the live-action background of Hell. 
8. Brutus, Sombra’s guide in Hell, portrayed in the film as a decaying undead orange dog-like creature, is an extremely ugly-looking character. He is also very unlikable as he appears at first to want to help Sombra escape from Hell, but in the end betrays him and tries to return to the real world himself. Not to mention that he is a terrible stand-in for Virgil from The Divine Comedy.
9. It’s very disturbing when Sombra arrives in Hell and encounters Satan himself, depicted as a gigantic black dragon-looking thing who attempts to eat Sombra alive. And who thought it was a good idea for Satan to appear in a kids’ movie in the first place? 
10. The scene where Sombra flies through a pit of fire and enters Hell is very poorly-animated, with awful visual effects. 
11. There’s lots of filler, such as the scenes where Radiant Hope grieves over Sombra and the scenes where Sombra and his guide encounter various souls condemned to Hell.
12. The entire thing has this very dark and creepy atmosphere that is quite out of place in a cartoon — it has more in common with a lost episode creepypasta than it does with an actual cartoon. While the previous KSFM installments could be mean-spirited and disturbing, they were still more comedic and lighthearted overall.
13. There are several instances of gross and disturbing imagery, such as the hellhounds vomiting maggots and Sombra’s corpse stiffening with rigor mortis after he dies. 
14. It doesn’t make any sense why Hell would exist in Equestria in the first place considering there was already the location of Tartarus in the actual show.
15. The pacing is terrible.
16. Awful voice acting, with many of the demons sounding like they’re shrieking their lines.
17. Plot hole: Satan tells Sombra that Hell is inescapable for deceased souls, yet Sombra is able to escape from it with ease once he reaches the gates.
18. It tries to parody Dante’s Divine Comedy, but it has such a poor grasp of the source material that it falls flat.
19. Stupid and poorly written dialogue.
20. As always, there are plenty of offensive jokes, such as when Sombra sexually harasses and exposes himself to several of the souls he encounters.
21. The infamous scene where Sombra meets a pony called “Hoofler,” clearly meant to be a spoof of Hitler. The worst part is that Sombra appears to idolize him and wonders what he’s doing in Hell.

Redeeming Qualities:

1. The premise is interesting.
2. Some of the scenes and visuals are creative.
3. It’s nice to see a cartoon parody of Dante’s Inferno, even if it was very poorly executed.
4. “I’m in Hell?! What the… *glances around* HERE is going on?”
5. Satan is actually quite an entertaining character and one of the funniest parts of the movie. When Sombra meets Satan, the latter is clearly exasperated to find out the news that Sombra has died, and he exclaims that “We’ve done all we can to keep you from showing up here! We give you near-immortality, countless chances to revive yourself, and yet you somehow mess that up, too — and by sticking yourself in a friggin dryer!” This implies that even Satan himself despises Sombra and can’t stand spending eternity with him.
6. The animation is somewhat better in this film, and you can at least look at it without wanting to gouge your eyes out.

Reception:

Like every film in the KSFM series, reception of this movie is almost universally negative. It was heavily panned for its story, animation, poor writing, voice acting, and disturbing imagery. However, it has developed a very small cult following of fans of the series, who enjoy it because of the “so bad, it’s good” quality that it has along with all the other films in the series.

Trivia:

• This is the second KSFM film to utilize puppetry, after King Sombra’s Fantastic Movie 2: Sombra Street.
• This film has been banned in many countries due to its depictions of Hell, as well as its parody of Hitler.
• The title comes from the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno.