Rodney Ascher, special sequence producer here at WOW, went with friends recently to the Steve Allen Theater to see Hollywood Hell House, the by-the-book, celebrity-strewn satire of fundamentalist horrors. Here’s what he says:

We stormed Hollywood Hell House (HHH) and it totally ruled! Of course we all got boozed-up first. “Can we drink inside?” we asked someone who seemed in charge. “Of course,” he said with gravity. “We don’t recommend anyone experience the HHH sober.” Then Newman from Seinfeld appeared as our demonic guide to lead us through the evilly outfitted anonymous office spaces in the bowels of the Steve Allen Theater. (Actually, the ID of Newman was hotly debated amongst our party, so maybe it wasn’t him. But whatever – it was funnier imagining it was.)

Now you’ve probably read elsewhere about the (sexy!) human sacrifices and bloody abortions and damned AIDS patients, and it’s all there as promised. And if that sounds like your idea of hilarity (as it was ours) you should totally go. Of course, our group also had its share of wiseacres. “Are you going to cut out her fake tits too?” one yelled as an unwitting girl was about to be sacrificed on an altar. The arrival of the most unholy of unholies, Satan himself (Andy Richter), was greeted with the demystifying heckle, “Is that Chris Farley?” And things got positively saucy as we encountered a surprisingly, um, passionate Jesus at our last station.

The good-natured cast and crew were fairly tolerant of shenanigans and even invited us for donut holes and fruit punch afterwards at their youth group meeting on the theater’s stage (to help us decompress from all the presumed emotional trauma of the HHH) and that’s when things got really ugly. It’s safe to say that HHH failed in its mission to scare the sin out of us: Later that night, we wound up in a booth with Poison’s C.C. DeVille at the Dresden Room.

“. . .Things got really ugly.”