Hellraiser: Inferno

 

 

And so it comes to this. I didn’t really want to go this far, but for posterity and the sakes of completion here we go: the direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels. There are a lot of them and they’re all completely horrible. Once Hellraiser got into American hands it became clear that they didn’t really know what to do with it. Hellraiser 3 was fun and along the right lines, but Bloodline seemed like a confused entry not sure what to do (they went to space!). But after that they obviously really had no idea what to do, nor did they care enough to do it well. They had the rights to a franchise that was still popular, but instead of putting in effort they just lazily threw the Hellraiser title onto any pissweak horror script. That’s the bizarre truth – from this point on most of the Hellraiser sequels originally weren’t Hellraiser movies at all, they were unrelated horror scripts that were rewritten and tweaked to make use of the Hellraiser brand. While Bloodline was weak, most of the films from this point on are just absolute garbage horror stories that have Pinhead show up at the end. That pretty much sums up Inferno.

Joseph Thorne is a corrupt detective. When he’s not doing drugs and cheating on his wife, he’s actually a skilled investigator with a sharp mind. At the scene of a bloody, ritualistic murder, Thorne finds a puzzle box, takes it home and solves it. He then begins to have disturbing dreams of monsters. Soon after Thorne ends up on the trail of a brutal serial killer, the Engineer, who kills people close to Thorne, leaving a child’s severed finger at every crime scene. Thorne starts having horrific visions and nightmares, with his encounters with the Engineer getting increasingly disturbing. Forced to see a psychologist as his mind begins to slip, Thorne becomes determined to stop the Engineer and rescue the child.

Inferno isn’t a Hellraiser movie. It might use the Hellraiser name and throw in Pinhead, but it’s nothing like the first three, or even like Bloodline. Instead it tries to go psychological with its horror despite not putting in the effort. Psychological is not the way to take the Hellraiser series and makes no sense in context. Think about it, the entire Hellraiser series concerns itself with hell and the Cenobites killing people – we know that’s what they do, we know it’s real, so why try and do a ‘is it all in his head’ thing? Why go psychological at all? It doesn’t add anything and it doesn’t fit with the meaty, gory, physical horror that is Hellraiser. Inferno seems to have come about because somebody watched Jacob’s Ladder once and tried to copy it. That’s the only explanation I could come up with, since this film has absolutely nothing to do with the characters or story of the Hellraiser series. It doesn’t even have the same feel or spirit as the other movies. It does have more than a few Jacob’s Ladder-esque moments, especially in a hospital full ofgoofy-looking  horrible things. He even has nightmarish flashbacks.

At the end Pinhead turns out to be Thorne’s psychiatrist. He tells Thorne that he’s been in hell ever since he opened the box, and that everything that has happened since, all the murders and nightmares, is his hellish torture and punishment. The Engineer is revealed to be Thorne’s dark side, and the child is his innocence – his dark side has systematically killed his innocence. Thorne’s torture is to go through this revelation again and again for eternity. Thus he is killed, then immediately wakes having just solved the puzzle box, meaning the cycle will repeat again endlessly.

We get a few glimpses of some new Cenobites but they suck. Two are just weird eyeless women with long tongues that attempt to make out with Thorne, and one is a torso monster that drags itself after him.  They show up and torment him a few times and that’s it – they don’t kill anybody or anything. The Engineer here just looks like somebody’s half-assed attempt at copying the Chatterer from the first two films. He’s a normal guy with a mask of skin that covers everything apart from his teeth. At the end he pulls it off to reveal he’s Thorne, which is a stupid revelation anyway. That whole ‘evil side and innocent side’ thing is played out and doesn’t mean anything. Thorne was already an asshole, so what was the point? The innocent ‘child’ version is only seen at the end and nothing Thorne says or does during the movie suggests he’s having some sort of moral dilemma – he’s a dick throughout.

Thorne is completely ridiculous. He’s got crazy eyes going on the entire time. He’s not a likeable character, as he blackmails his partner, cheats on his wife, beats up suspects and just acts like a total douche the entire time. I guess he’s meant to be horrible so the ending revelations work, but when you don’t give a shit about a movie’s dirtbag hero it’s hard to care. The other characters are nothing, all there to get killed as Thorne’s mental descent continues. Most kills are offscreen, with Thorne arriving at the scene. They’re mostly stabbed or cut up or something, though Thorne’s neglected wife and child are frozen and shatter to pieces in the finale’s nightmare-logic revelatory scenes. We don’t really know much about Thorne, so we don’t care about his life, especially when we see him being a dick the whole time. They try and make some sympathy when his hospitalised parents go missing, and then try to kill him in a nightmare moment where he has to blow them away.

 

Doug Bradley is back as Pinhead, as he is in almost all of these sequels. This Pinhead isn’t like any of the others. He’s mostly there to explain the ending, telling Thorne he’s in hell. He’s not menacing or dangerous, he just shows up to tell Thorne “hey, you’re dead and this is your punishment in hell”. What’s strange is having Pinhead be a personal torturer for some random guy. It’s also weird that his version of hell would be psychological torture instead of horrible physical torture, which the last four films established is what hell and the Cenobites are all about. In the other films Pinhead’s torture was always instant, horrible mutilation by hooks and chains. Switching out physical torture for psychological torture is a weird switch.

Inferno sucks. It’s a bad horror movie, and a terrible Hellraiser movie. There’s nothing particularly good about it, with its ideas all seeming to be ripped from other horror movies. It’s never scary, the plot sucks, the pace is stupid and every attempt at being scary is ridiculous. At one point Thorne is beaten up by a bunch of guys outside a bar while a guy dressed like a cowboy watches. What the hell was that even about? Speaking of hell, apart from Pinhead and some chains there isn’t much Hellraiser imagery here, with most of it being dark rooms. It’s just a shoddy movie all up. Inferno is bad, but it isn’t the worst Hellraiser movie. We haven’t gone that far yet. No, we can go deeper.