The Last Witch Hunter

I have a confession to make: I love Vin Diesel movies. It’s a love completely devoid of irony or mockery, instead occupying that rare sort of love based almost entirely on simply seeing an actor doing anything. I just like watching Vin Diesel. It’s a similar love to the one I have for Nicolas Cage, or Bruce Campbell or Kurt Russell. The movies could be crap (and, in many cases, mostly are), but I just get a genuine joy in seeing them in action. Drive Angry is awful, but Nic Cage having fully clothed sex with a random woman as he kills evil cultists, shotgun in one hand and booze in the other, is amazing. The only reason I watched Sky High was for the cameo roles by Kurt Russell and Bruce Campbell (I ended up liking the movie actually). But there’s always been something about Vin Diesel. There’s something so peculiar about a man whose body shape can only be described as bulbous starring in so many movies about how tough he is. Think about it. He turned a character from an indie sci-fi/horror movie into the basis for a movie series, a cartoon and two videos games, all dedicated to how much of a badass he is. That takes dedication.

A Vin Diesel movie doesn’t have to do that much to get my approval; it just has to be fun. I like the Chronicles of Riddick movies (even though I’m instinctively against anything that uses the word ‘Chronicles’ in the title), the last couple of Fast and Furious movies have been genuinely great fun and I like the ridiculousness of XXX. If anything the criteria for whether I like a Vin Diesel film is simple: just be better than Babylon AD. Yes, Babylon AD, the dull mess of a Vin Diesel vehicle with a shoot plagued/cursed with issues and misfortunes, supposedly gutted from its directors self-important ‘transcendental’ dystopian sci-fi narrative vision into a desperately edited, sloppy, slipshod action movie where almost nothing happens, the entire experience completely devoid of joy and humour. With criteria so low it’d seem that it wouldn’t take much to please me. Unfortunately ‘The Last Witch Hunter isn’t up to snuff. It’s not as bad as Babylon AD, nowhere near as bad, but it’s nowhere near a good movie. It’s just a boring one.

In the middle ages, gruff witch hunter Kaulder is sent to kill the Witch Queen who has unleashed the black plague and killed thousands. Kaulder is able to kill the Queen, but with her dying breath she curses him with eternal life so that he’ll be forced to see everybody he knows and loves die as he lives on. In the present day some eight hundred years later, an ageless, mellow Kaulder polices the world of witches and warlocks, preferring to imprison evil witches instead of killing them. He acts as the ‘weapon’ for ‘the Hammer and Cross’, an organisation that exists to keep peace between the human world and the witch world, hunting down rogue witches. Through the years he’s always aided by a Dolan, a priest tasked with recording his deeds.

When his only close friend and retiring confidant, the 36th Dolan (Michael Caine), is cursed by a witch, Kaulder has only a few days to track down the witch responsible and lift the curse. He’s aided initially by his new Dolan, the 37^th (Elijah Wood), and eventually by Chloe, a young witch with dream-based abilities (played by Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie). As their investigation gets dangerous and closer to the truth, Kaulder discovers dark witch forces are conspiring to revive the Witch Queen, and only he can stop them. 

It’s not an action movie. You wouldn’t know it from the trailers, but The Last Witch Hunter is actually, of all things, a ‘Men in Black’ movie. It has all the elements – a secret organisation tasked with policing a secret world of unhuman beings, headquarters in a nondescript place with all sorts of strange gadgets and tools, secret stores, clubs or communities full of otherworldly residents and a villainous plot in which some great evil was threatening the world. It also has a lot of investigating – in fact the movie is almost entirely comprised of investigating. Kaulder and whatever sidekick he happens to have at that moment head to a location, meet a character (usually a witch) and then some sort of magic will happen and he’ll discover a clue or a vital piece of information that’ll take him to the next location to investigate. The movie continues like this for a long time; almost it’s entire middle.

So it’s a movie that drags. After a rough but promising initial fifteen minutes it becomes clear that the plot is in no rush to go anywhere or do anything. It’s less a case of slamming the brakes on and more a case of the top speed being sub-40. It’s less an issue of being lost and more an issue of not actually having a destination. Clumsy, nonsensical driving metaphors aside, the movie’s slow pace is a combination of poor design and poor ideas. It has no ambition, scope or scale; it’s a very small movie with small ideas for the large world building it seems to want to build. It’s also a movie so determined to keep a status quo that in its final moments it relents and renders everything that happened meaningless.

Vin Diesel tends to play a very similar tough guy character in his movies, with the only difference really being how hard of an edge he has. That edge sits on a sort of scale, with violent criminal Richard B. Riddick on one end, and the caring bodyguard from kid’s film The Pacifier on the other, while in the middle sits Fast and the Furious’ tough guy Dominic Toretto. Despite the character’s reputation as a witch killer, Kaulder sits somewhere between the latter two, with his character basically being a great big pussycat of a tough guy. The glimpses of past Kaulder, with his Viking beard and flaming sword, show a much more badass character we never see in the rest of the film. Instead Kaulder comes across as a bit of a dumb softie, ~

Elijah Wood is weak as Kaulder’s new Dolan, basically filling the sidekick role for the first half an hour of the film and then disappearing until the very end where, an inexplicable heel turn later, he’s revealed to be one of the villains (it’s a spoiler, but it honestly comes from nowhere and is ultimately meaningless). Why does Elijah Wood just take crap roles in weak movies? Did Lord of the Rings really nosedive his career that much? The bulk of the movie is instead spent with Chloe, a character who, while infused with a little spunk, spends a lot of time talking to Kaulder about things that aren’t important. It’s mostly there to take the place of ‘character development’, a concept the film struggles with. So instead of meaningful plot developments or character growth we get Kaulder being lectured on how not all witches are bad, Chloe revealing her meaningless witchy secrets, Kaulder’s past being briefly mentioned (the flashbacks to his long-dead family are constant) and just idle chat. Michael Caine is fun in his few short scenes, giving the tiny role more humour and effort than the film deserves. The villains are routinely villainous. While the Witch Queen is bland and forgettable (being evil is her only personality trait), most of the film is spent pursuing a heavy set, bearded Romanian-looking man who is neither threatening nor interesting. Even the ancillary characters are completely forgettable.

For somebody cursed with eternal life, forced to see his friends and family die as he lives on, Kaulder really doesn’t seem to care. He’s not brooding or distant, he’s positively jolly, gleefully seducing air hostesses (apparently he flies a lot), harassing witches and being chummy with Michael Caine. It really takes the edge out of the film’s finale (more on that later), especially since ~ For somebody said to be a powerful Witch Hunter, who has earnt himself the nickname of ‘The Weapon’, Kaulder is actually a big pansy. He’s either being beaten up, knocked down, flung across the room, shot, stabbed or, the most ridiculous one, hypnotised. Every other scene the supposedly big muscled (but small brained) Kaulder ends up stuck in a memory or a dream. For somebody the witches have struggled to defeat for hundreds of years he’s so weak.

The action scenes suck. While the action itself is as generic and poorly choreographed as can be (honestly Nic Cage’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ did magic battles better), the problem is how they’re shot – they’re either far too dark or involve blinding flashes of light. Most action scenes occur in dark indoor areas like caves or apartments, and almost all involve lightning or thunderstorms, magical or otherwise. That means it’s alternatively too dark to make out what’s happening and then too bright to see anything. The effect outright hurt my eyes and made it hard to enjoy the very limp action. While the opening, with a grizzled Kaulder wielding a flaming sword and stabbing ugly fly-spewing witches, suggests we’re in for a pretty cool witch-killing time, it’s not indicative of the rest of the movie at all. In fact I’d say past Kaulder’s scenes come from an almost completely different movie, with a harder, more violent edge to the PG13 weakness of the rest of the movie. It’s like a scene from a much better movie, still not amazing but at least a potentially fun one. Every present-day action scene is weak, and almost non-existent, usually involving a witch using a spell to trick Kaulder or to simply fling him across the room. It must also be said that the film’s tone is surprisingly light and almost comedic, with Kaulder and co cracking wise more often than brooding.

The film has a pretty boring look all things considered. While I mentioned The Sorcerer’s Apprentice before, it actually looks and feels a lot like that movie, with its New York setting – there’s only so much you can do with ‘Manhattan with magic’ as a premise. The CGI effects are, at least, pretty decent for this sort of movie. While there is some unconvincing nonsense (evil witch roots look silly), the magical rune effects look pretty good. Witches have a shiny glint in their eyes when casting spells and some of the big stuff is ok. There’s a giant golem made out of skeletons that is pretty cool when you see it (though it’s fought mostly in darkness). The Witch Queen herself is pretty disappointing, basically being an ugly woman with wrinkly, plant-like skin. She’s not frightening or memorable as a villain. The most memorable effects would be the CGI for a newly immortal Kaulder after having just killed the Witch Queen. He looks like a horribly burnt zombie, writhing in pain. It’s pretty cool, but also feels much darker and violent compared to the rest of the movie.

The movie is determined to keep a status quo for a sequel that has no way in hell of ever being made. The ending is what completely ruins it. It was already a bad, disappointing movie, but the end completely killed it for me. I have to spoil it a bit, but let’s get to the point – Kaulder’s immortality is tied to the Witch Queen’s heart. As long as the heart still beats, the Queen can still be revived, and Kaulder lives forever. To truly defeat her and stop her evil forever, the heart must be stabbed, which will also kill Kaulder. At the end Kaulder is poised to stab the heart and kill himself and the Witch Queen. Chloe begs him not to, with a combination of ‘I love you!’ and ‘there’s a bigger evil out there that will be revealed in a sequel and you’re the only one who can stop it!’. Kaulder has to make his choice. At this point one wonders whether it’ll do a Highlander (i.e. Kaulder loses his immortality but becomes super powerful), or if True Love and the Ultimate Sacrifice will allow him to remain immortal. Or, if we’re going to go rough, maybe he’d just die but all evil would be eliminated?

We get none of this, because Kaulder just doesn’t stab the damn heart. The heart itself has been a massive point of contention in the plot, being the source of several betrayals, the central MacGuffin, the tool of ultimate evil and the only way Kaulder can win and end the evil once and for all, and the idiot decides to keep it so he can be immortal. This is basically the sort of thing the villain would do – this is the equivalent of that Nazi broad in The Last Crusade keeping the Holy Grail. The entire sequence also doesn’t work because the Kaulder we see in the film is perfectly fine being immortal. He’s happy that he can’t die and seems to enjoy the life he’s lead, so it make zero sense for him to want to kill himself.

So the movie ends at the same point as where it began. Nobody has changed, nobody has undergone any growth, the evil witches are still out there, the Witch Queen is still a threat that can return and Kaulder is still immortal. It’s the narrative equivalent of ‘it was all a dream’, essentially making the entire film pointless and not changing anything. This would have been forgivable if the journey itself was worth taking, but The Last Witch Hunter is just a bad movie all up. It’s just so overwhelmingly dull, with barely any action or movement and a lot of dull busywork as characters just wonder around and don’t do much at all. It’s as bad as it was expected to be, which is a shame. One does have to wonder why nobody can seem to make a good movie about witches.

 

Hellraiser: Revelations

 

This is absolutely fucking terrible. This is the absolute nadir of the entire series, the lowest point, one of total creative and technical bankruptcy. This is the sort of franchise-killing movie that usually means the total death of a series. It’s so bad it makes the other straight-to-video Hellraiser mistakes look much better in comparison. Still not good by any stretch of the imagination, but at least they’re not as insulting, as painful, as absolutely awful as this garbage. Revelations sucks.

Revelations was made in about three weeks with a budget of about $300,000 dollars, rushed into production at the last minute and existing solely for business reasons. The only reason the film was made at all was because if it wasn’t made then Dimension films would lose the rights to the Hellraiser franchise. This movie is a fucking obligation, and it shows. There’s no passion or care, it’s just there so they could keep the rights to something they clearly don’t give a shit about, but want to hoard anyway. And it really shows – Revelations is cheap, lazy and soulless.

Two idiot friends, Steven and Nico, go to Tijuana to get drunk and screw prostitutes (which they accomplish). Nico then randomly kills a hooker because he’s a dick. Freaking out the two of them run away…to a strip club to get drunk. A hobo turns up and gives them the Lament Configuration, telling them that if they can solve it, it’ll make them feel substantially better. Because they’re idiots they take the box and go and solve it, summoning the Cenobites who take them to hell.

Since then they’ve been missing, presumed dead with no apparent leads, with the only record being the footage caught on their camera and a mysterious puzzle box found amongst their belongings. A year later the families of the two boys get together to try and reconcile and get closure. They mostly get drunk and argue, with Steven’s sister and Nico’s girlfriend Emma being critical of both families not doing enough to find the boys. Suddenly Steven shows up, bleeding and injured. As the family try to piece together what happened and get answers, Steven acts strange as the past is recalled.

The movie is cut 50/50 between flashbacks to Steven and Nico in Tijuana (complete with awful ‘found footage’ styled shooting) and the family in their house mostly hanging around and being drunk. It sucks. It’s barely over an hour long, clocking in at only about seventy minutes, including credits. Its short length is probably the only good thing about the movie – its brevity means the torture of watching it is over faster. There’s fuck all of a story there so it doesn’t matter.

It begins with found footage because it’s a cheap, easy and lazy way to do horror. Two idiots in a car are talking about how they’re going to screw whores in Mexico. Then their car gets stolen and it suddenly cuts to one of the idiots, with his shirt off, solving the Lament Configuration. Bells ring and then fake pinhead shows up and tells him he’s going to take him to hell. The acting is god awful, the effects laughable and the cinematography, even for found footage, is a blurry, poorly shot mess. In the other half the two families get together to have fancy dinners and get drunk. They don’t want to talk about what happened, preferring to yell at each other, get even drunker and smoke heavily. I don’t even know what the point of it all was. Throughout the film we get constant flashbacks and cuts to Steven and Nico being drunken dickheads in Tijuana, shown as a messy mix of found footage stuff and normal footage. They get drunk, chat to prostitutes and are just unlikeable douches in general.

Unlike the last four movies, Revelations was written as a Hellraiser movie from the very start, and not as some unrelated horror script being edited. Not that it means anything – the plot is completely awful with absolutely terrible writing. Half the film is made up of flashbacks. Think about that – there’s really only about thirty five minutes of plot, and even that is mostly characters standing around while flashbacks play until the end.

There’s a twist. There always has to be a fucking twist with these. It turns out that Steven isn’t really Steven at all! No, he’s Nico! Nico eventually killed Steven and stole his skin, and is now on the run from the Cenobites. He’s returned home to get the puzzle box so he can trick somebody into opening it to hopefully take his place in hell. He gets a shotgun and takes the families hostage. He makes Emma open the box, the shitty Cenobites (including a transformed Steven) show up and then kill some of them and take Nico to hell before leaving on their own accord. At the very end Emma, the only one alive, is a total idiot and goes to open the box again.

Holy fuck, Nico and Steven are fucking horrible assholes. They’re sexist, racist fucking shitheads who drink and screw prostitutes because they’re idiots. Their behaviour goes beyond being just dicks, these are cartoonish morons. Nico kills a prostitute for absolutely no reason and then blackmails his friend about it. Nico then opens the box and the Cenobites come and take him while Steven films it. He then stays in Tijuana for some reason, banging and killing prostitutes so he can try and bring Nico back to life. No idea why he would considering how much of a tool Nico was.. The rest of the cast are just as horrible and the acting is atrocious. Emma, Steven’s sister and Nico’s girlfriend, is the absolute worst. She wants them all to talk about what happened to her boyfriend and brother and whines for a long while. But when her brother turns up, she’s the absolute last person to talk to him. Then she starts to flirt with her boyfriend’s dad and becomes obsessed with the box (apparently being near it makes you horny?). Nobody acts like a person. Nobody has anything approaching a clear motivation or personality. In fact nobody does anything that makes sense.

The filming itself is horrible, with constant shaky-cam, regardless of whether or not it’s meant to be found footage. It’s as though they didn’t bother to use a tripod, or just couldn’t afford one. It looks ugly, it sounds ugly, the acting is atrocious and it’s a shoddy mess overall. This movie sucks badly. Tijuana is a shadowy place full of prostitutes, scum bars and dirty motel rooms. The new Cenobites look awful as well. There are three of them – shit Pinhead, a female version of Chatterer and an even shittier version of shit Pinhead.

Speaking of shit Pinhead, Doug Bradley no longer plays him. While Clive Barker washed his hands of the film franchise a long time ago (when Americans got their hands on it and drove the franchise into the ground), Doug Bradley continued to appear as Pinhead in all the previous sequels, doing his own makeup and being just about the only good thing about those horrible movies (his appearance is really the only thing that lets those movies use the ‘Hellraiser’ title. Revelations is significant because it’s the first Hellraiser to not have Bradley, for him to refuse to be in it, and the first to replace him. And the new guy and the new make-up are both completely horrible. The makeup is noticeably slack and lazy and he doesn’t look monstrous at all (he’s also got a butt chin which looks silly). His acting is god awful, with his delivery and lines both being way too try-hard. They basically just wrote variations on his lines from the first few films and had him say them lazily. He sucks.

Revelations is horrible, and is where the Hellraiser legacy ends. A contractual obligation lazily spewed out with no passion or effort. And that’s where we leave the series. It’s a bit strange to consider just how bad most of these are, weighed against just how iconic Pinhead is. The character and designs had such an impact that they basically buoyed the entire series. Not that the movies started out bad – while rough around the edges the first is great, and the second and third are fun in their own ways. I’d say only the first three are really worth watching, with the first being the best (in sheer purity of purpose). Bloodline is watchable as long as you don’t think about it too heavily, but after that point the series is a total wash. But the impact and inspiration it’s had is strangely large compared to what were essentially smaller, weirder horror movies (emerging from the UK no less). The series has spawned a lot of comic book adaptations (many with Barker’s input) and the fashion reflexively inspired the same fetish community it sprung from. There are rumours that Clive Barker is penning a proper Hellraiser movie, reboot or otherwise, with the man himself confirming it at one point (and perhaps directing again), but it’s all been silent on that front for a long time. Also Barker has a bad habit of saying he’ll do something and then never actually doing it (he’s almost notorious for failed projects).

Hellraiser: Hellworld

 

Hellworld is the fucking terrible. The last three movies were bad, but this manages to be worse. Again, this wasn’t initially written as a Hellraiser movie, and this time it really, really fucking shows. The movie makes brief, superficial mentions of the Hellraiser series, as though that would be enough. Otherwise this is a pathetic, piss weak horror movie that’s been shoddily slapped together, a combination of poor shooting, terrible acting, horrible plotting and a story that might as well not exist.

 

A group of friends are addicted to playing ‘Hellworld’, a videogame based on the Hellraiser series (yeah, we go a bit meta). One of their friends, Adam, becomes completely obsessed with the game and kills himself, which fractures some of the group and upsets Chelsea, who decides to stop playing the game. Two years later they’re all invited to a secret party for Hellworld players held at a big creepy mansion, ‘Leviathan House’, apparently built by Philip Lemarchand. The party itself is a piss-weak thing, full of nightclub folks (for a secret party there’s a fuckload of people there). Nobody seems particularly enthused, and the exact size and scale of the house is never clear. Sometimes there’re a whole lot of people partying, then it’s randomly sparse. I’m getting side tracked here – they head to the party and meet the host (Lance Henrikson) who tells them the houses’ creepy history and promises them the party will be truly amazing. And then they just sort of hang around and mingle with the partygoers while having random scares. They start to explore the house and get killed off one by one and they realise something’s up. The story is almost non-existent and not much happens. They spend a lot of time stuck in the house not doing anything.

In the end we get yet another variation on the same twist that just keeps fucking happening in these awful Hellraiser sequels, the ‘it’s all a nightmare/hell/hallucination’ twist. But no, instead we go even dumber with this: the party’s host was actually Adam’s father, and he held the group responsible for his suicide. So he lured them to the party, drugged them and buried them in his backyard, and everything that happened was a shared hallucination they’ve been having for a few days, as they died one by one. So the Cenobites and Oinhead were all hallucinations (until the very end twist, which we’ll get to). Whether the party happened or not is a point of confusion - the actual party seemed to have happened at least in part, and I guess the characters were astral projecting there? That means that while this rowdy party was going on nobody noticed the guy abducting people, dragging them to the backyard and burying them. It’s weird – at times they aren’t able to talk or interact with the other partygoers, but then they’re having sex with them and getting blowjobs and having conversations? Or was that all just the same hallucination? Towards the end all the guests eventually disappear, with things making even less sense.

The characters are fucking horrible and the acting is atrocious. This movie looks and feels like a poorly shot student film. The main actress for Chelsea spends a portion of the movie looking stoned, her mouth agape, her eyes barely open as she shuffles about, shoulders slouched. At the end she randomly does a spinning kick on Lance, knocking him over a railing (he’s a hallucination so he’s fine). The rest are just as bad. Early on they try and make it seem one of the group, Jake, is the killer by making him act weird and saying everybody deserves punishment. During the end revelation they go silly – Lane Henrikson gained information on the group by pretending to be a woman online and seducing Jake, who told him everything. This is the dumbest thing ever.

Who even found these idiots? Funnily enough, one of them would later become Superman – Henry Cavill is here, eventually getting a giant hook through the chest. He’s a douche bro joker guy who spends his time there trying to get laid. He gets shitty at Chelsea for not wanting to have sex with him and wanders off to get a headjob from some random woman. He spends the entire movie with a big shit-eating grin on. They end up getting killed off one by one. How they’re managing to get away from the massive party to end up alone in some sort of death trap is beyond me. At one point one of the guys drops his inhaler into a vent and then wanders down to the evil surgery room to find it. He lies down on one of the surgery tables because of course he does and then his head is cut off. Makes sense to me.

The house is full of stupid crap. There are a lot of things there to try and sell the ‘Hellraiser’ thing, like a giant puzzle box, portraits of Lemarchand and other stuff. There’s an underground surgery room full of hanging hooks and jars of severed body parts. The group think this is awesome because they’re idiots. It’s also got stupid party rules – everybody gets a featureless white mask with a number on them and a mobile phone with which they’re meant to…do something? Call each other to hook up for sex? I know a lot of party people randomly have some sex, particularly some of the main characters. It’s unclear what the party’s purpose is. Barely anybody at the party wears the masks, but then again they’re meant to be hallucinations I think? Or some of them at least? The party definitely happened though, I mean they got drugged during the party. The police show up though and there doesn’t seem to be a party going on. The actual mechanics of how the twist is meant to work are beyond me. The idiots talk about Hellraiser. ‘Cenobites aren’t real, and even if they were I wouldn’t open the Lemarchand Configuration’ says the idiot heroine, as though feigning familiarity with the source material while make up for the fact that the movie has almost nothing to do with Hellraiser. Pinhead makes what amounts to a cameo appearance (as he has in the last three movies) and that’s mostly it. Whenever somebody dies Pinhead will show up to say something, and sometimes he even kills people. The Cenobites show up towards the end but they don’t do much.

The Hellworld game is shown as a crappy web browser flash game, one of those ones where you click on things and crappy sound clips play. How anybody could become obsessed with a game like that is beyond me. What’s also beyond me is the idea that dead Adam somehow became self-destructive over it – apparently the character’s guilt is what was killing them (and not suffocating in a box, or the Cenobites or whatever), because they felt guilty for not stopping their crazy friend who go so obsessed with a web browser game that he set himself on fire.

The gore effects are there, but they so dull and standard they’re not worth talking about. The scare attempts are weak as well – keeping with the ‘everything was a hallucination’ thing, we get a lot of fake-out scares or visions or something freaky happening but then not really. We keep cutting to footage of Adam digging a hole in the basement. What the fuck even for? Why? He eventually see him self-immolate. There’s a lot of sex here, with characters randomly screwing party guests, who may or may not be real. I don’t know why the sex scenes are there actually, since they don’t add anything.

In the end, the police show up from nowhere outside and dig up the surviving two characters, saving them. This is the movie not knowing how to end itself, suddenly having the police show up to save the day. Lance Hendrickson, in a hotel somewhere, finds that his son actually had his own puzzle box (?) and he opens it. Pinhead and the Cenobites show up and kill him. The end, I guess?

Hellworld is horrible. The other three were horrible too, alretnating between dumb and annoying, but this is somehow worse. It’s yet another ‘twist’ movie, where it’s all build up to some stupid psychological trick that’s meant ot be surprising or impressive and manages to be neither. This also marks the final appearance as Doug Bradley as Pinhead, a character that has become nothing more than a cameo at this point (he’s barely in it here).

We’re not done yet. We’ve got one more Hellraiser movie to look at. It’s one that Clive Barker has publicly bashed and that Doug Bradley declined to reprise his role as Pinhead in. It was made in about three weeks, on a budget or about $300,000 and that only exists because if it didn’t get made the studio would lose the right to the Hellraiser franchise. Guess how good that one turned

Hellraiser: Deader

And we’re still going. By this point the Hellraiser direct-to-video have proven themselves to be garbage. The first two were almost the same movie. The third, Deader, is a little different but still along similar lines. What’s worse is how dull it is – it’s a total bore and it drags on and on. It gives a different setting, but even that’s a drag, and its attempt at a story is pathetic. The film was produced by Stan Winston, the make-up guru designer of the Terminator and the Predator – I’ve no idea why he’d produce this. I don’t think he did the effects, which are subpar. It’s just another bad movie.

Amy Klein is a reporter doing stories on crack addiction, immersing herself into junkie culture. Her boss tasks her with investigating the ‘Deaders’, an underground cult movement that practice ritualistic murder and suicide, only to be miraculously resurrected by the cult’s mysterious leader Winter. She heads to Bucharest, and immerses herself in Deader communities trying to find Winter. Along the way Amy also gets her hands on a puzzle box.

The story here is somehow thinner than ever before. It’s just Amy tracking down Winter until she finds him, then there’s a few ‘revelations’, half an hour of nightmare sequences and flashbacks until the end. The pace is atrocious, plodding along until the eventual confrontation, and then meandering until the end. They go psychological again with nightmare sequences, fake-out visions, flashbacks and all that nonsense.

Amy isn’t likeable. She’s that tiring sort of ‘maverick reporter who plays by her own rules’ character, the one with attitude and bitchiness that others put up with because her work is apparently really good, though we never see any real evidence of it. She produces an exceptionally thin column titled ‘How to be a crack whore’ which she investigates presumably by becoming a crack whore. She’s really crap at her job as well, considering she’s meant to be such a fantastic reporter. She’s bad at lying, crap at following leads, terrible at protecting herself. The girl sucks. Yet the entire film is filled with characters talking about her, listing off her supposed traits and qualities, but then we never ever actually see her display any of them.

The leader of the Deadites is revealed to be ‘Winter Lemarchand’, an ancestor of Philip Lemarchand, the man who made the puzzle box. For some reason he’s got the power of necromancy (Why? How?). His plan is stupid – he’s decided that, as a descendant of Lemarchand, he should rule hell and the Cenobites (!?) and needs somebody to open the puzzle box for him because he can’t do it. He started the cult to gather up weak minded individuals susceptible to self-sacrifice. He kills and revives Amy, who opens the box, and then the Cenobites turn up and kill Winter and all the Deaders because of course that’s what they’d do. They want Amy to come with them, but she decides to kill herself instead (?) and that somehow defeats them, closes the puzzle box and also causes the entire building to explode, the end. What the fuck?

Winter Lemarchand sucks. He’s a generic cult leader, making great pronouncements, talking in cryptically, speaking in a light whispery tone. There’s nothing interesting about him, and his plan is stupid. There aren’t any other characters of note, with the rest of the cast just there to tell Amy to go somewhere else on her meandering ‘investigation’. Her boss talks about how great she is, a random punk guy talks about how dangerous the Deaders are, and a few others just talk shit.

Now let’s go over this for a second – Winter’s plan is fucking stupid. The Cenobites hate the Lemarchands, why would he think he’d have power over them? Also this makes zero sense in the terms of the series’ logic – if we’re following Bloodline then Philip Lemarchand only built a toy box, which got its demonic powers from the duke summoning demons, so the Lemarchand family had no real link other than that. Also the timeline is a bit off – based on fashions and technology (they still use VHS) Deader seems to be placed in either the eighties or nineties, which is before John Merchant’s story in Bloodline but possibly during Hellraiser 3. So is Winter John’s uncle or cousin or something? That would mean Pinhead killed Winter long before meeting John, and when he met John he was surprised the Lemarchand bloodline was still running after Philip died two hundred years earlier? And why is the puzzle by just around if, by Hellraiser 3, it was either in the Cotton’s possession, in the Pillar of Souls or in the foundation of the building Merchant designed? The more you think about it the less it makes sense.

 

It does have a different feel to the last two, but I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Everything is sorta grey and muted, but Bucharest at least feels like a place and we get to go outside a lot, compared to the perpetual indoors of Hellseeker and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Inferno. The music here is overbearing, playing way too loudly over pretty much every scene. It’s so overwrought and dramatic that it removes any tension or atmosphere. It drowns out the dialogue as well. Seriously what the hell is with the music? It’s not even good music, it’s just generic horror music. I have to mention that the Hellraiser overture/theme hasn’t actually been heard since film 3, while Bloodline had a variation on it. These sequels didn’t even bother using the same music. Again it doesn’t feel like a Hellraiser movie. If you ignore the gore, the focus on chains and the Cenobites showing up this is clearly a different horror movie rewritten to be a Hellraiser sequel.

The movie plods along – it’s not a long movie, but it certainly feels long. The entire first hour is dull and the last thirty minutes is just stupid nightmare imagery. The usual things happen. Fake-out nightmares, odd visions of non-scary things like creepy strangers and random blood puddles, flashbacks, characters acting strange. It’s all so played out. At one point Amy goes to some alternative counter-culture folks who live on a train – it’s not a derailed or fictional train, it’s an actual subway train running on the tracks and stopping at regular intervals. No idea how that’s meant to work. When she boards it, it’s suddenly like a little slum community, or maybe a gypsy commune would be right. There are a lot of naked people, women making out, people with tattoos and piercings (what is it with the Hellraiser sequels equating tattoos and piercings with being creepy?) and stupid random imagery. I think they’re meant to be junkies as well. Once she's dead, Amy returns there and everybody's killed in some gruesome way. It's the same thing that happened in the last two, where they return to a place and find it freaky.

The whole ‘Amy is killed and resurrected’ thing seems to exist only to drag the movie out. After being stabbed she wakes up with bloody wounds and wanders around seeing dead people everywhere and having constant flashbacks to her childhood, where her abusive father raped her.  It’s garbage. It tries once more to go psychological, but we’ve just seen her get stabbed to death so we know she’s been killed and everything is happening in some sort of nightmare limbo. She eventually remembers that she eventually murdered her dad (a repressed memory) and then Winter brings her back to life and then she opens the Lament Configuration. She opens the box by throwing it. It’s stupid, but that’s what happens. It opens in cartoon lightning nonsense, and Pinhead and his shitty Ceonbite friends show up. It’s the same Cenobites from the last film, presumably because it was much cheaper to just reuse the same costumes and make-up. 

 

The Cenobites are here for the ending I guess. Pinhead shows up a few times to warn Amy. It’s the first time he’s been seen actually trying to help somebody. At the end he calls his chains and they kill the Deaders, but otherwise I’d say Pinhead does even less here than in the last two movies. This is literally the movie bringing him out for the end, which is what the last two did as well. You can tell that this was meant to be a different horror movie. You could also tell with the other two, but this one in particular feels as though it was meant to be some psychological horror character study, but it sucked badly so they just threw in Pinhead hoping that’d fix it. It didn’t.

Deader sucks. All these direct-to-dvd ones suck, but Deader manages to be duller than the last two, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. Is it the worst? No. These movies manage to get even worse.

Hellraiser: Hellseeker

 

This is where things start to repeat themselves. Hellseeker is a very, very similar movie to Inferno. It makes a single attempt to link to the original series by bringing back one of the original characters, but even that is weak and underutilised. You can really tell that this was written as a different horror movie before having the Hellraiser title slapped onto it.

The film follows Trevor, a man married to Kirsty Cotton (from the first two Hellraiser movies). They’re involved in a bad car crash in which Kirsty goes missing, presumed dead. Trevor barely walks away alive, spending time in the hospital and being prescribed powerful, potentially mind-altering medication, but there are suspicions he was responsible. As he seeks out what happened to Kirsty he begins to have horrible visions as those around him start to act strange. He begins to have horrible visions and waking nightmares as his fractured memory begins to return and he finds out what happened to Kirsty.

It’s not a fun movie. Almost all of it involves people talking shit to Trevor, either accusing him or murder, being aggressive with him, yelling at him or, in the case of women, aggressively trying to seduce him. He just seems confused most of the time, and never appears particularly freaked out by any of it. Even horrific nightmare things like witnessing a murder or a suicide don’t seem to bother him. Funnily, Trevor is played by the same guy who played Dennis Duffy, Liz Lemon’s moronic dirtbag ex-boyfriend from 30 Rock. Dennis was a self-confessed sex addict who was always involved in some horrifically outdated business venture (like selling beepers or investing in coffee vending machines), was caught seeking sex with a minor on ‘To Catch a Predator’ (“What are you doing here sir?” “I’m here to bang a chick named Judy”) before going on to marry a perpetually drunk Irish woman named Megan and adopting a black son who he named ‘Black Dennis’. I find it hilarious seeing him in a horror movie.

Trevor has a rough, aggravating time. The police constantly treat him like a piece of shit, women aggressively try to seduce him and his friends and co-workers constantly demean him, all passive-aggressively accusing him of murdering his wife. It does not make for an interesting or entertaining movie. Everybody is angry and annoyed almost all the time, while Trevor seems alternatively exasperated or bored by it all.

 

I said Inferno was sort of like Jacob’s Ladder, but Hellfire has even more in common with it. Hell, the entire film is pretty much just a worse movie with the same basic premise. The film is also very repetitive. Something freaky will happen and then it’ll be revealed as a dream. Trevor wakes up from about a dozen dreams, or maybe more, with every big moment immediately being followed by him waking up confused and disorientated. It’s full of a lot of ridiculous, horrific but silly looking stuff that means nothing. At one point Trevor throws up an eel. It’s made of CGI and has nothing to do with anything, but it’s kinda gross. There’s a bit of CGI nonsense, and it all looks pathetic. It’s never scary, it’s just fake.

Kirsty Cotton is back! But she’s sort of a bitch. She’s only in the movie for a little while, maybe three or four minutes screen time tops. Apart from a few glimpses in Trevor’s memories, she’s really only there for the ending twist revelation, same with Pinhead hwo only actually shows up to explain the plot.

In the end all is revealed – Trevor has been dead the whole time and is in Hell! It’s revealed that Trevor was a dick who only married Kirsty for her money (she’s inherited a lot of stuff from Larry, Frank and Julia apparently), and cheated on her with a whole bunch of women. He comes up with a plan to kill her to inherit her money, and tries to do so by forcibly giving her a puzzle box. The Cenobites came for Kirsty to pay for past dues (she did technically open the box in the first film so they own her), but Kirsty made a deal – her freedom for five souls. So she murdered the women Trevor had slept with and one of his friends, framing Trevor for it, before killing him and staging it as a car accident. It’s a bit of a silly accident considering the massive gunshot wound to the head he has when they retrieve the body though.

You know, Trevor doesn’t actually seem to be bothered by any of this. When the revelation happens and he’s given back his memories, and even sees his deceased body, he’s surprisingly accepting of the whole ordeal. It’s the same reaction as if he’d lost his car keys, spent a few agitating hours frantically searching for them before finally seeing them. He seems almost relieved actually.

 

The end twist sort of makes Kirsty into a horrible, violent bitch. She’s no longer surviving by the skin of her teeth; she’s now a murderer killing off people she doesn’t know to save her own ass. I get the idea of being a survivor, but you see the crime scenes she left and the girl went more than a little overboard with some of those killings. There’s a difference between shooting somebody and torturing them to death in an elaborate way to frame the man you’re about to kill.

You get a very quick glimpse of some Cenobites, and they’re sucky again. One is just covered in straps, one has his face stitched closed and one has a steel mask on. They don’t do anything – there’s no murder or threats, so they’re more like props than anything else. That’s the big problem with these last few films – the Cenobites don’t really do much, and are only there because since they’re using the Hellraiser title they felt obligated to show some Cenobits. Pinhead shows up every now and then for a few seconds, either glimpsed in a nightmare or there to say something creepy or cryptic. He’s only really there for the end, where he tells Trevor what’s going on.

A lot of nonsense happens. Whenever he’s brought to the police station he sees people being tortured, while the hospital is full of horrible surgery nonsense. Some effects are pretty decent (in an early nightmare scene doctors perform brain surgery on a conscious Trevor), but a lot of it is pretty generic by this point. Guy in prison with chains on him? Random guy with tattoos and piercings? Stuff like that isn’t scary, but the film treats it as though it all is.

Hellseeker is another bad one. It’s about on equal footing with Inferno actually, since they’re almost the same movie. I will say that Trevor is less of a horrible asshole than Thorne was, and doesn’t have the constant crazy-eye stare that psycho detective had. Maybe that’s just me though, since now all I can think about is a Hellraiser comedy sequel starring Dennis Duffy unapologetically being a tool the entire time. Once again this isn’t a Hellraiser movie in pretty much any sense. It’s not about Pinhead or hell or the Cenobites or the puzzle box – they’re in the film sure, but it’s not about them. I don’t know why they want to go psychological, but they just keep doing it from this point on.

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.

Hellraiser: Bloodline

 

Pinhead goes to space! Bloodline is a weird movie, attempting to act as a prequel/origins story for the series, a sequel to Hellraiser 3 and an ending to the series. Bloodline offers an origins story to the series’ central puzzle box, through which hell and the Cenobites are summoned. The origin story is weak though and doesn’t amount to much. Bloodline is a pretty weak movie overall, taking place in three separate time periods. Each segment is short and has a different feel, but none are particularly good, following weak characters. Mediocre is the word that comes to mind – it’s not an awful movie, and there’s still the gory violence and hellish nonsense the series is known for, but overall it’s a bit weak.

 

In the distant future, space engineer Dr Paul Merchant commandeers a space station he personally designed, the Minos, sealing himself in it and using machines to open a puzzle box, the Lament Configuration, to summon Pinhead and the Cenobites, sealing them in a room as part of his plan to finally destroy them once and for all. Armed soldiers arrive and question Paul, preventing him from finishing his work. Trying to convince them to help, Paul recounts his family’s history, the history of the Lament Configuration and his family’s ongoing feud with the Cenobites.

Hundreds of years earlier, Philip Lemarchand, a French toymaker living in poverty, makes a puzzle box (the Lament Configuration) at the request of a wealthy Duke. The Duke uses the box as a gateway to hell, killing a prostitute, skinning her and using the box to summon a demon, Angelique, who inhabits the dead girl’s skin. Witnessing this and horrified by what his work has done, Lemarchand attempts to design a puzzle box to close hell for good, the ‘Elysium Configuration’, but is unable to finish it. He attempts to retrieve the puzzle box to prevent it from summoning more demons, only to find that the duke has betrayed and killed by his servant (a young Adam Scott from Parks and Recreation), who also mortally wounds Lemarchand. As he dies he warns his wife to leave and look after their son.

Two hundred years later and we switch to Lemarchand’s American descendant, John Merchant, a successful architect (the designer of the puzzle box building at the end of Hellraiser 3). John is suffering from nightmares about Angelique, and becomes obsessed with attempting to finish his ancestors’ ‘Elysium Configuration’. Angelique, sensing Merchant’s work is a threat to hell, heads to America and retrieves the Lament Configuration, summoning Pinhead to assist her in stopping Merchant. Angelique wants to seduce him and lead him against his work, whereas a bored Pinhead would prefer to just massacre him and his family. John Merchant fails to makes the Elysium Configuration work and is killed by Pinhead, but his wife and child survive and manage to send Pinhead and Angelique back to hell.

Back in the future a few hundred years later, the soldiers are sceptical about Paul Merchant’s story, but the Cenobites are loose on the ship and starts killing them off one by one. Paul must activate the Elysium Configuration to finally close the gates to hell and end Pinhead for good.

Bloodline is pretty weak. Each segment of the film has a different feel, but none of them are particularly great. The first segment is really short and sorta meaningless (the box was just a box?), though the scene of the Duke summoning Angelique is pretty gory and cool. The middle section drags a bit though, and John Merchant outright sucks. The movie becomes a stalk-and-slash film in its final twenty minutes when we’re returned to the ship. It’s basically a bunch of scenes as the armed guards wander around the ship getting murdered by the Cenobites. We don’t know who these people are so we don’t care, and there’s no real tension since they just wander into the path of one of the Cenobites and then get killed.

Each version of Lemarchand/Merchant is pretty weak. Lemarchand the toymaker comes across as an idiot, caring more about building his fancy little box than his family. I do love his wife’s reaction to the box (“is that it?”) and how he gets huffy that she doesn’t appreciate his supposed genius. When he dies it’s pretty weak as well. Apparently he’s been mortally wounded by the duke’s servant, but all he has are a few scratches. Maybe he just had a weak constitution? John Merchant also sucks. He’s struggling with the pressure of receiving an award for designing the puzzle box building. That’s a pretty silly issue. He comes across as pathetic too, and can’t make the Elysium Configuration work at all. The last one, Paul, is barely around, and even then all he does is summon the Cenobites and then trigger the Elysium Configuration to take them out.

Seeing a young Adam Scott (from Parks and Recreation and dozens of B-list comedies) cracks me up. He’s the duke’s servant who murders him and Lemarchand so he can bang Angelique. And he does apparently, spending some two hundred years screwing around with her. Apparently since she’d been summoned she has to obey orders (and also makes you immortal?) as long as her master ‘stays out of hell’s way’, whatever that means. Adam Scott doesn’t want her to go after John Merchant so she kills him. Weirdly Pinhead refers to her as a princess, suggesting there’s some sort of hell royalty that’s never been mentioned before and never gets mentioned again. Angelique in America then tricks some poor sap into opening the puzzle box. The guy has to be the biggest idiot in the world – she makes a pass at him, tells him she wants to go somewhere private for some fun, but then she leads him to the basement of the building to uncover the puzzle box and gets him to strip his shirt off, sit down and solve the box. The idiot goes through with it, which is the dumbest thing ever.

It’s a bit stupid that Angelique and Pinhead are both so obsessed with killing off the Lemarchand bloodline. Does it even matter at all? Lemarchand couldn’t figure out the Elysium Configuration, and John screwed it up, so if they just left the idiots alone nothing would have happened. It’s also funny how ineffectual they both are. Angelique attempts to seduce John Merchant by giving him sex dreams, which doesn’t work at all. I don’t even know what her plan’s goal was meant to be, since it doesn’t change anything. John still works on the plans. Pinhead rightfully gets pissed off and decides to just try killing them outright, but he does it in a half-assed way, mostly letting John run away until he gets bored and outright kills him. He cuts his head off with a bladed hook/chain thing. While he gloats, John’s shrieking wife and son manage to close the Lament Configuration and send Pinhead, Angelique and the other Cenobites back to hell, so he dropped the ball there.

The other characters are weak. None of the space guards are useful or memorable, and none of the women in Merchant’s life have much, though John’s wife actually does some stuff. But why does she frantically try to open the puzzle box when confronted by Cenobites? She doesn’t know what it does. She basically points it towards Pinhead and it just works. It wraps chains around Angelique and drags her to hell, while Pinhead explodes and his gore is sucked into the box.

The ‘Elysium Configuration’ seems like a Barker idea – it’s a box that reflects light infinitely. Lemarchand’s drawing is crap though, it’s a squiggle surrounded by a few squares, so it’s no wonder John Merchant couldn’t figure it out and make it work. At the end Paul creates it by positioning satellites with giant mirrors around the space station, which itself transforms into a giant cube, then using lasers to shoot light around it. The cube then explodes, which seems to completely defeat the purpose of ‘reflecting light infinitely’. Pinhead, stuck inside the ship in the middle of the cube, is seared by the light (like a vampire I guess?) and then explodes with the ship.

The box’s origins are a bit dull. It also doesn’t explain why or how it got its demonic powers. Sure, the evil Duke used it to cast a spell or something to summon a demon, but how does that suddenly make the puzzle box able to open, close and basically control hell. For all its central purpose about the Lemarchand bloodline being linked to the box and Pinhead they really don’t have much of a link at all. Pinhead only seemed to know about the Lemarchands when he was summoned to kill John Merchant.  And if we’re going by the ‘Cenobites were people’ logic then Pinhead wasn’t even around at all when the box was made. I feel he’d have a bigger issue with the Cotton family.  

The Cenobites here are pretty flimsy. There’s a Cenobite dog. That’s a bit funny. The other Cenobites are lacklustre. Angelique ends up with her skull exposed after Pinhead gets tired of her techniques and takes control. Twin security guards have their heads and bodies melded together but it looks like garbage. They kill a guy by splitting themselves apart then reforming with him between them, joining them. The effects aren’t great, with some awful CGI. The Cenobite dog in particular is funny in this regard, because I don’t think the actual prop/puppet could move from the spot (maybe it was too heavy?), so every moving shot is awful CGI.

 

Bloodline was a weak entry, with only a few good parts. It failed to capitalise on the novelty of having Pinhead in space, which was always a stupid concept. The entire premise, the whole ‘prequel, sequel, origins and ending’ thing wans’t handled particularly well. I think the biggest issue is that the film has no weight when it gives these supposedly important things. It’s meant to be three beginning and the end to the Hellraiser series and it doesn’t have the strength to make either satisfying.

This marked, essentially, the end of Hellraiser’s potential, and the last Hellraiser movie to be released in cinemas. It’s also pretty much the last Hellraiser movie that was watchable. There are another five sequels but they’re all awful, and barely any of them feel like an actual Hellraiser movie. Normally I’d stop right here, but for posterity we’ll continue with the awful Hellraiser sequels.

Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth

 

This is the first American Hellraiser movie, and it’s actually not bad. Compared to the first two it’s a definite change of feel and pace and it lacks the creepy atmosphere of the first and bonkers creativity of the second, but it’s a fun little movie. It has a pretty good pace, building up to a big, bloody climax. It also finally lets Pinhead take up the limelight, thrusting him in the lead villain role and focusing its story on him. This is a great strength for the film, as it finally lets its most iconic character take the limelight. It’s a movie that builds up to its big, violent set piece. It does basically turn into something of a straightforward slasher in its finale, but it’s a fun little horror movie all up and a definite change of pace to Hellbound. It’s also a change of location, taking place in America.

JP, the jackass owner of a hip American nightclub, ‘The Boiler Room’, buys a horrific statue called the ‘Pillar of Souls’ from a mysterious store. Embedded in the statue is a mysterious puzzle box. After some blood gets onto the statue, it comes alive and slaughters one of the girls JC seduces from his club. Pinhead, trapped within the statue, is revived and convinces JP to bring him more women to kill so he can gain enough power to free himself, promising JP sights and pleasures undreamt of. JC, the asshole he is, agrees.

Meanwhile, struggling television reporter Joey thinks she’s found the story of a lifetime when she witnesses a man in a hospital emergency room get torn to pieces by hooks that appear from nowhere. Her only lead brings her to The Boiler Room, tracking down Terri, JP’s abused ex-girlfriend who has stolen the puzzle box from JP. Together they research the box’s history, linking it to an incident at the Channard Institute and learning about the Cenobites. As her investigation continues, Joey is contacted by the spirit of Elliot Spencer, Pinhead’s discarded human side who needs her help in fusing back with Pinhead and restoring his humanity – the only way he can be defeated.

But Pinhead is freed from the statue and wreaks havoc at the nightclub, slaughtering dozens and creating some Cenobite followers, planning to venture forth and create hell on earth unless Joey can stop him.

As you could probably tell, the movie mostly moves on from the characters and place of the first two films. We’re not in Britain any more and Kirsty isn’t out protagonist (though she appears in videotape interviews from her time at the Channard Institute that Joey finds, where she basically fills in the plot of the first two movies). The switch to American is a bit funny, but then again the box was originally found in Morocco (though it didn’t originate there), so travelling the world to dole out pain and suffering makes sense. The ‘Pillar of Souls’ is meant to be the pillar from the end of the last movie, but it’s substantially different looking (it’s a statue for one). It’s a bit strange that the puzzle box was embedded within, and that it apparently fell out as well. Speaking of the puzzle box, apparently it’s the only one again, despite Hellbound showing that there were a whole bunch of them. I’d be interested in knowing whether this is meant to be the original one from the first film. That box technically wasn’t in the second film, and was last seen in Morocco – I guess they could suggest that Channard collected it, but since Hellbound takes place in the days immediately after the first film I doubt he’d have the time to travel to Morocco and pick it up. 

Hell on Earth has a smaller scale than Hellbound, but a much more focused story, not matter how simplistic. It’s also more character-driven than the horror freak-show of Hellbound. It’s a much easier film to follow, with a basic plot that gets to the point. It’s a fair amount of ramping build-up as Joey investigates the box and JP feeds Pinhead until Pinhead is freed, but once Pinhead is free things get more action packed, starting with the nightclub massacre and then spilling out onto the streets. In many ways the film is a step backwards in terms of ambition and scope. We don’t explore hell or see any of its machinations, there are no labyrinths or giant rotating pillars. Instead we look into Pinhead as a character. I think it’s to the film’s benefit. The smaller scale and focus on characters makes for a more solid movie, and the smaller horror set pieces (the nightclub massacre, stalking through the streets, going to the church etc.) work well. I will say that at that point the pace is pretty much constantly moving until the end, swapping out chills for action.

Joey is our protagonist and she’s fine, though a bit useless. Her job as a reporter gives her the excuse needed to investigate the puzzle box, and she does a good job of following leads and getting information. When she’s in danger she’s pretty ineffectual and basically just runs away. The entire finale is her running from Pinhead and the other Cenobites until Spencer’s ghost and the puzzle box save the day. Terri is useless as well, basically the abused ex-girlfriend with no self-worth who feels sorry for herself and goes back to JP for no reason whatsoever. She ends up voluntarily becoming a Cenobite. All Pinhead does is basically say “Terri, you suck and everybody tramples all over you. Want to suck less?” and she’s on board. JP is a jackass douche, but he doesn’t get much focus. He’s pretty freaked out by Pinhead, especially when Pinhead skins and absorbs a girl in front of him, and then just sort of goes along with it.

Pinhead as the villain is fun. He does his usual things, making grand pronouncements (and saying his lines in that weird way), but he’s got good presence. Focusing on him is great, and making him the sole villain really works well. The dual nature with Elliot Spencer doesn’t change much, but it lets Doug Bradley walk around without all the make-up on. At one point he pulls some of the pins out of his head, and they’ve got creepy worms wrapped around their ends. He mocks a priest and destroys part of a church. It’s the first time the series has ever brought religion into the mix. Pinhead can also apparently turn people into Cenobites, as he does to a few of his victims. He does look completely stupid encased in the statue though.

The nightclub massacre is both fun and ridiculous. It’s the film’s big moment, and it leads up to it well. First the nightclub decorations start to come to life, then Pinhead appears and all manner of gory nonsense is unleashed. Hooks and chains rip people apart, water turns into icy knives, people are trampled, CDs jam into skulls; it’s just a whole bunch of people getting murdered. It’s mostly fun gore, and there’s nothing truly nasty or uncomfortable to watch here. It’s the first time they’ve ever shown Pinhead as a truly terrifying and destructive force. For the most part in earlier movies (and later) he might kill one person tops, but here he massacres a lot of folks. He still does a lot of it in his trademark way, by summoning hooks and chains from seemingly nowhere. He’s not exactly hands-on as a killer. Pinhead is looking good, and he’s actually bit more menacing without his posse of Ceonobite buddies around him. Continuing from the ‘Cenobites were people’ thing from Hellbound, they go into who he was, Elliot Spencer. I still don’t quite get the significance of Pinhead getting his humanity back – the guy is a demon, I don’t think it would change his torturing ways. And it’s not like it changed anything really – at the end Spencer merges with Pinhead but he’s still evil Pinhead. It doesn’t actually stop him either, as Joey still has to stab him in the chest with a transforming puzzle box to send him back to hell.

The new Cenobites are so dumb looking it’s hilarious. They’re more like cyborgs than Cenobites (some even make robot noises). They’re all people we see as humans – mostly nightclub staff, but JC and Terri both become Cenobites as well. There are three in particular that are amazing in how silly they are. One is the transformed DJ – he’s got CDs lodged in his head and he shoots them out as deadly spinning discs. Another is a transformed bartender who throws cocktail shakers like grenades and can breathe fire. The third is a cameraman with a telescopic cyborg eye that can stab through people’s heads. They’re all so absurdly stupid it’s amazing. They stalk Joey through the city streets, slaughtering a few people who get in the way and killing the police when they show up. Terri just has an open throat which she uses to some cigarettes – it’s not particularly imaginative. Sex-obsessed JP has two pistons pounding in his skull which looks completely silly.

With the switch to America, there were some other changes. It’s a more straightforward film and has a different level of technical polish than the more homegrown roots of the first and looser, rougher feel of the second. Heavy metal rock band Motorhead recorded two songs for it, one titled ‘Hell on Earth’, and another being a cover version of Black Sabbath’s ‘Hellraiser’, meaning the soundtrack contains songs named after the film’s title and subtitle. I just want to quickly note that the first Hellraiser movie predates the original song Hellraiser by a few years. All in all, Hell on Earth is a fun little horror movie. It’s probably the most easy to get into of the Hellraiser movies, despite its call backs to the first two, and it’s the only real one where Pinhead gets to be the villain.

The ending is strange. With Pinhead defeated and sent back to hell, Joey drops the puzzle box into wet cement on a construction site. Time passes and on the spot is now a large business building, the inside of which is patterned and designed the same way as the puzzle box. I have no idea what this is meant to mean in terms of an ending. Did the puzzle box influence the interior design? Is it meant to suggest that the puzzle box in the foundation has turned the building into a giant puzzle box? Is the business an evil corporation of Cenobite worshippers? Or does it ultimately not mean much at all? Find out next time!