Hellbound: Hellraiser 2

 

Hellbound is a bigger, grosser, nastier movie than the first Hellraiser (which is saying something), throwing up even more strange, horrific imagery. It’s also less coherent and makes less sense, with the decision to go broad with its ideas meaning there’s less consistency and clarity. While the first film was relatively small-scaled and self-contained, Hellbound is bigger, weirder and loosely plotted. It makes sense as to why: the film was rushed into production very shortly after the release and surprise success of the first film, which brought in more money than expected, and was released to cinemas the next year. Clive Barker no longer writes or directs this time: despite writing and directing the first film he didn’t retain the rights to the Hellraiser series, though he stays on in a producing role, and having a bit of influence on it (a lot of aspects have his touch).

Hellraiser 2 is a big, dumb movie full of nonsense. It’s strange, gory, sometimes horrifying and occasionally goofy nonsense, but it’s all weirdly interesting, even when it’s silly. This is a movie that’s almost like a house of horror attraction – you see a lot of stuff thrown around in front of you, and while it isn’t scary it’s still freaky. You can tell that they just threw anything they thought was creepy, disgusting or gruesome up here. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but the constant barrage of imagery and gore is appealing and gives it a horror rollercoaster sort of experience, at the expense of a proper story.

Hellbound attempts to go deeper into the Hellraiser mythos, concerning itself more with the puzzle box, the Cenobites and hell. Story comes second to going into these things. It must be said that going into the specifics and revealing some answers takes the mystique and terror out of a lot of it. Its story is weak and it lacks a good sense of pace. It’s mostly just a smorgasbord of horrific imagery and gore, throwing things at you through its length. It doesn’t have the simple but solid plot of the original, with this movie seeming to just be an excuse to throw as much stuff around and see how far they could go in terms of sex and violence. And they go pretty damn far.

 

At the end of the first Hellraiser, the puzzle box was returned to Morocco where it ended up in the hands of some poor sap. But Hellraiser 2 doesn’t follow up on that, but instead follows Kirsty Cotton in the immediate aftermath of the first film. It does begin with a pretty big and drastic revelation – the Cenobites used to be human. The film begins with Elliot Spencer (Doug Bradley), a Captain in the British Army circa 1920s, unlocking a puzzle box and unleashing hell, which torture and disfigure him, slicing a grid in his head and hammering nails into his skull, turning him into the Cenobite Pinhead.

Kirsty Cotton finds herself in the Channard Institute, a psychiatric hospital, being questioned by police about the gruesome events of the first film. Kirsty’s talk about demons and hell and her insistence that they destroy key evidence – specifically a bloody mattress her stepmother Julia died on - makes them believe she’s having a mental breakdown, and thus she remains there under the care of chief physician Dr Channard. Kirsty, at night, has a vision of a skinless man smearing a bloodied message on the wall “I AM IN HELL. HELP ME”. Believing it’s her father, Kirsty attempts to tell her story Channard, hoping somebody will believe her. Unfortunately she’s told the wrong person.

Underneath his seemingly warm personality, Dr Channard has a dark, sadistic side, using the patients as experimental guinea pigs for torture and surgery. He is secretly obsessed with the Lament Configuration and the Cenobites, having done extensive research on it. He even has a few of the puzzle boxes in his possession, one of which he’s given to mute young patient Tiffany who excels at puzzles. He manages to retrieve the bloody mattress and, a blood sacrifice later, Julia is revived as a skinless corpse. Promising to show him hell, Channard feeds Julia patients until she gets her strength back, and the puzzle box is opened sending the entire hospital to hell where the Cenobites are waiting.

 

Kirsty is back and angrier than ever, which makes sense. Surviving demons and killer stepmothers is one thing, but waking up in a psyche ward with everybody thinking you’re crazy would be pretty frustrating. Once again she’s not really the focus so much; she’s there to be the heroine but the film largely focuses on the other stuff going on. Weirdly they don’t do much with her. She never really tries to escape the hospital, and she does herself no real favours when she’s trying to convince people her zombie uncle and demons were responsible for everything. Besides being the main heroine, she doesn’t have much of a stake this time going around. Sure, trying to prevent Julia and Channard from unleashing hell on earth is a pretty good motive, but for the most part she’s involved just because she happens to be there. Her boyfriend from the first movie is missing, and instead one of the orderlies takes an interest at her, but he ends up getting eaten by Julia. Tiffany is barely worth mentioning. She opens the puzzle box, but remains largely mute and expressionless for most of the movie. She’s there to solve the puzzle box and close it to sort everything out at the end. It ends a bit too cleanly I might add, much the same as in the first film – simply closing the puzzle box seems to be enough to completely shut out hell and stop the villains.

Julia is back from the dead as one of the antagonists. I think it is fine, if a bit too convenient. A complaint I had last time was that she didn’t look particularly sexy, but they’ve managed to change that a bit here, seemingly just by changing her hair and clothes. With long hair and a dress she’s looking much more appealing than the stark evil stepmother from the first film. Of course at first she lacks all of that, being a fleshy meat person for a while. Channard, as a doctor, at least wraps her in bandages (then makes out with her, which is gross). Julia eats a whole lot more people than Frank did in the first film, as Channard feeds her patients he steals from the hospital. She kills enough to completely revive, whereas Frank ended up having to steal his brother’s skin. She’s smarter and more confident here, no longer being used as a pawn but using others (Dr Channard) to get what she wants. She even gets revenge on Frank in hell (a smart call-back – of course he’d be in hell). She gets taken down pretty easily by Kirsty though, who manages to pull her skin off completely (a bit too easily; she just gives it a tug really) and sends her flying into a chasm.

We get something of an ‘ultimate evil’, but it’s a bit underwhelming. Leviathan, the ruler of hell, is a giant rotating crystal lighthouse thing that shoots beams of black light around hell. It’s a bit weird (compared to the fleshy torture of the Cenobites, a giant stone isn’t exactly scary), but it is consistent with the sort of thing Barker does in his books. In a cool little detail if its dark light hits you, you see all the sins of your life. For Dr Channard it’s a flashing series of horrible surgery images suggesting he’s been messed up since childhood. Leviathan then takes Channard and turns him into a Cenobite, who begins to wreak havoc on his hospital, massacring his own patients. It must be said that apart from transforming Channard (and possible controlling him on his rampage) Leviathan doesn’t do much. It just rotates there. When hell is being close at the end it transforms into a puzzle box for some reason, but it’s never particularly malevolent. The stupid upside down monster from the first film was more dangerous than this.

Channard is our villain this time, sort of. As a human he’s got that dark side, but it comes across more as curiosity than actual evil. It’s a bit unclear as to why he’s interested in going to hell, and he seems a bit freaked out by it once he gets there. He’s not much of a negative presence to Kirsty or Tiffany until after he transforms into a Cenobite. Before that point he’s just standing around the hospital. Sure, what he does with his patients is messed up, but he’s not portrayed as sadistic or maniacal or psychotic. Once he becomes a Cenobite that changes, as he becomes this sort of ridiculous murder machine, cackling wildly as he kills everybody he comes across. That seems to be the extent of his intentions. He’s pretty silly and lacks the menace the Cenobites originally had, especially when he’s basically flying around cackling like an idiot.

Pinhead and his Cenobite posse are back (though the actress for the female Cenobite is noticeably different). They still look good, but they’re barely in it again. They’re also not quite villainous, just sort of hanging around. When they start taunting Kirsty it comes across more like bullying from the cool kids gang. Since the film was rushed into production so quickly, they didn’t seem to realise that the Cenobites were probably the most popular thing about the first movie, which would explain why they’re barely here. Pinhead and the other three original Cenobites also go down like chumps. It’s so disappointing and completely ruins their threat and effectiveness (the first film had the same problem), but they all get killed within seconds. They show up to torment Kirsty, who manages to make them remember that they used to be human (pretty much just by yelling “you used to be human”). Then Channard Cenobite shows up and just kills them all in about ten seconds by shooting barbs at them. They don’t even do anything (Pinhead tries his hooks but they don’t work), they just stand there and get killed before reverting back to their human forms (fat guy’s a fat guy, girl’s a girl, chatterer is a little boy though which is weird). The issue here is that the ‘Cenobites were humans’ thing doesn’t have any real impact or meaning (big deal, so what?), and then they just weakly die. What was the point at all? Channard Cenobite also ends up going down like an idiot. His finger tentacles end up getting stuck in the ground and when the giant tentacle attached to his head tries to move him it accidentally rips his head in half.

 

Kirsty finds out that it’s not her father stuck in hell, it’s Frank, which actually makes a lot of logical sense – he is stuck in hell, his fate sealed due to opening the puzzle box (and also all the murder and being a horrible tool in general). He wants to get out of hell, or to just hurt Kirsty. It’s more a call-back to the first film and doesn’t really change much. He’s not particularly threatening this time, especially when Julia turns up and kills him as revenge. It does brings up a question about the mechanics of dying in hell though – do you just come back to get tortured? Frank died twice in the first film and came back both times, so does that mean that Julia, Channard and the Cenobites are just going to come back despite their ‘deaths’? We never get an answer.

In the first film the character’s motivations, actions and decisions all made some sort of sense within the film’s context. This time people do crazy stuff for no real reason. Channard’s plan is unclear, Julia’s intentions are unclear (is it revenge? if she wanted to escape hell, why did she return there? She says she’s working for Leviathan, but what does that even entail?), Leviathan just sort of rotates around (can a giant stone pillar have motivations?) while the Cenobites seem to just hang around and don’t do much – they don’t even seem to know what’s going on in hell. And if Leviathan was controlling Channard then why did it let him kill the other Cenobites? At one point towards the end, Kirsty puts on Julia’s skin and wears it like a suit to fool Channard (kinda like how Frank stole Larry’s skin in the first film). It’s absolutely stupid and makes zero sense whatsoever – how the hell did she slip it on, dress and all? And why does she actually look like Julia and not just like somebody with horribly stretched and torn flesh wrapped around them? It’s a really dumb plan.

It’s much gorier than the first film, with more blood and gore than before and a nastier edge. Some of the violence is hard to watch. The most horrible part is when Julia is revived – Channard brings a psychotic patient to the bloodier mattress Julia died on and gives him a razor blade. The patient, paranoid that bugs are crawling under his skin, then begins to slice himself up. It’s bloody and horrible, cutting between him slicing his flesh and fighting off worms and maggots. It’s really uncomfortable to watch. Other gore is par for the course – people are cut apart, have hooks dug into them, get stabbed by tentacles – it’s all pretty wet and meaty. Some of the effects are poor or laughable though. The scene of Channard’s transformation is funny as silly monster hands wrap wire around his face. Channard himself looks ridiculous, being carried around by a giant monster tentacle attached to his skull. Where the tentacle leads is a mystery, since you never see what it’s attached to, even when Channard ends up indoors (I think it’s meant to be Leviathan maybe?). The weakest special effects are Channard’s ‘fingers’, shown as stop-motion snake-like tentacles with mouths that open to reveal knives, eyeballs and other nonsense (at one point a flower and a beckoning finger). Hellbound was released only a year after the original and it has an odd feeling that they rushed it out to strike while the iron was hot, which might explain some of the cheaper, rushed-feeling special effects.

 

Hell is given a very strange, almost abstract portrayal here, a labyrinth comprised of a lot of winding corridors, staircases and chasms over a stark, empty void-like surrounding. A lot of its architecture is vintage Barker. Then, further in, there’s areas that seem to be made of just generic horror imagery, such as a demonic carnival with a clown juggling his own eyeballs. At times it’s like horrific nightmares. Some of the stuff is pretty weak, while other stuff is pretty freaky. As said, it’s like a horror ride – some stuff works, some doesn’t but it overloads you with a bit of everything. Compared to the large voids and nightmare-logic nonsense, I prefer the demonic abattoir version of hell that appears when the Cenobites are around. I do like how sex fiend Frank’s version of hell is full of women writhing in orgasmic ecstasy that he can’t see or touch. In this respect, and with the Cenobites, the film attempts to offer more explanations to the Hellraiser mythology, but it also just opens up a bunch of questions. There are also apparently a whole lot of puzzle boxes, more than the one that Frank had in the original. The films to this point still haven’t gone into their origins, but Channard didn’t seem to have any difficulty in stockpiling a bunch of them.

Hellbound is interesting to watch to just see all the visual creativity and nonsense. In that respect it’s a fun time, but it lacks the solid, pure nature of the first film. It’s worth watching, if only for the ridiculous sideshow of horror sights and sounds. There aren’t many films like it. The story and characters suffer as a result, but as sheer horror spectacle it’s pretty good, though I prefer the first film. In the end Julia, Channard and the Cenobites are all dead, Leviathan transforms into a puzzle box itself and the gates to hell are closed away as Kirsty and Tiffany escape and survive. Some men investigate Channard’s house sometime later and find the bloodied mattress, one is dragged inside and a horrific torture pillar emerges, with a lot of the gruesome and terrible aspects of hell trapped within, including Pinhead. This is a really weird way to end the movie, but they somehow make it work for its sequel, which marks where the Hellraiser series fell into American hands.