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.