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
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