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The year was 1987. In 1986, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives debuted and brought life back into the F13 franchise. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III: Dream Warriors came out and fully transformed Freddy from dark and scary into wisecracking.
The slasher film business was booming and the definition of horror had seemingly been changed to "kill lots of teenagers." While I think the F13 and Nightmare franchises kick ass, it's always a problem when a trend starts in the horror film industry.
The horror genre in film is pretty unique and shares a lot in common with the sci-fi genre. It's often very hard for a horror film to a large level of backing in the movie industry since the genre is so risky when it comes to the mainstream.
The result of this is that a very large majority of horror films go to the dreaded direct-to-video market and never get a chance to be seen by a large audience (although sometimes Sci-Fi channel will give a horror film a break and play it at 1 AM, right after they finish showing Mosquito 2, Crocodile Part 5, and Python vs. Boa).
Whenever a studio takes a risk and releases a successful horror film, the other studios don't think "Hey! Let's start releasing horror movies!" they think "Hey! Let's start releasing horror movies JUST LIKE THAT ONE!"
The result is a horror movie trend like the slash movie trend of the 80s and the "hip," self-referential trend of the 90s that Scream started. All these trends end once movie studios drive them into the ground and people stop caring about them, leaving the horror genre to tread water in direct-to-video until another trend comes along.
Today I'll be looking at a franchise that started as one of the most original horror films of the 80s amidst a sea of derivative slash films and ended up in the mediocrity of the direct-to-video universe.
"What's your pleasure, sir?"
After seeing previous movies based off his works turn out to be complete shit, Clive Barker decided to adapt his novella, 'The Hellbound Heart,' himself. It turned out to be a pretty good decision as the end result was a Clive Barker movie that wasn't, you know, complete shit.
Hellraiser is the story of Frank Cotton, who in his boredom of Earthly pleasures seeks to find some other experience beyond his current understanding. This leads him to the Lament Configuration, a puzzle box that opens the door to a whole new world in which there is no border between pleasure and pain.
Unfortunately for him, the experiences he receives weren't exactly what he was going for (you mean people don't like being pulled apart by hooks and chains?) and he wants to escape from this new world and reclaim his old life.
The only way he can break back into our world is by consuming large amounts of blood, and so he recruits his brother's wife whom he had an affair with and has moved into the house where he solved the box. The only one who knows about what's going on and can stop it is Kirsty Cotton, Frank's niece.
"The box. You opened it. We came."
The funny thing is that the Cenobites appear for ten minutes at the most in Hellraiser and aren't even given names in the credits beyond "first cenobite" etc. The fact that these characters were so memorable would later come back to hurt the franchise down the road.
For now, let's just admire how cool and original Hellraiser was at the time. Besides some rather silly looking special effects (it's only 1987 so they can be forgiven) and an ending that seems rather stupid in retrospect (If Clive Barker wants to change the ending of his own story I guess that's okay), Hellraiser is a nearly flawless tale of murder, revenge, and the "lengths a woman will go to for a good fuck" (A title that one of the producers of Hellraiser suggested in jest when the movie was still untitled).
"But please, feel free, explore. We have eternity to know your flesh. "
Whenever a sequel to a movie gets made in under a year, that's usually a good enough reason for red flags to start raising in your mind.
Most movies take years to get through the pre-production process and escape development hell, so when a sequel gets released in a year it means the studio said "Holy shit this movie was a hit! Get a sequel out immediately!"
The problem with this is that it leaves no real time to get a good script ready and whatever script comes first is used because there's no time to delay. The end result of this is usually a horrible movie but Peter Atkins was one of the few screenwriters to deliver an awesome script for a sequel on such a fast track to production.
Hellbound defies the usual path of the sequel - rehashing the original - by trying to be even more ambitious than Hellraiser. As it turns out, it may have been a little too ambitious for the budget and script that it has.
Since Hellraiser was about calling beings from Hell into our world, Hellbound explores the flipside and sends people from our world into Hell. However, Hellbound does fall into the usual sequel pratfall of explaining the origins of certain characters and events from the first movie and thereby removing the unknown factor that made the concepts so cool in the first place.
"And to think...I hesitated. "
Everyone except Dr. Channard, the head of the hospital who has secretly been researching the Lament Configuration for years. He wants nothing more than to explore the outer reaches of sensation and unlock the puzzle of the flesh that only the Cenobites know the answer to.
Using Kirsty's account of what happened to her family and the expert puzzle solving ability of one of his patients, Channard finds a way to open a gateway into hell itself. Kirsty follows Dr. Channard into hell because she believes her father is trapped inside of it.
The rest of the movie deals with Dr. Channard's use of his newfound knowledge and Kirsty's quest to escape from the labyrinth of Hell and reclaim her father's soul. Along the way there's plenty of weird imagery designed to make Hell look creepy and bizarre.
For the most part it works, mainly because this concept of Hell is so far removed from the traditional one. There is no Satan, only Leviathan, the God of order who seeks to destroy all chaos and tame the flesh.
While some of the effects looked awesome back in 1988, it's very hard to get into a movie these days that relies so heavily upon really bad matte paintings.
Like Hellraiser I, Hellbound breaks down as it approaches the conclusion, forsaking events that make sense in place of things that just look cool. Even though it stumbles in a few places, Hellbound is still to be admired for what it tried to accomplish. Hellraiser III, on the other hand, would not be so ambitious.
"This is my body, this is my blood, happy are they who come to my Sabbath"
I have a soft spot for this movie. It's not because of a certain cheese factor in it or anything; it's that it was filmed nearby my house.
Hellraiser III is supposed to take place in New York City but it was filmed in High Point, North Carolina. One of the men in my neighborhood worked on the make-up effects in Hellraiser III and for Halloween that year he used his resources to transform himself into Pinhead and made his garage a nightmarish den of chains and other assorted terrors.
I was only eight years old at the time this occurred, and as my innocent self in my Flash costume went into his garage in pursuit of candy, I instead had the living shit scared out of my by a guy dressed like Pinhead.
I think I exited that garage pretty quickly and wouldn't go back in no matter how much my parents tried to console me. I like the place this movie was filmed at. This is the only thing about the movie I like at all, seeing as it is complete and utter shit.
I don't know why Miramax bought the rights to the Hellraiser franchise. I'm guessing it had to be money, because if they admired something about the previous two movies in the series they sure didn't see fit to include any of the elements that made them great into this one.
They had one thing in mind - turn Pinhead, not Hellraiser, into a franchise. After being defeated in Hellbound, Pinhead was bound to the Pillar of Souls. A stupid nightclub owner buys the pillar from a shop and allows Pinhead to escape its confines and run amok on Earth.
"Hello. I'm one of the most fucking retarded characters in horror movie cinema."
Pinhead, who was in about twenty minutes of the two previous films, is given a starring role and boy is he ever the chatty bitch. I don't see how he ever finds time to kill anybody in between his ten minute monologues about shit no one could possibly care about.
I don't even know what the hell he's supposed to be doing to be quite honest. I'm guessing that he's trying to create hell on Earth like the title says, but all I see him doing is tearing up a nightclub and slowly walking the New York Streets trying to get a puzzle box.
What powers will the puzzle box grant him? Who knows! We just know that he needs it. To get it, he turns innocent bystanders into makeshift Cenobites. To be more specific, he turns them into some of the stupidest monsters to ever be featured in a horror movie.
A guy with a video camera in his head who kills people with its zoom lens! A retard with CDs in his head that kills people by flinging the CDs like a frisbee! A fat bartender who breathes fire! It's a total reject squad and even Pinhead admits it as the movie goes on.
There's no clear clue of what's going on in this movie, why it's going on, and why it needs to be stopped. There's never a bit of urgency to the film and it just doesn't make any fucking sense.
If they were going to just turn Pinhead into a slasher franchise, you'd think they'd at least deliver on some gore. The majority of the gore in this movie takes place during one five minute sequence and that's basically it.
And for the love of God, can we have one Hellraiser movie where a character doesn't say "Go to hell!" to the Cenobites like it's the most original and hilarious thing on Earth?
Even the Cenobites probably don't like the torture of having to hear that line every fucking time they abduct someone. I think Hellraiser III can be summed up entirely by its credits - Hellraiser I and II ended with the haunting Hellraiser theme song. Hellraiser III ended with 80s cock rock.
"Pain has a face. Allow me to show it to you. I am pain."
It's usually a really bad sign for a movie when the director refuses to attach his name to it. After Hellraiser III turned out to be a horrific turd for Miramax they let the franchise cool off for a while before producing Hellraiser: Bloodline, the movie that was supposed to end the Hellraiser legacy.
Bloodline doesn't focus entirely on Pinhead like Hellraiser III did; instead it focuses on the L'Merchant family. Phillip L'Merchant was a toymaker in France who designed the Lament Configuration for a wealthy client, not knowing that it had the power to create a gateway to Hell.
Mortified by what he has created, Phillip designs a way to destroy the box but is killed before he can even attempt its construction. Thus the creation of the box becomes the secret shame of his bloodline throughout the ages.
The movie is essentially made up of three segments - Phillip L'Merchant creating the box, John Merchant in present day trying to destroy the box, and Dr. Paul Merchant in the year 2127, where he has hijacked the space station he designed in order to try and destroy the Lament Configuration.
Director Kevin Yagher disowned this movie due to the cuts that Miramax forced him to make. They also demanded more Pinhead be included in the plot when he's not even a major player in this story. I don't fault Yagher for taking his name off of something that he's not proud of, but I personally think that there's not much to be ashamed of in this movie.
"The Garden of Eden. A garden of flesh."
The movie even attempts to freshen up the Cenobite/demon concept by introducing a new character - Angelique, a princess of Hell who is summoned into the body of a French prostitute. As a resident of an older type of Hell, she uses the power of temptation rather than the threats of pain like the Cenobites. This creates a conflict between her and the new guard of Hell that has come into power since his absence.
The only real problem with Bloodline is that its three acts gradually diminish in quality. The first act that details the creation of the box is fantastic but the middle act feels much less important. The audience has already seen the beginning of the future story arc when the film begins, so the audience already knows that the Merchant in the second act is not going to succeed in his quest.
This reduces the middle act to little more than a way to connect Hellraiser III to Bloodline. The future act is also a disappointment, as the concepts introduced in the earlier parts of the film such as Angelique are completely forgotten and replaced by retarded gore where the Cenobites kill characters whom the audience couldn't possible give a shit about since they only have a screen time of five minutes.
However, I wasn't really surprised since the Hellraiser films always seem to peter out at the climax. If this had ended up being the final chapter in the Hellraiser saga, I for one would not have been let down.
The one little thing that still bugs me about this movie is the total lack of explanation as to why Pinhead is a Cenobite again. After all the chaos he caused in Hellraiser III I doubt that the forces of Hell would be eager to let him return to their ranks. I guess Miramax demanded Pinhead at all cost, plot be damned.
"When you hunt for the Engineer, the Engineer hunts for you."
This is the film where Hellraiser falls into the abyss from which almost no franchise can return - direct-to-video. Once a theatrical franchise is reduced to DTV, you can be pretty sure that it's never going to make it back to theaters.
In Hellraiser's case, that's not entirely a bad thing. When the series was in the theaters, Miramax felt a need to make the movies more mainstream by sticking Pinhead in them when he didn't need to be. Now, freed from mainstream expectations, the Hellraiser series could cater to its fanbase and put Pinhead back into his original role as a background character.
Hellraiser: Inferno shares more in common with Hellraiser I and the old Hellraiser comic series (which was actually very good) in that it's more about exploring the lives of the people who come into contact with the Lament Configuration and the horrific ends that come to them as a result, ends that are much more horrible than just being ripped apart by chains.
"Ah, the eternal refrain of humanity. Pleading ignorance, begging for mercy. 'Please, help me. I don't understand.'"
After opening the box and seeing the cenobites, he awakes in the morning to find yet another homicide and yet another finger. As the day goes on, Thorne tries to piece together the clues and find the child before it's too late. His search leads him to hear of the Engineer, a street figure with no real name whom everyone is afraid of.
With each new murder forcing Thorne to question his sanity, all Thorne has to hold onto is solving the case and finding the true identity of the Engineer. Inferno shares a strikingly similar tone as the Silent Hill games with a main character caught in a world that seems unreal and shapes itself to a person's inner demons.
Since Bloodline ended the main mythology of the series (Pinhead and the Lament Configuration), it's nice to see that the Hellraiser series can get beyond those things and explore other concepts, like Hellbound's definition of Hell. Inferno is good enough to stand next to the original two Hellraiser films and succeeds on its own merits.
On another note, some people mistakenly rip into this film because Bloodline "ended the series," but they never seem to recall that Bloodline was set in the future and Inferno takes place in present day. Pay attention assholes.
My wife just died a few days ago and the police are trying to pin a motive on me. I know, I'll fuck tons of other women!
As movie franchises get longer and longer, each new film in the series seems to have a gimmick to try and get people to watch it. One of the most overused gimmicks in movie franchises is to bring back the hero or heroine of the original film in the series, like that will somehow make the film as good as the original.
This works in some movies, but in horror movies the main character of the films is the bad guy no matter how much the movie makers will try to deny it. Did anyone really give a shit when Jamie Lee Curtis came back to the Halloween franchise?
However, a few talented filmmakers can make the gimmick work. Wes Craven brought back the character of Nancy Thompson (played by Heather Langenkamp) from a Nightmare on Elm Street back in Nightmare 3 and made the film much stronger than it would have been without her. He brought her back again in New Nightmare, although the actress was actually playing herself in that mindwarp of a movie.
When it was announced that Ashley Laurence was reprising her role as Kirsty Kotton in Hellraiser: Hellseeker, I couldn't help feeling that it was going to be another Jamie Lee Curtis situation and not the much preferable Nightmare on Elm Street one. Was I right? No, not exactly. Hellriaser: Hellseeker doesn't suck because of Ashley Laurence, it sucks because it's the same fucking movie as Hellraiser: Inferno.
Oh man, I've totally been waiting for Ashley Laurence to come back to this franchise!
The police are on his back, his best friend is on his back, and women are throwing themselves at him for no reason. All he wants is to see his wife again, but all he's getting is more confusion, headaches, and Cenobite sightings. Anyone who has seen Inferno can figure this entire movie out in three minutes. Hell, anyone who has ever seen a movie before can figure it out in three minutes.
The only reason to keep watching this predictable piece of shit is to see how Kirsty Cotton works into all of it. I'm here to tell you not to bother because it's nothing you want to see. There's absolutely no reason to have Kirsty Cotton in this movie. No mention is made of her previous character history besides "She has a large inheritance from her dead father and Uncle Frank."
She acts in a manner so far removed from Hellraiser I and Hellbound that I doubt the filmmakers even saw those films. It's pretty obvious that this script did not have her character initially and the main female lead was just changed to include her. Either that or the screenwriter is a complete asshole, your choice.
Even the Cenobites aren't entertaining to look at in this installment. It's quite obvious that they were made on the cheap and re-use old Pinhead outfits from the previous sequels. This movie can't even stay consistent for thirty seconds! Pinhead goes from "You can't escape me this time. I only want one thing and that's you" to "Why sure I'll make a deal with you and let you go LOLZ" in under a minute.
While not as insultingly bad as Hellraiser III, Hellseeker deserves almost as much scorn for ruining the main character of the first two Hellraiser films and completely ripping off the previous film (Is it possible for a franchise to rip itself off?). Don't bother hunting through the direct to video section of your movie rental store for this piece of crap.
Kick-ass party!
Hellraiser: Deader (2004)
This film has yet to be released and I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Directed by the same shithead that made Hellseeker, Deader (Pronounced dee-ay-der OOH, FANCY!) is about a spunky journalist (There are only two types of journalists in the movies - spunky and grizzled) who investigates an underground cult that resurrects dead people.
Doesn't sound like a Hellraiser movie? That's because it isn't! Hellraiser is just the latest out of the large number of franchises that take a completely unrelated script and change it to fit their needs. This is always a risky proposition because if the original script was good and the bastardized franchised version sucks, it means we'll never get to see the original script made into a good movie.
Script reviews of the original Deader were very positive, so I guess all I can do is hope they didn't fuck it up too much. It's got Kari Wuhrer in it so there's a one in five chance you'll see some tits at the very least.
You'll do Hellraiser 8 but not Pumpkinhead 2? Fuck you Lance Henriksen!
Here's an indicator to see if a movie has a 99.9% chance of totally sucking ass: the word "internet" is mentioned anywhere in the plot outline. Filmed by the SAME director as Hellseeker and Deader (Deader and Hellworld were filmed back to back), Hellworld takes place in our world and is about a mysterious Hellraiser fansite that supposedly summons the Cenobites for real!
Not only does this film resurrect the fucking putrid "hip self-referential" genre of horror films that died out a few years ago, but it also involves the internet. One only needs to look at Feardotcom and Halloween - Resurrection to see how awesome horror movies that involve the internet are.
The "real world horror villain" concept of New Nightmare just barely worked because Wes Craven is a talented director. After seeing Hellseeker, I know for a fact that the man behind Hellworld is anything but talented.
We've already had Pinhead in space (Which defied all odds by being good) and now we have internet Pinhead. Hellraiser: In The Hood must surely be next. I can't wait to hear the Cenobite rap at the end!
When I said I was glad that direct to video allowed the Hellraiser franchise to explore other areas of the concept, I meant ones that didn't completely fucking suck, like THE INTERNET. The Internet is scary enough because it's full of so much stupidity (this article included).
We don't need people trying to make it scary by trotting out a bunch of "OMG Killer website!" movies. Perhaps this will be the one that finally ends the franchise once and for all, but if Hollywood has taught us anything it's that no franchise, no matter how old and busted, is ever truly dead if another dollar can be squeezed out of it.
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