I used to maintain a LiveJournal and a different Blogger page called Blog'D; I also used to write for a geek culture website. This was a posting from 09/22/05.
I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I keep going back, no matter how bad it gets, hoping, HOPING that my faith will be rewarded. It’s not like it’s always been like this. There was a time when I didn’t feel wasted and used afterward.
You know, before watching Hellraiser: Bloodline, that is.
I first saw Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II back-to-back in my teenage years, and even though my love of monster movies was firmly planted in my gray matter back in grade school, my exposure to and experience with the genre really didn’t involve much more than what I was able to pick up from library books and whatever I could sneak in via television (catching the face-tearing scene from Poltergeist on Showtime in the middle of a parent-less afternoon burned quite an image in my young mind). In high school, though, two things happened: 1) I was no longer hassled by “the man” about watching R-rated movies, and 2) I had my own wheels, which meant I could get to a movie theater or video store on my own power and schedule.
So one night, my friend Scott and I headed to the soon-to-be-absorbed-by-the-Blockbuster-empire local video store and picked up the first two Hellraiser flicks. Even though I was developing a fierce love of horror films, my friends weren’t into it as much as I was, which meant my friends humored me a lot of the time when it came to watching movies; part of breaking one of childhood’s taboos - watching an R-rated movie - made watching Hellraiser an easier pill to swallow for Scott, I’m guessing.
Even though I hadn’t really grasped the enormity of what I had seen, I was blown away by the movies. Even now, I can’t look back and adequately describe my feelings, but I can definitely say that my then view of horror movies was torn wide open by those two films.
It’s kind of sad the direction the sequels went, isn’t it?
I was a paying customer for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, and I remember that I was one of just a few customers in the movie theater. It was a little sad (the turn out) and, well, a little sad (the movie itself). In no way did it compare to the previous two films. Was it because it was too Americanized? (The first two installments had been decidedly British productions.) Was it because it was too studio-ized? (Is that even a word?) Clive Barker wasn’t as involved in its production; could that have been it? Whatever the reason, it just felt . . . lesser. The slasher-film motif is really not something that the Hellraiser franchise was built for, or around, and turning Pinhead (even though the audience knew Doug Bradley’s cenobite character by name by now, Hellraiser III was the first film in which he was actually CALLED Pinhead by another character in the film) into a slasher-type character just didn’t work. (Thankfully, Bradley was still able to infuse Pinhead with a bit of class and distinction. Some of the other cenobites, however, ended up delivering lines that would have been more at home in a Freddy Krueger flick.)
Despite it’s widely-reported studio interference and an eventual director credit given to Alan Smithee, I wanted to see Hellraiser: Bloodline theatrically, but I was visiting my grandparents in Arizona during the one weekend the movie played, and taking them along to Hellraiser really didn’t seem like a great idea, so I waited for the video release. I had heard and read about the problems with the production, but I was intrigued by some of the concepts teased in Fangoria magazine. (I think this was the first of the horror franchises to take the story to outer space - Jason X was years off, and John Carpenter hadn’t yet suggested jettisoning Michael Myers (an idea that was jettisoned itself, but that hasn’t stopped Carpenter from once talking of sending Snake Plissken to space in a potential third Escape From… movie). Leprechaun in Space was also a year away.)
The fourth Hellraiser wasn’t AWFUL, per se, but it definitely wasn’t great. A valid argument could be made stating that the first Hellraiser film was the best, and the quality slowly declines through parts 2, 3 and 4.
And definitely through to Part 5.
Hellraiser: Inferno was the first of the franchise to be treated to a straight-to-video release. It was also the first of the films to have at least felt like it started life as something decidedly non-Hellraiser. Of all the Hellraiser entries, Inferno seems the least invested in the mythos of the films. I can’t confirm that this is actual fact (like it is with Hellraiser: Deader), but Inferno’s script could have started life as a completely different movie that was morphed, forced and changed into a Hellraiser (much like the third Die Hard film started life as a non-John-McClane script called Simon Says that was molded into the Bruce Willis flick it eventually became).
Craig Sheffer gives a solid performance, but his character is so unlikable, it’s hard to really care about the lead’s fate, and by extension, the movie at all. The movie itself isn’t BAD, it just didn’t FEEL like a Hellraiser film. Doug Bradley’s near-absence (which is odd since one of the reasons the studio interfered with the Bloodline so much was the lack of Pinhead through most of the original script) led to Pinhead’s appearance at the end of the movie feeling pinned on.
The sixth installment, Hellraiser: Hellseeker was a bit better. It gave Pinhead a bit more screen time, and it did tap into the previous Hellraiser mythos a bit more. Sort of.
Ashley Laurence returns as Kirsty, sort of. She’s called Kirsty at one point, but no mention is made of what happened to her since the events of the earlier films, which is a bit odd since in the third film, we learn that she was locked up somewhere, mental-institution-style. Apparently, between 1992 and 2002, she got better, got married and ended up with a dirtbag husband. And even though Doug Bradley made mention of Pinhead and Kirsty having some “unfinished business” in various interviews and such, not much is made of this relationship or connection either.
In the end, though, this movie was MUCH better than Hellraiser: Deader. The movie makers haven’t even tried to hide that, as I suspect was the case of Hellraiser: Inferno, Deader started out as a non-Hellraiser film right off the bat. The script was acquired by the powers that be, then sent off to a new writer to be rewritten with the famed puzzle box making a few appearances and Pinhead showing up, mostly near the end. Eh. Boring film. Kari Wuhrer as the lead really was just an annoying journalist throughout the entire piece, and the story of her investigating a strange cult that kills themselves and then come back from death just drug on and on.
The best thing about this movie is the Easter Egg hidden on the DVD - make-up artist Gary Tunnicliffe (who’s been with the franchise since Hell on Earth), directed a fan film called No More Souls in which he himself plays Pinhead in a lonely, barren Hell. Humanity has succeeding in killing itself off, and Pinhead soliloquies about the absence of, well, anything to do. It’s a neat idea, and adequately executed. Makes one wonder what would happen if Tunnicliffe was given a chance to actually direct a Hellraiser feature himself.
Hellraiser: Hellworld was recently released on DVD, and while it’s definitely better than its immediate predecessor, I still found it lacking. The premise was interesting enough: Hellworld is an online role-playing game like ‘Everquest’ or ‘World of Warcraft,’ but is based firmly in the world of Hellraiser. That’s cool; I’d play that, even if the movie starts with the funeral of one of the game’s players who “took things too far.”
Man, Hellworld is just filled with missed opportunities. The movie’s tagline ‘Evil Goes Online’ just lends itself to some sort of web support, but there’s nothing. This is so indicative of these movies in recent years - make the movie, throw it to the market, hope for the best. I only knew of the existence of Hellworld because I read about it in Doug Bradley’s book Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor. No advertising. No pride.
Another missed opportunity? Lance Henriksen. Can you imagine him interacting with Doug Bradley? Yeah, apparently the filmmakers couldn’t either. With the exception of a, “Uh, uh, how do we wrap this up?” ending, these two genre actors share no screentime. (To his credit, Henriksen performs well, good and creepy, and homeboy’s lookin’ good and healthy. I seem to recall seeing him in something recently, and thinking to myself that he wasn’t aging well; I was glad to see otherwise.)
Hellworld was just . . . I can’t even tell you what I thought of it, but I really just don’t know. It was a horror movie, maybe even a Hellraiser movie, but in the end, it just . . . didn’t leave an impression.
I don’t know if there’s a ninth film in the works or not. I have mixed feelings about there even being one. Is it possible for a franchise to break back out of the straight-to-video market? Should Hellraiser even continue? Is it time to give up the box? Hell, the last three films were shot in Romania, so it’s not like their dropping a lot of money on the films now. We know Deader started out as a non-Hellraiser film; Inferno and Hellworld may as well have. Would it be too much to ask for someone to write a script, knowing IN ADVANCE that it’s going to feature elements like Pinhead, like the puzzle box? Clive Barker’s not been directly involved in the franchise for years now, so we can pretty much count him out in terms of breathing new life into the films (although he’s reportedly working on a new story featuring Harry D’Amour - from ‘The Last Illusion’/Lord of Illusions - and Pinhead).
Should the franchise be retired? I don’t think the audience has gone away. I mean, I’m still here, right?
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