| Hellraiser II: Hellbound Released: 1988 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Demonic/Occult Nuts and Bolts: Kirsty Cotton finds herself a patient at the Channard Institute. But the good doctor is a bit more than he appears to be. Channard is an aficionado of Cenobite lore and has discovered the means to resurrect Kirsty’s wicked stepmother Julia! Summary: We begin with a flashback to World War I. Somewhere in Europe, British soldier Captain Elliot Spencer discovers one of the puzzle boxes of Leviathan. Taking it to a strange temple he performs the ritual required to solve the box’s riddle. The doorway to Hell is opened and a barrage of razor edged chains burst forward latching themselves into Spencer’s flesh. His body is pulled into the dimensional labyrinth where he meets the Engineer. From this point on Spencer’s body is transformed into the Cenobite informally known as Pinhead. So now we flash forward to the year 1988. We find Kirsty Cotton recuperating from her recent trauma (From the first Hellraiser) inside of a patient’s room at the Channard Institute. Kirsty awakens to find a police detective named Ronson sitting in her room. He has already interviewed Steve and now wishes to get Kirsty’s side of the story. Kirsty relays everything from the first movie. (I’m not explaining it all here. Just read the bloody review already!) Anyway, Ronson naturally doesn’t believe a fucking word that she says. Now while all of this is going on, police officers Cortez and Kucich are at the Cotton house perusing the remains of Julia’s victims. Kucich gets spooked and shoots the shit out of one of the maggot-filled corpses. They also find the bloody mattress that Julia died on. They radio Ronson at the institute who orders them to send the mattress down to the station. The head of the institute Doctor Channard and his chief aide Kyle MacRae visit Kirsty. Kirsty warns Channard that the mattress that Julia died on must be destroyed. Channard humors her apparent mania and conducts a brief interview. He abruptly leaves and instructs Kirsty to get some sleep. Kirsty has a bizarre dream wherein she thinks she sees her father’s skinless body lying prone in the corner of her hospital room. The gruesome figure writes the words, “I am in Hell. Help Me!” in blood on the wall. Kirsty awakens with a start and leaves the room. In the room next to hers she finds a young girl named Tiffany. Tiffany is autistic and has spoken a word in the six months since she was admitted to the institute. She spends all day putting together various puzzles. Kyle comes along and tries to get Kirsty to go back to her room. She warns him of the dangers of Julia’s mattress and claims that her father is trapped in Hell and that he is suffering. (No, this bitch isn’t TOO whacked out is she?) Anyway, Kyle dismisses Kirsty’s ramblings and proceeds down the hall. He is about to enter Channard’s office when he overhears the doctor talking to someone on the telephone. Channard instructs someone to bring the blood-soaked mattress to his house. Kyle finds this to be beaucoup strange and decides to drive down to the doctor’s house to see what is up. Channard goes down to a sublevel of the hospital and hand picks a crackpot named Browning. Browning is a ‘special’ case, as he believes that maggots are crawling all throughout his skin. Doc takes him out of the hospital and brings him home. But before the Doc arrives, Kyle is snooping around his house looking to get into shit. He finds a study containing three different puzzle boxes under glass. He also has a bunch of files and maps and dissertations pertaining to the mythology of what is commonly known as the Lament Configuration. He also finds the blood stained mattress settled into the center of the floor. Now before he can inquire any further, he hears the Doc returning home. Kyle quickly hides behind a floor-length curtain and listens to what transpires. Channard brings the whacko Browning into the study. He sets him before the mattress and asks him if he would like him to help take the pain away. The guy thinks he has maggots crawling all over him! Of COURSE he wants you to help take the pain away! Doc hands Browning a straight razor and the sicko goes to town slicing himself up in an effort to get the illusory maggots off of his body. He’s bleeding all over the goddamned place and the blood is enough to prompt a reaction from the mattress. Two red glistening hands burst from the mattress and latch on to Browning. A bald skinless face rises next to it and we realize now that Julia Cotton is being reborn. She propels herself fully from the box spring and crawls after Browning. She eventually catches him and chows down on his medulla oblongata. Channard is completely turned on by this and invites the bloody bitch into the other room for a drink. As the two exit stage left, Kyle takes the opportunity to escape. He races back to the institute and tells Kirsty about everything that he had seen. Kirsty is horrified at the notion of Julia being alive again and tells Kyle that she is going there to finish her off. Throughout the course of the day, Doc brings Julia over a dozen victims to dine on. One by one she slurps them down and with each death her body begins to regenerate to its former appearance. She is almost completely back to normal save for a section of exposed spine. Kyle and Kirsty break into the house. Kirsty heads straight to the study where she finds all of the maps and boxes and such. She also finds an old photograph of Captain Elliot Spencer. She realizes that Spencer is also the Cenobite known as Pinhead. Now while she’s having a Kodak moment, Kyle is wandering around the rest of the house. He comes upon Julia but doesn’t realize that this is the same woman he saw earlier. Julia shows him the people that she had tortured. She eventually embraces Kyle and begins kissing him. From here she is able to slurp his life force in order to regenerate that batch of exposed bone on her back. Kyle falls over a dry withered husk. As Julia turns around, she finds that Kirsty has entered the room. They trade some witty banter before the older woman finally backhands Kirsty across the carpet. Now while all this had been going on, Doctor Channard had gone back to the hospital to get Tiffany (As much traveling back and forth as these clowns do its amazing that they never passed each other on the road). Doc guides Tiffany into the study and gives her one of the puzzle boxes. It only takes the little retard a few minutes to solve the configuration and once again, the doors to Hell are laid open. But rather than the Cenobites coming out, the characters are actually thrust IN to the Hell gate. They now enter a domain, which is known as the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth is a series of multi-tiered passageways that run in a pattern similar to that of the Lament configuration itself. Kirsty races around trying to find her father while the others spend time exploring. She comes upon the Cenobites who are only too eager to fuck with her. They’re still pretty pissed that she banished them the last time around. Kirsty tries to do the same trick again, but Pinhead takes the puzzle box from her and transforms it into a diamond shaped relic. Apparently this shape is similar to that of the Cenobite dark god Leviathan and will keep everyone trapped inside of Hell. Meanwhile, Julia takes Channard to the center of the Labyrinth. There we see the immense diamond shaped form of Leviathan stretched out across the horizon. Channard is suitably impressed. That is until a larger version of the Lament configuration wraps around him. One of Hell’s engineers goes to work on him transforming Channard into a brand new freshly squeezed Cenobite. To make matters worse, a tentacle from some nether-demon rises up and attaches the end of its proboscis into the top of Channard’s skull. Channard guides the tentacle and allows it to pull him around like a great big puppet string. Now while this is going on, Kirsty has eluded the capture of the Cenobites. As she is racing around Hell she comes to a door that looks strikingly similar to the front door of her home. Upon entering she realizes that this is the personal hell reserved for her uncle Frank. Frank appears and confesses that it was he who left the message in Kirsty’s dreams. Kirsty is frustrated (and probably embarrassed) by the fact that her father is nowhere to be found. Enraged, Kirsty starts a fire, which burns off all of Frank’s skin. Now he’s back to looking the same way he did throughout the bulk of the first movie. Julia comes upon the scene and Frank tries to rekindle his old relationship. But Julia recalls that it was he that killed her in the first place. Julia rips Frank’s heart from his chest killing him for good. Kirsty runs out of the room. She eventually comes upon Tiffany and together they race around the Labyrinth. Kirsty unwittingly drops the diamond box. Julia finds the diamond and tries to use it against Kirsty and Tiffany. But a huge crack opens up and a tremendous wind is summoned. Everyone struggles to hold on to something but Julia’s skin is torn from her body. Her skinless body is drawn into the winds of Oblivion. The winds die down just enough for Kirsty and Tiffany to continue. They eventually find a doorway back into the hospital, but Channard follows them. He’s killing patients left and right and cracking out some real groaners while doing it. The two girls are left with no choice but to venture back into the Labyrinth. As soon as they do so, they come upon the other Cenobites. Pinhead is all ready to rip her a new one but Kirsty wants to show him something. Pinny is reluctant to entertain this but concedes regardless. Kirsty shows him the photo of Elliot Spencer. Pinhead pauses in killing Kirsty as he is assailed by memories of his mortal life. This is probably a big no-no as far as the laws of Hell are concerned because Leviathan then sends the Doctor to take care of the Cenobites. Channard enters the room and releases a series of bladed steel serpents from the palms of his hands. They strike each of the Cenobites in the chest killing them. As they die their bodies transform back into their human forms. As the Doc is gloating over his victory, Kirsty and Tiffany make a break for it. They find Julia’s old skin, which is still holding on to the diamond box. Tiffany takes the box and tries to reverse the configuration. Kirsty meanwhile has to distract Channard by dressing up in Julia’s old skin. (Ewwww.) Tiffany finally solves the puzzle and Leviathan is pretty pissed off right about now. Feeling that Channard has failed in his duties it orders the tentacle thing to detach itself from the Cenobite’s body. Upon doing so however, it succeeds in ripping off half of Channard’s head. Kirsty and Tiffany race out of the Labyrinth before the door closes for good. There’s also a weird little epilogue. Two movers rummage through Channard’s house getting rid of all the remaining artifacts. One mover, (who is also the mover from the first movie) gets pulled into the mattress. As the other mover watches in horror, the Pillar of Souls rises forward. Attached to it are the physical remains of the Cenobites as well as the puzzle box guardian. The guardian’s face smiles as he says, “What’s your pleasure sir?” Acting/Dialogue: The acting is all well done here, but it lacks a bit of the zest that the characters had in the first film. For some reason Ashley Laurence seems to go to great lengths to impersonate Heather Langencamp of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. As I’m watching her race around the Labyrinth screaming for Tiffany I can’t help but think that I’m watching Nancy Thompson. Doug Bradley is back again as Pinhead and boasts some of the coolest fucking dialogue to be found in any Hellraiser flick. We even get a neat little cameo by Sean Chapman reprising his role of Frank Cotton. Sean does a commanding job once again of playing a loathsome bully, but for some reason his character didn’t really seem to fit right in this film. Clare Higgins nails the part of Julia once again. Whereas before she played the character with a bit more humanity and compassion, now she plays her as she needs to be portrayed; a power hungry hell slut with an axe to grind. There is no semblance of humanity left in Julia and Higgins portrays her as the classical movie villainess. But the Crème-de-la-crème comes from the actor who played the part of Browning. It must be difficult to play a full bore whack-a-loon and not look silly. This guy pulls it off like a champ though. Gore: Now what kind of a Hellraiser movie would we have here without copious amounts of blood-n-guts eh? This one is even nastier than the first as now we get to see TWO different people transformed into Cenobites. We also have skinless Julia running around as well as freakshow with the straight razor. The death of Channard is pretty fucking grisly as well. Guilty Pleasures: When it comes to nudity, you don’t get much more naked than a person who doesn’t have any skin can you? Be that as it may, the skinless Julia was designed more to horrify than arouse. (Or at least…I HOPE it was.) We also get to see one of Julia’s victims shaking her tits in fear of being slaughtered. The Good: Tony Randel takes the directorial chair in this one. He does a fairly adequate job of maintaining the Barker style with this flick and succeeds in keeping all of the lights and shadows in proper perspective. The mood is very solid and flows well from one film to the next. As any true sequel demands, Hellraiser II proves to be even MORE epic and grandiose because we actually get to see inside of the Hell dimension. I like the expanded mythology and writer Peter Atkins gives us just enough to keep our interest, but he doesn’t explain off every single little detail. I like the concept of Leviathan. Rather than a big Satanic looking goat-devil, the dark god of Hell is nothing more than a large black and gold diamond roughly the size of Texas. The end product is a paternal interpretation of the puzzle box and as such it is beyond mortal perception as well as comprehension. This interpretation of Leviathan adds an heir of majesty to the mythos and even suggests a sense of cold indifference to the world of man. I also like the metaphor of the Labyrinth. Early on in the flick, Doctor Channard goes on this heady Hannibal Lechter style diatribe about the Labyrinth of the mind. Since the mind is the world’s greatest puzzle it only makes sense that an alien dimension based off of human emotion should be just as perplexing. Within the labyrinth we come to find each supplicant’s personal Hell. Even Tiffany falls victim to this as she watches images of her mother as one of Channard’s mental patients. I also liked the humanization of Pinhead. It’s cool to see Elliot Spencer’s last moments on Earth as a human being before being infused with the essence of a blue-faced demon from Hell. Again, Randel gives us just enough background here to pique our curiosity without divulging a full character background. Keep the mystery alive, I say! I’m on the fence when it comes to the Channard Cenobite. He looks cool as hell, but I could have done without that big dick that swings him around. He reminds me a little too much of Baron Harkonnan from Dune. Barring that, he keeps a lot of pathos to the character. I probably would’ve ended up liking him more than Pinhead if it weren’t for those cheesy Freddy Krueger inspired one-liners. I’ll give credit where credit is do in regards to the Kyle character. I thought they were going to go the Hollywood route with him and make him Kirsty’s token boy toy. Remember Steve from the first film? No? That’s probably because he didn’t do anything except offend fashion designers. Well luckily Kyle turns out to be slightly less useless than Steve. Through him we at least pave the way to intro the character of Tiffany as well as provide a vehicle (figuratively and literally) by which Kirsty leaves the institute. The good thing is, Tony Randel realized when it was time to cut the umbilical with this clown. He gets rid of him in the first act by way of Julia. His death is awesome because at the last moment he realizes that the beautiful woman standing before him is actually the bloody flipper girl that he saw earlier. The Bad: This is a pretty cool fucking flick, but I also have a lot of problems with it. My biggest complaint is the lack of structural continuity. Did Randel and Atkins even WATCH the first Hellraiser? HELLO! They BURNED down the fucking house! How in hell can you have Ronson’s men traipsing around the place after its been burned to the fucking ground! I guess in retrospect we are supposed to ignore the fact that the burning picture of Frank Cotton in Hellraiser I was supposed to be symbolic of the home burning down. I guess that was just some barren wasteland with burning furniture that Steve and Kirsty were visiting. Well if nothing else, it helps to answer some pretty mind-boggling questions that I had over in the Hellraiser review. My second biggest complaint: The Cenobites went down like PUNKS! What the fuck was this supposed to be? I understand that Pinhead is wrestling with the memories of his human host body but come on! It’s not like this guy really IS Pinhead. He’s a mortal shell fueled by a demonic essence. Pinhead wouldn’t give a CRAP about Elliot Spencer’s photograph! Not only that, but Channard seems to possess the ability to de-cenobite a Cenobite. Layer by layer he strips Pinhead down to his bare components. And what’s more, he even grew the guy’s HAIR back for him! Well that was pretty nice of him. And the other Cenobites were about as useless as tits on a bull as well. They didn’t do shit. They just stood there looking demonic while Channard ran them through. The only one that would be a logical victim would be Butterball and that’s because he’s got those thick ass glasses on. He probably didn’t even see the projectiles coming. If the fat fuck quit fingering his belly button for two good God damned minutes he might of thought to at least bob or weave in an effort to avoid the projectile. And lets face it; Butterball is probably not the most agile fellow in the world. Laziness is what prevented HIM from dodging out of the way. The Channard Cenobite was something of a let down as well. Like I said before, he would have been really fucking cool if it weren’t for the one-liners. When the Channard Cenobite first enters the hospital he says, “The doctor is in.” Later on he says “Doctor’s orders.” I’m surprised he didn’t belt out a “Take two of these and call me in the morning” nyuk nyuk; Or maybe one of those “Apple a day” lines. I’m sure that would have worked well. (If this were a Joel Schumacher film, I’m reasonably certain that all of the above dialogue would have definitely made it into the movie.) I don’t even need to look at the liner notes to tell that this flick came out in the late 80s. At this point in time, Freddy Krueger was really hot and all the trend chasers wanted to latch on to the Nightmare vibe. Just another shining example of when good villains go bad. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that a Leatherface stand-up video is being primed and ready for an HBO Special even as we speak. And don’t think for a second that this trend ends with Hellbound. It takes a deadly turn for the ultra-cheesy when PINHEAD becomes a punch line spouting stooge in Hellraiser III! To be honest, I’m surprised he’s not surrounded by all new Cenobites, Moe Larry and Curly. (I’ll reluctantly submit a review for that shit-pickle in the near future.) Hellraiser II is an adequate sequel and it will hit you right in the horror g-spot. But just don’t spend too much time over-analyzing it. Theme and drama take a backseat here to style and grit. Great Lines: “Trick us again, and your suffering will be legendary even in Hell.” --Pinhead talking to Kirsty. “It is not hands that summon us…but desire.” --Pinhead realizing that Tiffany is not the one who summoned the Cenobites. “And to think…I hesitated.” --Channard’s only cool line of dialogue. He says this immediately after emerging from the conversion chamber. “We have all eternity to know your flesh.” --Pinhead taunting Kirsty “I’m not only the wicked step-mother, now I’m the evil queen.” --Julia antagonizing Kirsty. “Oh shit.” --Tiffany’s first words in the whole movie. What a way to start the day. “My father is dead and he’s alone and he’s still suffering!” --Kirsty breaking down in front of Kyle. Overall Rating: 7 out of 10 severed heads. |
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