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Through the Gates of Hellraiser
(2000 - 2005)
Reviewed By Fistula
Genre: Four Short Reviews For Four Direct-To-Video Shitstorms Of Pain
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” – Dante Alighieri
Yea, brothers and sisters! The Lord speaketh and he speaketh that Hell is among us on this most unholiest of days. But seriously, folks, this day stands to me as proof that Hell is already here, not just on this day but for several years now. What makes me think so? Ask yourself, horror movie lover, what did you do with your day of three sixes? If you said “I saw/am going to see The Omen remake,” and you’re not appalled by the prospect of yet another pointless fucking Hollywood remake being thrust upon a brain-dead and comatose America that no longer has the mental capacity to say no to shitty cinema, then I think it’s obvious that you’ve been stewing in Hell so long you don’t even realize it. Yes, you’ve been looking forward to another by-the-numbers horror remake…
RECIPE FOR BIG-BUDGET HOLLYWOOD HORROR REMAKE:
1) Repackage the exciting parts of original movie wholesale.
2) Sprinkle beautiful, preferably talentless, actors and CGI effects over the rest.
3) Add dumb double-twist ending, preferably one that leaves open possibility for “reimagined” franchise.
4) Boil in Michael Bay’s cock-snot for nine months, garnish with $90 million.
5) Then, serve to guests by pouring shitty movie over their heads and laughing as you wave their money in front of their faces and rape their kittens.
… for months and you probably paid $8 to get in and see the stars of Scream 2 and Save the Last Dance pretend to be Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. You poor dumb bastard, you could use a few laps in a lake of fire to think about what you’ve been doing with your life.
Seeing as how Hell is here and we just need to accept it, I thought I’d get up close and personal with Hell for this week’s review. But what is Hell? Let’s look at a few defining characteristics:
1) Hell is hot. You may not have even realized it, but the season we call summer was not always the hottest one weather-wise. Rather, the heat of summer is a byproduct of hellfire and brimstone bubbling up from Hell that comes from the annual parade of obscenely terrible movies that get crapped out for summer blockbuster season. Secretly, environmental specialists blame global warming on the rise of Jerry Bruckheimer.
2) Hell is painful. So painful that it makes watching a full season of “Friends” seem like an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” marathon.
3) Hell is relentless in its torment. Suffice it to say, there are no 15-minute breaks in Hell. Hell is in your face all the time, grimacing and stabbing like the awesome suckiness of The Fast and The Furious, or 2 Fast 2 Furious, or 3 Fast 3 Furious: 2 Fucking Dumb 4 Words.
4) I think the most underrated part of Hell is an insidious, taunting nature. Let’s face it, swimming in fire and sucking off the Devil is twice as nasty when you remember all the good things about your pre-Hell stint. Your special lady, your pet bunnies, football season, Pearl Jam, H.G. Lewis, Hell makes damn sure that you remember them but you cannot experience them.
And what movie, or movie franchise, captures all these characteristics of Hell in just one sit-down? Direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels! Come on people, if you’ve seen these steamers you know exactly what I’m talking about. Somehow, those bastard Weinsteins and their minions managed to create four terrible, direct-from-Hell movies that leave the viewer feeling like they got Hot Karl from Beelzebub himself that, at the same time, taunts you with how cool the series used to be. And since this day only comes about once every 1,000 years, I thought I’d put my head down and trudge through Hell itself by watching all four of them in one sit-down! Go on, I fucking dare you to say you’ve had a more torturous moviewatching experience. Anybody? I didn’t think so.
Fortunately for my flesh but unfortunately for this review, I myself cannot say that I’ve done this, as Hellraiser: Deader was rented and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive city-to-city looking for one. So, though the experience itself wasn’t as bad is it could have been, the movies certainly are. Put on your hiking boots folks, you’re about to be given a guided tour through movie Hell!
Reviews______________
Hellraiser: Inferno
(2000)
Full Cast & Crew Credits
In 2000, it had been four years since the flawed-but-decent Hellraiser: Bloodline seemingly stuck Pinhead and his cenobite buddies in their coffins for good with a lackluster showing in theaters. Unfortunately for all of us, Hell bubbled up again in the form of star director-to-be Scott Derrickson’s Hellraiser: Inferno, a movie that forcefully and tenaciously breaks every good rule of filmmaking and showers you with urine every minute it’s in your DVD player. Derrickson, who earlier that year had declared his contempt for the world by writing Urban Legends: Final Cut, kept his momentum going when he directed and wrote one of the worst all-time horror movies and destroyed the Hellraiser series beyond repair.
Inferno is tragically concerned with the life and times of one Detective Joseph Thorne. Thorne, played by beefy-lipped Craig Sheffer, shines through as the most loathsome, despicable protagonist that any movie ever asked you to feel sympathy for. Frankly, I’m offended that a movie would even ask me to care about such a prick. Over the course of the movie, Thorne’s laundry list of detestable acts includes a couple hits of cocaine, sleeping with a hooker while his wife and daughter are miserable without him at home, framing his partner for a cenobite murder, abandoning his parents in a nursing home and generally being an insufferable asshole for 95 minutes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand damn times, STOP MAKING MOVIES WITH LOATHESOME PROTAGONISTS! That should be the first thing taught at film school. I don’t give a good goddamn if you are making the point that this guy is a jerk and deserves the Ebenezer Scrooge treatment, nobody with half a brain wants to watch the exploits of a guy they hate and don’t care what happens to. Apparently somebody somewhere changed the definition of anti-hero to an intolerable prick that deserves to die every second he is on screen.
Not that it’s possible to care, but Thorne finds the Lament Configuration, that little golden puzzle box that once upon a time summoned Pinhead and the cenobites to unleash their own little brand of pain and pleasure on whoever opened it, at a crime scene and opens it after a coked-up round of hooker sex. From there, his world falls apart as the ones around him get murdered by a faceless cenobite with a long black tongue that leaves a child’s finger at each crime scene. The first half of the movie plays out like one of those lame cop dramas on TV nowadays with Thorne and his partner, played poorly by “NYPD Blue” vet Nicholas Turturro, hunt for an infamous underground killer called The Engineer. Eventually, the movie spirals right down the toilet as it becomes apparent that the whole thing has been orchestrated by our own Pinhead, played wonderfully as always by the great Doug Bradley, because Thorne has made the wrong choices in life.
As if the movie wasn’t terrible enough on its own, it has to rewrite the entire Hellraiser mythos by wiping out the whole “pain equals pleasure” aspect that made the first few so wonderful and instead making the cenobites into interdimensional karma police. As great as Bradley is and will always be as Pinhead, he appears in the movie for only 3.25 minutes, doesn’t get a single good line and never does anything remotely evil. He’s like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Add it all up and you’ve got one of the shittiest, most insulting efforts ever. Not even a true Hellraiser movie, watching Inferno is like eating a turd sandwich with hooks and pins in it. As far as Derrickson goes, he still deserves to burn in Hell, even though he somewhat redeemed himself with The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Son of a bitch, he’s rich now and he still gets to live after making this movie. Hell 1, Humanity 0.
Hellraiser: Hellseeker
(2002)
Full Cast & Crew Credits
As awful as Inferno was, it astoundingly turns out to be light years ahead than the next ill-fated installment of the Hellraiser series: Hellseeker. I burn with contempt just typing that word. Hellseeker is a slightly more ambitious yet more painful carbon copy of Inferno and a serial abuser of the most annoying device being flaunted in horror movies today: false scares. Save for the loathsome protagonist, there’s nothing that pisses me off more than a movie that bludgeons its audience with false scare after false scare, all the while grinding the plot to a complete halt. But Hellseeker isn’t content to merely bore its audience for repeated “Oh my God, something terrible is happening to him! This is really the end, oh God! He’s… oh, it was a dream” copouts, it even makes doubly sure its viewers don’t care by focusing on another unbearable asshole of a protagonist, all the while bringing back the moralistic, neutral third-party Pinhead of the last shitty installment!
The star of this suppository of a film is Trevor Gooden, played limply by “Law & Order/Oz” vet Dean Winters. Despite being a total douche with a mindless job right out of Office Space, Trevor has the girls all over him, including Ashley Laurence in her return as Kirsty Cotton, the hero of the first two Hellraiser films. Things first appear to be all sunshine and happiness for the two wedded kids, but Trevor jerks the car off the road and into the river, killing Kirsty. Her body is never found. So much for the grand return of Ashley Laurence to the floundering Hellraiser series. From here, Hellseeker is Jacob’s Ladder deep-friend in bukkake slop as Trevor is gang raped by flashbacks, hallucinations and women that inexplicably want to have sex with him. All the while, Pinhead has something to do with all of it as he appears for a few scattered and ultimately pointless “you’re a bad man and you can’t run away from your past” monologues. I’m not even going to bother running through what happens because it’s all fake and Trevor isn’t even alive after being shot in the head by Kirsty for cheating on her and plotting to kill her for her inheritance from her dad and Uncle Frank – the movie can’t resist but remind you of better Hellraiser movies you could be watching.
The reveal of this movie, while initially interesting after 80 minutes of movie masturbation, makes no sense. At some point in their marriage, Trevor forced Kirsty to open the puzzle box at gunpoint so Pinhead could kill her and he could have her inheritance. Kirsty again bargains with Pinhead, turning over five souls – the sluts Trevor cheated on her with, Trevor’s co-worker who he conspired to kill her with and ultimately Trevor. What doesn’t make any sense is that Pinhead gives a monologue about how he’s been coveting Kirsty’s soul since she escaped him and how he’s going to enjoy tearing her apart. Then he backs down after being offered five souls? First of all, now that Pinhead is no longer bound to the Lament Configuration after joining the karma police, why does he need someone to bring him souls? The rule about him coming only for the person who opens the box and leaving when he has them is obviously no longer being adhered to. Even if you want to pretend really hard that Pinhead is bound to the old rules, it’s hard to get around the fact that Trevor was sold the box by Pinhead in human form in the first place, so again, why does he need help in getting souls when he can exist in the real world in human, not Capt. Elliot Spencer, form to arrange his own slayings. Plus, Pinhead’s identify is still completely undefined after the whole thing about the cenobites being dark angels rather than villains is thrown out, yet he is clearly not the evil force he was in the third and fourth installments.
Sure, make any excuses for this movie that you want, but nothing will change the fact that it is a punishing, dreadful experience that ranks up in the top five of my most despised movies of all time. Why would someone do this to a once powerful and great film franchise? Perhaps Dimension Films’ motivation lies within, as the movie opens with the previously referenced Dante Alighieri quote: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” There you have it folks, Dimensions hates you and wants you to weep for the good times the series had while they torture you with a aggressively-bad movie. Yet, somehow, it’s not hard to find scores of people on the Internet who think these two are some of the best Hellraisers out there. The evidence that Hell has overtaken the Earth continues to stack up. Hell 2, Humanity 0.
Hellraiser: Deader
(2005)
Full Cast & Crew Credits
NOTE: Due to our Tomb deadline, I didn’t get a chance to re-watch Hellraiser: Deader and Hellraiser: Hellworld, the next two sub par installments of the series. But I have suffered through them once before, so what the hell, eh? Read on, won’t you?
After descending to some of the murkiest depths that any movies have ever gone, the series takes a meager step up with Deader, despite its stupid name and the fact that it’s pretty much the same movie as the last two with only a few key changes. The bad news is that, once again, the story revolves around a character – this one a hard-boiled American reporter named Amy Klein – whose world becomes an annoying jumble of hallucinations and surreal imagery after opening that damned puzzle box. The biggest difference is that Klein, played by Kari Wuhrer, isn’t so despicable that you want to see her skull dashed against a rock from the first five minutes of the film on. She’s plenty unappealing as a chain-smoking bitchy reporter, but after what we’ve been through in the last two movies she seems as sweet and pleasant as Teresa Wright in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt… oh, I’m sorry, nobody watches those kinds of movies anymore. Okay, like Jessica Biel’s breasts in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Anyway, Klein is sent to Romania or some European county after seeing a tape in which a girl is murdered and brought back to life by a cult known as the Deaders. As you’d assume, the cult, lead by Winter (Paul Rhys) wants to gain ultimate power by using the puzzle box. That doesn’t sit well with Pinhead and his buddies, though, who make a triumphant appearance in a fairly worthwhile climax and fuck Winter’s world up.
As I pointed out, the fact that Wuhrer doesn’t make you want to beat her brains in is the best thing the movie has going for it, along with the everlastingly cool, though once again tragically underutilized, Pinhead. Some of the imagery is cool too, and the movie doesn’t go too far overboard with the false scares, though it does go right to the brink of pissing a person off. As a whole, I wouldn’t have a problem putting Deader on the same level as Bloodline, though a little below it.
Hellraiser: Hellworld
(2005)
Full Cast & Crew Credits
You’d think that maybe Dimensions pulled its head out of its ass after coming closer to the mark with Deader but you’d be dead wrong. Because while they were filming Deader they were also filming Hellworld, maybe not the worst but easily the most embarrassing of all the Hellraisers, back-to-back. Hellworld, as if it was a living entity and was actively trying to piss us off, takes the same tired format of the last three and makes it even more irritating by inventing an online Hellraiser video game that the kids are into, adding a terrible emo soundtrack and reducing Pinhead to less of a demon and more of a Michael Myers-style slasher. He even uses a meat clever in one scene! Though I’m too bitter to go through the plot, I will say that Lance Henriksen, who doesn’t even mean anything anymore after defacing his legacy countless times since the days of Aliens and Pumpkinhead, throws a party for fans of the video game with a revenge plot in mind for something very stupid. The twist ending is one of the dumbest I’ve ever seen and I won’t even dignify it by spoiling it here.
The best thing – the only good thing – about Hellworld is that it just might have been bad enough to finally kill off this rudderless series for good. It’s really a shame, because Pinhead was and still is a great character and Doug Bradley deserves to make a consistent living off of it the way Robert Englund lives off of Freddy Kruger. By this time, though, Dimensions has completely watered down the Pinhead character to the point where it has nothing to do with what made it so memorable when Clive Barker was manning the pen. Now that Dimensions has been reportedly bought out and Barker apparently and understandably doesn’t want anything to do with the series, a great character hangs in limbo and is in danger of being remembered for its lowest point. And all this while the moviegoing public is shelling out big bucks, the ones they once denied the Hellraiser series back when it was legitimate, to see the great Cotton Weary pretend to by Gregory Peck. To quote the ever-prophetic Pinhead, “Welcome to the worst nightmare of all…reality!” Hell? You’re soaking in it!
FEEDBACK
All materials found within this review are the intellectual properties and opinions of the original writer. The Tomb of Anubis claims no responsibility for the views expressed in this review, but we do lay a copyright claim on it beeyotch, so don't steal from this shit or we'll have to go all Farmer Vincent on your silly asses. © March 5th 2006 and beyond, not to be reproduced in any way without the express written consent of the reviewer and the Tomb of Anubis or pain of a physical and legal nature will follow. Touch not lest ye be touched.
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