Pranzo Oltranzista
Registered User
- Oct 18, 2017
- 3,981
- 2,900
At last - after many failed attempts - it looks like it's coming. I don't know what to think about David S. Goyer's involvement in this, but I'm very happy with the announced casting of Pinhead (Jamie Clayton from Sense8 - really couldn't have hoped for a better choice).
(not the actual poster)
I went back and watched all the films of the series (only the last one I hadn't seen before). Now please give me some good Hellraiser material and don't **** this up again.
--------------------
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987) – A favorite of mine. Very simple story of a puzzle box serving as a gateway to hell, infused with Clive Barker's unique imagination, complexified by early traces of gender ambiguity and oedipal tension. Hellraiser almost has the tropes of a great ghost/haunting narrative, with the crypt and the family secret, but Barker's tales don't exactly work as classic horror (though this one should be remembered as one of the best body horror films). As it will become (too) obvious in Nightbreed, what is different, unconventional (queer?), is already here portrayed as what is right – or at least what's ordered. Monstrosity is elegant, transgression is noble (as belonging to the limits of experience). The Cenobites exist at those limits, they are not presented as a breach in the mimetic world model, but as something that do exist, that (some) people know about as part of a more exhaustive understanding of our reality – and the pain/pleasure symbiosis they offer as something refined, sought-after by a very specific kind of connoisseurs. In that, these Barker stories fall somewhere between horror and fantasy, something that make them quite unique, but that was wasted with pretty much every sequels in this franchise. Great ideas in order to make a lot with little – the hell corridor, the creature design and effects, the gore, are all very nicely executed. The visual F/X of lightning and spades of lights are, on the other hand, very poor and you would have thought Barker would have stayed away from these cheap tricks after the terrible Rawhead Rex finale (especially knowing he openly hated it). Pace, atmosphere, acting (Ashley Lawrence is particularly good), this film has a pretty unique signature and it all works very well. 8/10
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988) – The intentions were great and ambitious. The execution is often borderline ridiculous – the visual effects are especially atrocious: everything related to the new Cenobite doctor looks like it's been made with Plasticine in poor stop-motion, and the matte painting and props for the labyrinth really didn't age well (plus, in both cases, editing is absolutely terrible – the doctor is framed in disparate/discarnate ways that only underline the whole thing not working (never the whole thing together), and the larger establishing shots of the labyrinth never match the closer shots of characters). Worst of all, the finale with the pillar getting out of the mattress pushes the silliness beyond anything imaginable. Still, makeup, creature effects and everything related to the body horror elements are again – and for one last time – very successful. The film goes too far into its fantasy components, and thus loses its grip as a horror tale, but remains somewhat interesting. For some reason, they felt the need to do a recap of the first film through Kirsty's testimony, making her some kind of omniscient narrator, suddenly knowing stuff she shouldn't have known (causing a weird distanciatory effect). The actors aren't as good as they were in the original, pace is often rushed (feels like they're in a hurry to get to the hell part) – you'd think it's a pretty poor sequel to Hellraiser, but considering what followed, this is a masterpiece. 4/10
Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (Hickox, 1992) – I hate this film. It might not be the worst of the sequels (though it's very very close), but it's the one that ruined everything. By 1992, the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise had run its course through some very popular sequels. It's clear that this is the tone they had in mind doing this, with dream logic, Pinhead getting out of hell and into reality, and the atrocious one-liner humor. It was a bad idea in itself, but doing it with Anthony Hickox at the wheel was just plain dumb. The guy had one great idea with his first film, and then proved time and time again that he wasn't capable of directing a movie, or getting actors to act. What he can do is cameos of himself, and trying to reuse some of that autoreflexive magic that only worked once (and the whole thing looks flat from the get-go: no more sweaty and greasy British actors, just beautiful people from Hollywood – he even makes Doug Bradley a terrible Pinhead). The fantasy elements are lost on Hickox, he makes “funny” monster movies (well, he really only made one and a half that worked), so that's what he tried here too. The new Cenobites certainly are the worst offense in this nauseating sequel: a cameraman with a camera stuck in the head (he was decapitated moments ago, no worry), a DJ throwing CDs, a chain smoker with a cigarette stuck in her throat... There's no mystic surrounding the Cenobites anymore, just random visual jokes and terrible dialogues. 2/10
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Alan Smithee, 1996) – I haven't read the original screenplay, but (short and sparse) parts of this film feel like they understood and maintained the Clive Barker sensibility - a lot more than anything that came with the third entry of the series anyway. Dimension Films weren't happy with Kevin Yagher's cut (Yagher is the makeup artist behind the Crypt Keeper and the Freddy Krueger look we all preferred – he is not a film director), they got involved and he bailed and disavowed the project (they tried to avoid the Smithee tag, presenting him with different cuts as options, but he felt that none of them were close to the movie he wanted to make). It's basically remembered as Pinhead in space, and he got there a lot sooner than Jason, but it's a movie that was supposed to be relatively ambitious, sporting three timelines (past/present/future). Of course, the mess the studio ended up releasing is unwatchable, trying to cut short to anything not involving Pinhead, most of it is rushed through and ultimately pretty boring. The visual effects are terrible too. 1.5/10
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000) – This is one very peculiar film. As it will happen again a few times with this out-of-favor franchise, the film is based on a script that had nothing to do with Cenobites or the Lament configuration, or Hellraiser. Pinhead and stuff were only forced into it, and it never feels like anywhere close to the Barker universe (and no surprise, he hated that film, calling it an opportunistic insult to the franchise – I wonder how he feels about it after seeing what would come next). Still, it's a film that's hard to dislike entirely. After the failure of Bloodline, this one was a direct-to-video production and Derrickson had to work with very limited means, limited actors (talent-wise), repetitive creature effects, etc. Despite a few moments where the result feels TV-movieish, he still manages to create some pretty nice imagery and the film avoids ending up as a flat and uninspired paint-by-numbers production. I guess it was received as a pretty good demonstration of what he was capable of as a director: he got bigger horror projects, and ultimately ended up handling the 165M$ budget of Doctor Strange. It's a very limited film that doesn't work at all as a Hellraiser sequel, but that's still kind of fun. It plays out like a nightmarish moral tale where you're responsible for your fate (with a weird wannabe-film-noir voice over narration), closer in relation to Jacob's Ladder or to a demonic Groundhog Day than to anything Clive Barker ever did. Like the films that follow it in the series, it's a straight-to-video production, but contrarily to them, it still feels like it was done with care. 4/10
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002) – Another entry that's based on a non-Hellraiser script in which Pinhead and stuff were forced. It goes one step further than the previous entry in trying to tie everything up, with the return of the first two movies' heroine, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, who aged splendidly), and allusions to her father's and Uncle Frank's deaths. It even tries to get closer to the pain and pleasure symbiosis (but fails to go beyond timid and corny erotica undertones). Weirdly, it fits a lot more with Hellraiser: Inferno than with the films it tries to stick with. It kind of reads like a variation on Inferno's themes, with the main character's guilt becoming some kind of personal hell – but a final twist brings back Kristy as we've known her, making deals with the demons and making the whole thing pretty absurd and hollow. Otherwise, the film stays close to the previous one, a nightmarish ride blurring reality and hallucinations – the amateurish elements might be a little more persistent, and the cast a little weaker in general, but it's still original enough to be somewhat interesting. It lacks the signature Derrickson managed to maintain through the weaker stuff. Here, Bota is clearly way over his head trying to manage the more complex ambitions of this narrative. Some of the hallucinated stuff is kind of cool (the doctor picking his brain – a nice allusion to part 2 of the series), but in the end of no importance, so kind of false leads if you're trying to read the film. On the other hand, the disastrous introduction sequence, with terrible direction and editing, becomes relevant since this is all fabricated memory – it's obvious that it's still just terrible direction and editing, but saved by the unfolding of the narrative. Like Inferno, it would have fared better as an episode on a Twilight Zone series or something similar. 3/10
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005) – Production wise, these films are getting lower and lower in quality. Rick Bota is back for the second entry in his Hellraiser trilogy (he shot this one and the next back to back), and it's once again based on a script that had originally nothing to do with Pinhead and his box. The acting continues to go downhill (the phony hard edge too cool for school reporter main character is unbearable), the story is just plain dumb, and the visual effects are atrocious (the cgi bugs running on the walls might give you a nice little laugh). Bota managed to do ok with the previous film, but here he really shows how bad of a director he is – spatial construction and editing are often borderline delirious (it's just like Bota is either not giving enough material to the editor to construct the scenes, or the editor is a no-shit-given hack: an insert of a shot taken from later in the scene, a little girl that paints a portrait with a brush with every closeups showing hands with a pencil, etc. - no surprise, same editor as the previous and next ones). Some of it I should have used in my past life where I liked to theorize stuff (that video image saying “I'm not real” before committing suicide would have been handy), but overall it's a pretty bad film – with everything you'd expect from a straight-to-video production (oh that terrible filling music), except Stan Winston's name as main producer... (but why?! At least there's a few cool cenobites – that we only see a minute or so – and lots of blood, but he's not even responsible for any of that). Story-wise, it gets closer in tone and themes to the original films, with desire for the extreme, pushing the limits of experience, but it's all lost in cultish silliness, and well... lust is just lost in the kinky wagon. The guy responsible for forcing the Hellraiser stuff in this script is the same who did it for Hellseeker too (his IMDB page is pretty funny, he's just like the boom operator in Living In Oblivion, he really is a grip and an electrician on movie sets, who turned screenwriter for these Hellraiser projects, and never wrote anything else). 2.5/10
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005) – Hellraiser is a popular and addictive web-based game, and a kid (for some unexplained reason) takes things too far and sets himself on fire “because of the game”. His friends all feel guilty because “they should have seen this coming” (what?! how? why?). The kid's estranged father who hasn't seen him in years and don't even bother showing up at the funeral decides to take revenge on his son's (absolutely innocent) friends and bury them alive while they hallucinate cenobites coming for them. This is the “meta” entry in the Hellraiser franchise, but apart from a scene where the runaway car won't start (cliché) and the bad guy is hiding on the back seat for a scare (cliché) and goes something like: “just like in a bad horror film” - there's pretty much no reflexivity in this (and it's not only super dumb, but not even relevant to the Hellraiser films). Oh yeah, there's a guy wearing a Chatterer mask that could be read as self-reflexive, but really what a waste... This is just meta-crap, the worst of the terrible Bota films (no wonder he disappeared afterwards). It's supposed to be based on a non-Hellraiser short story (of which I can't find any trace), and it's the film that's the further away from the original ones, in tone, style, etc. It's pretty much a teen-horror flick, with juvenile humor and cheesy kink. It's kinda fun to see Henry Cavill before he was Superman, and Khary Payton before he was Ezekiel, both playing super dumb horny kids, but that's the only fun you'll have here. 1.5/10
Hellraiser: Revelations (Garcia, 2011) – IMDB tells me I've seen this film 10 years ago, but I had no memory of it at all. On one hand, it's pretty cool to finally have, after 4 films that were based on other material and forced into Hellraiser films, an original story written for the series. Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who wrote this, has been involved with the franchise since part 3 as a makeup artist. He wrote a few direct-to-trash cheapo movies before, and even directed a family movie – he'll move on and direct the next and last-to-date Hellraiser film too. His script has a lot of the right ideas, but mostly the movie is ruined by atrocious acting and poor execution (I was afraid and a little nauseous when it started as a found footage piece – and a very bad one – but it's just the prologue). Visually, it goes back to some of the classic imagery, and does it pretty well (even though the video production feels amateurish and Doug Bradley is finally replaced as Pinhead, which feels all kinds of wrong, especially since new Pinhead is overacting like the rest of the cast). There's that one terribly cheap effect that really betrays the lack of means and hack-it-yourself production and that might throw off some of the most tolerant viewers (they make it work up to the point where they try to recreate Uncle Frank's return from hell in the original film) – other than that, if you don't mind terribly cheap production, atrocious acting, and a script that often feels like a poor variation on the original story, you've got yourself a Hellraiser film, something that can't really be said of any of the sequels after part 2. 2.5/10
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018) – This one is not only written but also directed by Hellraiser veteran (and mostly makeup artist) Gary J. Tunnicliffe. It starts with Pinhead chit-chatting with a new Cenobite buddy, and soon turns into something like a top-tier student film or a porn signed by Michael Ninn, with just way too much emphasis on aesthetic exuberance (it's often nicely done, but just too much, and it never really feels like it's going anywhere – we're not talking Matthew Barney's level of useless excess, but still overdone). We're far from the Hellraiser tone, but some of its universe's classic visuals is recycled at the end. It's supposed to have been written as an original Hellraiser film, but I somehow doubt that – it feels forced, like parts 5 to 8 did. It's not as cheap as some of these films, it even has some kind of appeal as a dark detective story (something that could have been out of a Clive Barker story, but a lot closer to Harry D'Amour than to Pinhead and crew). The new Cenobite, the nerdy cousin of the Highway to Hell cop, is a pretty cool character, but has nothing to do with the original gang. It has a lot of flaws, and like the previous one could pass for fanfiction, but as a stand-alone piece, considering it was done with just about nothing, it's not complete trash. 3/10
(not the actual poster)
I went back and watched all the films of the series (only the last one I hadn't seen before). Now please give me some good Hellraiser material and don't **** this up again.
--------------------
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987) – A favorite of mine. Very simple story of a puzzle box serving as a gateway to hell, infused with Clive Barker's unique imagination, complexified by early traces of gender ambiguity and oedipal tension. Hellraiser almost has the tropes of a great ghost/haunting narrative, with the crypt and the family secret, but Barker's tales don't exactly work as classic horror (though this one should be remembered as one of the best body horror films). As it will become (too) obvious in Nightbreed, what is different, unconventional (queer?), is already here portrayed as what is right – or at least what's ordered. Monstrosity is elegant, transgression is noble (as belonging to the limits of experience). The Cenobites exist at those limits, they are not presented as a breach in the mimetic world model, but as something that do exist, that (some) people know about as part of a more exhaustive understanding of our reality – and the pain/pleasure symbiosis they offer as something refined, sought-after by a very specific kind of connoisseurs. In that, these Barker stories fall somewhere between horror and fantasy, something that make them quite unique, but that was wasted with pretty much every sequels in this franchise. Great ideas in order to make a lot with little – the hell corridor, the creature design and effects, the gore, are all very nicely executed. The visual F/X of lightning and spades of lights are, on the other hand, very poor and you would have thought Barker would have stayed away from these cheap tricks after the terrible Rawhead Rex finale (especially knowing he openly hated it). Pace, atmosphere, acting (Ashley Lawrence is particularly good), this film has a pretty unique signature and it all works very well. 8/10
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988) – The intentions were great and ambitious. The execution is often borderline ridiculous – the visual effects are especially atrocious: everything related to the new Cenobite doctor looks like it's been made with Plasticine in poor stop-motion, and the matte painting and props for the labyrinth really didn't age well (plus, in both cases, editing is absolutely terrible – the doctor is framed in disparate/discarnate ways that only underline the whole thing not working (never the whole thing together), and the larger establishing shots of the labyrinth never match the closer shots of characters). Worst of all, the finale with the pillar getting out of the mattress pushes the silliness beyond anything imaginable. Still, makeup, creature effects and everything related to the body horror elements are again – and for one last time – very successful. The film goes too far into its fantasy components, and thus loses its grip as a horror tale, but remains somewhat interesting. For some reason, they felt the need to do a recap of the first film through Kirsty's testimony, making her some kind of omniscient narrator, suddenly knowing stuff she shouldn't have known (causing a weird distanciatory effect). The actors aren't as good as they were in the original, pace is often rushed (feels like they're in a hurry to get to the hell part) – you'd think it's a pretty poor sequel to Hellraiser, but considering what followed, this is a masterpiece. 4/10
Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (Hickox, 1992) – I hate this film. It might not be the worst of the sequels (though it's very very close), but it's the one that ruined everything. By 1992, the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise had run its course through some very popular sequels. It's clear that this is the tone they had in mind doing this, with dream logic, Pinhead getting out of hell and into reality, and the atrocious one-liner humor. It was a bad idea in itself, but doing it with Anthony Hickox at the wheel was just plain dumb. The guy had one great idea with his first film, and then proved time and time again that he wasn't capable of directing a movie, or getting actors to act. What he can do is cameos of himself, and trying to reuse some of that autoreflexive magic that only worked once (and the whole thing looks flat from the get-go: no more sweaty and greasy British actors, just beautiful people from Hollywood – he even makes Doug Bradley a terrible Pinhead). The fantasy elements are lost on Hickox, he makes “funny” monster movies (well, he really only made one and a half that worked), so that's what he tried here too. The new Cenobites certainly are the worst offense in this nauseating sequel: a cameraman with a camera stuck in the head (he was decapitated moments ago, no worry), a DJ throwing CDs, a chain smoker with a cigarette stuck in her throat... There's no mystic surrounding the Cenobites anymore, just random visual jokes and terrible dialogues. 2/10
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Alan Smithee, 1996) – I haven't read the original screenplay, but (short and sparse) parts of this film feel like they understood and maintained the Clive Barker sensibility - a lot more than anything that came with the third entry of the series anyway. Dimension Films weren't happy with Kevin Yagher's cut (Yagher is the makeup artist behind the Crypt Keeper and the Freddy Krueger look we all preferred – he is not a film director), they got involved and he bailed and disavowed the project (they tried to avoid the Smithee tag, presenting him with different cuts as options, but he felt that none of them were close to the movie he wanted to make). It's basically remembered as Pinhead in space, and he got there a lot sooner than Jason, but it's a movie that was supposed to be relatively ambitious, sporting three timelines (past/present/future). Of course, the mess the studio ended up releasing is unwatchable, trying to cut short to anything not involving Pinhead, most of it is rushed through and ultimately pretty boring. The visual effects are terrible too. 1.5/10
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000) – This is one very peculiar film. As it will happen again a few times with this out-of-favor franchise, the film is based on a script that had nothing to do with Cenobites or the Lament configuration, or Hellraiser. Pinhead and stuff were only forced into it, and it never feels like anywhere close to the Barker universe (and no surprise, he hated that film, calling it an opportunistic insult to the franchise – I wonder how he feels about it after seeing what would come next). Still, it's a film that's hard to dislike entirely. After the failure of Bloodline, this one was a direct-to-video production and Derrickson had to work with very limited means, limited actors (talent-wise), repetitive creature effects, etc. Despite a few moments where the result feels TV-movieish, he still manages to create some pretty nice imagery and the film avoids ending up as a flat and uninspired paint-by-numbers production. I guess it was received as a pretty good demonstration of what he was capable of as a director: he got bigger horror projects, and ultimately ended up handling the 165M$ budget of Doctor Strange. It's a very limited film that doesn't work at all as a Hellraiser sequel, but that's still kind of fun. It plays out like a nightmarish moral tale where you're responsible for your fate (with a weird wannabe-film-noir voice over narration), closer in relation to Jacob's Ladder or to a demonic Groundhog Day than to anything Clive Barker ever did. Like the films that follow it in the series, it's a straight-to-video production, but contrarily to them, it still feels like it was done with care. 4/10
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002) – Another entry that's based on a non-Hellraiser script in which Pinhead and stuff were forced. It goes one step further than the previous entry in trying to tie everything up, with the return of the first two movies' heroine, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, who aged splendidly), and allusions to her father's and Uncle Frank's deaths. It even tries to get closer to the pain and pleasure symbiosis (but fails to go beyond timid and corny erotica undertones). Weirdly, it fits a lot more with Hellraiser: Inferno than with the films it tries to stick with. It kind of reads like a variation on Inferno's themes, with the main character's guilt becoming some kind of personal hell – but a final twist brings back Kristy as we've known her, making deals with the demons and making the whole thing pretty absurd and hollow. Otherwise, the film stays close to the previous one, a nightmarish ride blurring reality and hallucinations – the amateurish elements might be a little more persistent, and the cast a little weaker in general, but it's still original enough to be somewhat interesting. It lacks the signature Derrickson managed to maintain through the weaker stuff. Here, Bota is clearly way over his head trying to manage the more complex ambitions of this narrative. Some of the hallucinated stuff is kind of cool (the doctor picking his brain – a nice allusion to part 2 of the series), but in the end of no importance, so kind of false leads if you're trying to read the film. On the other hand, the disastrous introduction sequence, with terrible direction and editing, becomes relevant since this is all fabricated memory – it's obvious that it's still just terrible direction and editing, but saved by the unfolding of the narrative. Like Inferno, it would have fared better as an episode on a Twilight Zone series or something similar. 3/10
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005) – Production wise, these films are getting lower and lower in quality. Rick Bota is back for the second entry in his Hellraiser trilogy (he shot this one and the next back to back), and it's once again based on a script that had originally nothing to do with Pinhead and his box. The acting continues to go downhill (the phony hard edge too cool for school reporter main character is unbearable), the story is just plain dumb, and the visual effects are atrocious (the cgi bugs running on the walls might give you a nice little laugh). Bota managed to do ok with the previous film, but here he really shows how bad of a director he is – spatial construction and editing are often borderline delirious (it's just like Bota is either not giving enough material to the editor to construct the scenes, or the editor is a no-shit-given hack: an insert of a shot taken from later in the scene, a little girl that paints a portrait with a brush with every closeups showing hands with a pencil, etc. - no surprise, same editor as the previous and next ones). Some of it I should have used in my past life where I liked to theorize stuff (that video image saying “I'm not real” before committing suicide would have been handy), but overall it's a pretty bad film – with everything you'd expect from a straight-to-video production (oh that terrible filling music), except Stan Winston's name as main producer... (but why?! At least there's a few cool cenobites – that we only see a minute or so – and lots of blood, but he's not even responsible for any of that). Story-wise, it gets closer in tone and themes to the original films, with desire for the extreme, pushing the limits of experience, but it's all lost in cultish silliness, and well... lust is just lost in the kinky wagon. The guy responsible for forcing the Hellraiser stuff in this script is the same who did it for Hellseeker too (his IMDB page is pretty funny, he's just like the boom operator in Living In Oblivion, he really is a grip and an electrician on movie sets, who turned screenwriter for these Hellraiser projects, and never wrote anything else). 2.5/10
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005) – Hellraiser is a popular and addictive web-based game, and a kid (for some unexplained reason) takes things too far and sets himself on fire “because of the game”. His friends all feel guilty because “they should have seen this coming” (what?! how? why?). The kid's estranged father who hasn't seen him in years and don't even bother showing up at the funeral decides to take revenge on his son's (absolutely innocent) friends and bury them alive while they hallucinate cenobites coming for them. This is the “meta” entry in the Hellraiser franchise, but apart from a scene where the runaway car won't start (cliché) and the bad guy is hiding on the back seat for a scare (cliché) and goes something like: “just like in a bad horror film” - there's pretty much no reflexivity in this (and it's not only super dumb, but not even relevant to the Hellraiser films). Oh yeah, there's a guy wearing a Chatterer mask that could be read as self-reflexive, but really what a waste... This is just meta-crap, the worst of the terrible Bota films (no wonder he disappeared afterwards). It's supposed to be based on a non-Hellraiser short story (of which I can't find any trace), and it's the film that's the further away from the original ones, in tone, style, etc. It's pretty much a teen-horror flick, with juvenile humor and cheesy kink. It's kinda fun to see Henry Cavill before he was Superman, and Khary Payton before he was Ezekiel, both playing super dumb horny kids, but that's the only fun you'll have here. 1.5/10
Hellraiser: Revelations (Garcia, 2011) – IMDB tells me I've seen this film 10 years ago, but I had no memory of it at all. On one hand, it's pretty cool to finally have, after 4 films that were based on other material and forced into Hellraiser films, an original story written for the series. Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who wrote this, has been involved with the franchise since part 3 as a makeup artist. He wrote a few direct-to-trash cheapo movies before, and even directed a family movie – he'll move on and direct the next and last-to-date Hellraiser film too. His script has a lot of the right ideas, but mostly the movie is ruined by atrocious acting and poor execution (I was afraid and a little nauseous when it started as a found footage piece – and a very bad one – but it's just the prologue). Visually, it goes back to some of the classic imagery, and does it pretty well (even though the video production feels amateurish and Doug Bradley is finally replaced as Pinhead, which feels all kinds of wrong, especially since new Pinhead is overacting like the rest of the cast). There's that one terribly cheap effect that really betrays the lack of means and hack-it-yourself production and that might throw off some of the most tolerant viewers (they make it work up to the point where they try to recreate Uncle Frank's return from hell in the original film) – other than that, if you don't mind terribly cheap production, atrocious acting, and a script that often feels like a poor variation on the original story, you've got yourself a Hellraiser film, something that can't really be said of any of the sequels after part 2. 2.5/10
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018) – This one is not only written but also directed by Hellraiser veteran (and mostly makeup artist) Gary J. Tunnicliffe. It starts with Pinhead chit-chatting with a new Cenobite buddy, and soon turns into something like a top-tier student film or a porn signed by Michael Ninn, with just way too much emphasis on aesthetic exuberance (it's often nicely done, but just too much, and it never really feels like it's going anywhere – we're not talking Matthew Barney's level of useless excess, but still overdone). We're far from the Hellraiser tone, but some of its universe's classic visuals is recycled at the end. It's supposed to have been written as an original Hellraiser film, but I somehow doubt that – it feels forced, like parts 5 to 8 did. It's not as cheap as some of these films, it even has some kind of appeal as a dark detective story (something that could have been out of a Clive Barker story, but a lot closer to Harry D'Amour than to Pinhead and crew). The new Cenobite, the nerdy cousin of the Highway to Hell cop, is a pretty cool character, but has nothing to do with the original gang. It has a lot of flaws, and like the previous one could pass for fanfiction, but as a stand-alone piece, considering it was done with just about nothing, it's not complete trash. 3/10
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