Project Hellraiser: Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

Ha ha, holy crap, I’m finally almost done! I’m finally on the last Hellraiser movie I have to review this month, because it’s the last one on the DVD box set I have, and that’s an excuse if I ever heard one! I’m not even doing one of those silly Project Hellraiser Logs I’ve been half-assing for a while now! And who knows? Maybe this, the sixth sequel, will FINALLY BE THE BIG BREAK OUT THIS SERIES IS WAITING FO---oh, no it won’t be.

Director: Rick Bota

Starring: Dean Winters, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274546/

Yeah, so this movie starts off…well, about as sprightly as the sixth sequel of any horror franchise could. We get this dorky guy named Trevor and his wife driving in a car. They’re laughing and happy, and then suddenly get serious and say they can work out all their problems. Then they start making out passionately WHILE HE’S STILL DRIVING.

And now on Stupidity News at 12...making out while driving DOESN'T usually help your concentration on the road!

And wouldn’t you know it? They’re fine afterwards! Not even a scratch on them! They’re just fi---oh, no they aren’t:

This should be a promo video in every Driver's Ed class.

I can’t even pretend to be sarcastic anymore. That’s how much I really just don’t care about this movie. Trevor wakes up in the hospital and is greeted by a rather seductive nurse…odd, being that his wife just died, but I’ll chalk it up to the director having zero idea what the flying blue hell he was doing. We learn that his wife was actually Kirsty Cotton from the first movie. If you’re wondering what relevance this has to the overall story, the answer is none, as she barely even appears again after this except in short, nonsensical flashback snippets. I’d make an over the top joke about this but…hell, I just don’t give a crap. This movie’s failure is so complete that I don’t even need to make jokes! The writing itself is a joke! That’s a goddamn miracle.

We see some stuff where these doctors are doing brain surgery on him for no reason and insert a pin into his brain…it’s never referenced again, so hey, it fits right into this asinine abomination of the silver screen.

He gets interrogated by the cops, who tell him the doors were open in his car and his wife was never found, so he goes to his incredibly bland office where he fits like a glove. When he gets there, he talks to his co-worker and then gets raped by his female boss while trying to get a candy bar out of the snack machine…hey, it happens!

The actor is clearly enjoying this more than his character is probably supposed to.

The confusing thing about this is the way the office building has cameras set up to catch everything that happens…oddly Orwellian, but okay. Obviously, they catch the rape in the break room, which Trevor is easily able to subvert by going into his computer file and deleting in like a second. For one, how the hell did he do that? These cameras are set up all over the place but any low-level goon can just log in and delete whatever he or she wants? What the hell kind of system is that?

And two, WHY would the boss character even come onto him like that anyway? I get it, this movie is weird and surreal, but it’s like in The Uninvited – you can’t just use ‘weird and surreal’ as an excuse for a lack of BASIC HUMAN LOGIC. That is shit writing, with no redeemable qualities whatsoever.

Ugh, so Trevor goes home and gets jump-scared by a barking dog right in front of his face, which by all logic he should have seen when he was walking up to his building. But I guess that would be too smart for this movie. Inside, he has convulsions and spits out water plus a big eel thing. Charming. This apparently is the mating signal for this girl:

Ooooh, yay, flirty flirt flirt!

…who also flirts with him and tries to get him to have sex with her. Is he just Casanova all the sudden? Why is everyone attracted to him now? Is losing a spouse the equivalent of really good cologne in this movie’s ass-backwards universe?

Later his boss comes over to his house and strips down to her underwear, and then crushes his crotch with her high heel, which is a feeling this movie replicates quite well actually. They have sex but Trevor then has a crisis of conscience, and pushes her off. Somehow, I guess, there’s a video camera in his living room now, and even after she leaves, it’s still recording the two of them doing it. Only then we see this:

Okay, I admit, this was a good, scary scene - even though she left his apartment a minute ago and nobody is sitting in front of the camera anymore, he still sees them making out and then her dying on the screen - spooky! But it's ruined completely by the fact that the next scene just makes it look like another hallucination and completely downplays it. This movie's knack for doing that makes it incredibly frustrating.

So basically the next hour or so of the movie is just this: we get a few random splices of pointless shit with the cops trying to interrogate him, and one or two scenes in the office with him talking to apparently the only other guy who works there, but mostly it’s just sex. Lots and lots of sex, with people who just come into his apartment and start doing him. So basically it’s just Hellraiser: The Porno. And didn’t everyone need THAT in their lives?

Getting a little old at this point...

And then we get a cameo appearance from Pinhead! Yeah, remember him? He shoves a nail into Trevor’s neck and asks if he likes pleasure or pain better. Weird, being that I thought the whole point of this series was that the Cenobites treated them like the same thing, but hey, if I had a nickel for every inconsistency in these movies, I’d be rich enough to pay other people to review them for me.

Then Trevor makes out with his acupuncture doctor…surprised?

OH MY GOD. Can't this movie do ANYTHING ELSE but show poorly written sex scenes? The first time or two I wasn't complaining, but this is what, the seventh time this has happened in an hour? I think I get it now. This was meant to be a porn flick, but then some idiot stepped in and said "durr, hey, we need a new Hellraiser sequel!" and thus this was born. Christ.

Afterwards, he’s walking home at night when he gets a gun pointed at his head by his old buddy from the office, who tells him they had a plan to kill Kirsty and take some inheritance money from her to get rich. That’s actually an interesting plot point! It could have made for a good movie on its own. So how much do you want to bet it will be mentioned for only about 3 minutes of the film’s combined run-time, and feature very little in the actual “story”? If you would bet money on that…well, you’d be right. Ugh.

Through some more asinine dream-to-reality transitions and jumpy schizophrenic directing, Trevor gets taken in for the murder of some woman and the cops are even less credible than the ones in Hobo with a Shotgun. That’s incredible. They lock him up in the basement of their torture chamber, because yeah, in the Hellraiser films police stations just always have torture chambers built into them, and then we get…well, probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in one of these movies:

Two heads...they're the same person...I just...I'm losing my mind at this, I really am.

So then we get to see Pinhead again; how nice of them to give him two cameos in the same movie! He puts chains in Trevor’s face and body and reveals to him what really happened: apparently Trevor was actually an asshole all along who was cruel to Kirsty and cheated on her with a bunch of women, ALSO aspiring to kill her for her money on the side! I love how shocked she is about all of this stuff; it’s like, if a guy was doing THIS MUCH BAD STUFF behind your back, wouldn’t you be able to catch on just a little bit? I guess the answer was no. So she pointed a gun at him and they drove off the cliff, where he died instantly and she was able to get out and survive.

In answer to your questions, yes. Yes, this movie just pulled the whole ‘he was dead the whole time’ plot twist. One of the oldest clichés in the book, but I guess it was good enough for the sixth installment of the ever-so-good Hellraiser series…ugh, was there anyone in the entire world who could have enjoyed this garbage? I don’t think there was. This is the bottom of the barrel, people. No entertainment value, no plot, no characters, just pure crap from beginning to end. The directing is a mess of awful flashbacks and vague transitions and the acting is forgettable as hell, even from series “veteran” Ashley Laurence, reprising her role as Kirsty.

And what is up with bringing back Kirsty in this one anyway? There’s no connection to the other films; there’s no character development from her early days in the first two. She’s just shoved in there as if to say LOOK, LOOK, THIS IS A HELLRAISER FILM. WE HAVE ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS FROM THE ORIGINAL! Well, it doesn’t work. Not to mention how there really is no story to this thing until the last 20 minutes when we find out Trevor and his friend were trying to kill her to get the money she inherited from Uncle Frank apparently. THAT would have been a cool story. Why didn’t they just make a movie about that? But no, we got pointless dream sequences that even Inception would laugh at, nonsensical sex scenes that didn’t add anything and a bunch of non-sequitur ‘hallucinations’ that are about as scary as your cat’s hairballs.

Yeah, so I didn't like it, but hey, I guess if you REALLY want some softcore porn and can't be bothered to go down the street to the adult video store, this might suffice.

…

So yeah, that’s the first 6 Hellraiser movies. It’s been a wild, crazy, stupid, ridiculous ride and I am glad it’s over. The thing with all of these movies is, they all had potential. Doug Bradley always seemed to be into what he was doing and the stories were all intriguing on paper, but the execution was just SO POOR that it completely ruined any chance of them being enjoyable. I really like a good occult horror movie, but none of these movies were good! They were all either dull, ridiculous or both. I’ve never seen a franchise with so much potential screw up everything in such a monumental way, and for that I thought these movies were worth reviewing. This has been Project: Hellraiser. Glad you’ve been along for the ride.

Project Hellraiser: Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

Project Hellraiser Log: I seem to have woken up in an unfamiliar place. It looks like a motel room. The wallpaper is paisley-patterned and the lighting is all a rather puke-ish green. Weird. And it all feels like I’ve been here before…

Director: Scott Derrickson

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229440/

Hellraiser: Inferno is the first Hellraiser sequel that didn’t have “creative genius” Clive Barker involved, which means it doesn’t have the same goofy slapstick-style horror and lack of any kind of dignity that the other movies had…but is it any good? Actually, I’ll spoil it for you and say no; no it isn’t. In fact, it just replaces what was bad about the first four films with entirely new flaws.

We start off with this guy named Joseph Thorne, who you might remember as Lowell from Dracula II: Ascension! Oh, wait, nobody ever saw that…my bad.

Anyway, in this MUCH DIFFERENT and DEFINITELY NOT BAD movie, he is a hard-assed cop who plays chess at high school basketball practices, does cocaine, lies to his wife and screws hookers on the side; isn’t he just a peach? He also narrates over the top of some scenes in a boring monotone; because of course what we need to see in a corrupt cop movie is his justifications for cheating on his wife! That makes it deep!

The other stuff he does is bad, but playing chess on a basketball court? He could really distract those kids! What if they decide they don't want to play sports anymore and instead take up chess?!

At one point he does cocaine with a hooker while lying to his wife and then drinks alcohol shortly after. And if THAT isn’t enough, he ALSO steals evidence from crime scenes!

Yeah, this is one of the very few reminders that this has anything to do with Hellraiser. Don't get used to that.

What a top notch guy! I think he deserves some kind of award for behavior.

So yeah, that knocks him out, and then we just flash forward rather haphazardly to the next day…we see that his best friend is a guy who has nothing better to talk about than his crossword puzzle of the day, which apparently needs a word for his own name that is ten words long. Thorne gives it to him – “palindrome.” I know this kind of detail is mundane and uninteresting, but hey, it’s what the movie gives us, and if I skipped every mundane and uninteresting thing in this movie, I wouldn’t even have a review.

Thorne gets a very distressed call at his office from the hooker he was with the previous night…what, so he just gives hookers his work phone number now? Does he also give them his wife’s cell phone number? I mean hey, you gotta be thorough!

And so this prompts him and his buddy to go running off to the motel to see what happened to her. We don’t see exactly what happened to her yet, but we do see that Thorne is visibly disturbed. His buddy ends up going to look, too, and also has a similar reaction. Thorne spills the beans about what happened, but he also frames his friend as well, implicating him because otherwise he would get all goody-two-shoes and tell on Thorne. Well, gee. It’s almost like it was a STUPID IDEA TO BRING HIM ALONG. Maybe keep the super-honest good-guy cop who wouldn’t want to cover up a mistake from the bosses OUT of the scheme next time? Just saying.

And seriously, THAT'S all it was in the bathroom that the film was trying to hide and build up to? That's not even that gory. The other movies had way worse moments!

So through some stupid dialogue, we stumble onto a plot involving a guy called ‘The Engineer,’ who is a mysterious pimp figure that kills his hookers…or something…yeah, it doesn’t make sense. We meet some guy who drives an ice cream truck who talks only in low indiscernible mutters and whispering. Of course, he’s given a long scene in which we’re supposed to be interested…are you really showing us a flashback with that stupid muttering voice narrating? Go to hell, Hellraiser: Inferno.

Then later the ice cream truck driver gets killed inside his truck, and a video is taken and sent to Thorne while he’s eating at a diner. Being a genius, he puts the video tape into the machine at the diner, instead of just taking it home where he could watch it himself, and sees the guy getting killed and all…unfortunately nobody else who watches the tape can see it and now Thorne looks like he’s crazy, oooooh!

Also, why is the ice cream truck just sitting there with the guy’s dead, skinned body in it right next to a park? Did nobody notice that and freak out or anything?

Apparently the story is ‘The Engineer’ has kidnapped a child, which Thorne knows through…some kind of psychological mind link or something? I don’t know. Thorne is put on the case and he takes his partner to this seedy looking bar in the middle of nowhere, where we see…

Okay, I have no idea. But to be fair, it doesn’t matter – none of this is ever referenced again. You know, it’s really bad when even Dracula II upstages your movie in the logic department. This movie is making Dracula II look good – THAT IS AWFUL.

Thorne goes to see a psychologist played by James Remar, who honestly gives one of the most bored, tired, sleep-inducing performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. He’s constantly about to nod off to sleep and none of the lines he gives sounds like he’s awake in the least. No conviction, no energy, no believability...wow, NOTHING worth talking about!

"I am the physical embodiment of the viewer's boredom...now that's deep...zzzz...."

And what’s the pay-off of this whole scene about Thorne seeing the psychologist? He tells Remar that he wants to reschedule, and Remar says okay and that they can do it tomorrow. That’s literally it; they don’t talk about any important subjects or anything like that. How hard is it to make a movie that has any kind of redeeming quality? C’mon. Tell me. Because I’m starting to really wonder about that, watching stuff like this.

So he goes back home again and tells his daughter he has to leave again immediately only to stick around and lie in bed for a while; glad he’s so good with his kids…his wife gets a call from the hospital that apparently tells them that his parents got a visit from The Engineer – apparently they’re in the hospital, but no real explanation is ever given and it’s not really brought up much after this at all, so we can mostly skip it. Anyway, he goes to the hospital and a bunch of weird shit happens:

This is a weird scene because they do the whole 'guy sees weird stuff that may or may not be real' thing, but then just stop after like one hallucination...like they just gave up all of a sudden and said, no, we don't feel like doing any more of this. Kinda takes the creepy factor out when there's only this one very brief, passing hallucination...

He opens a door and goes through it and is suddenly back in the hotel where the hooker died, oooooh…he wakes up, finding out that the previous scene was apparently all a dream, and goes down to the hospital for real, drawing his gun and getting arrested like you damn well would if you did that in real life. Finally. Just keep him there!

But unfortunately the show goes on, and Thorne’s best friend who he framed for murder gets killed by one of those freaky guys in masks. Thorne goes back home to find his wife and kid dead and tied to some pillar thing. James Remar comes back and reveals that he’s been Pinhead all along – does Remar ever just play a normal, non-supernatural being? Ever? – and then…well, alright, I can’t hide it anymore. The movie breaks after that. It just breaks in half, and after that it’s smashed into a billion little pieces, and those pieces are broken into a billion more little pieces, and those pieces are…okay, you get the idea:

Yeah, screw character development that actually expands our knowledge of who Thorne is and why he treats the people around him so badly. WE NEED MORE GORY FAST-PACED ACTION SCENES! STAT!

I guess he’s supposed to be…fighting his inner demons, or his sins, or something like that…but honestly, it’s done so poorly that I am astounded nobody in the studio just took a big hockey stick and whacked the director over the head with it to knock some sense into him. Why is the fantasy world falling apart around him now? What was the catalyst? Nothing was really resolved. He didn’t find out any groundbreaking clues that would make Pinhead take apart the world he constructed for him. So why? You can’t just…throw random scary images into a blender and turn it on ‘puree’ and expect it to work! You need some kind of cohesion and thought put into it! For this kind of thing to work, you need subtlety and an underlying theme to it!

But no. Hellraiser: Inferno just gives us scary old people with no eyes, and vampire hookers. I think the part that pisses me off the most about this is not just the lack of subtlety, but the fact that they have character development and an interesting story right at their fingertips, and they just throw it all away! Like there's the scene where he's fighting his dead eyeless parents, right? This could be a very subtle, well-done scene that explores why he neglects his parents and also allow him to grow as a character. But they just scrap that stupid idea and just throw in a goofy fight scene, right before he blows them away with a gun, like he didn't even know them. This is just despicably poor writing and a HUGE missed opportunity for what COULD have been a really good scene.

Anyway, Pinhead is in this movie!

He's in this movie for so little of the runtime that I bet he thought he was just shooting a commercial or something. 

…surprised? I was! What, are you trying to tell me this was a Hellraiser film or something? Pfft.

Thorne’s face gets pulled apart by a bunch of hooks and stuff, because if you didn’t know this was a Hellraiser film before, you at least know now. It’s revealed that the child he was trying to save all along was a younger version of himself, and then an evil version of himself kills the younger version of himself, and then kills the Thorne we’ve been following for the whole movie…okay, seriously, I give up. Movie…you need help.

The film finally ends its long, drawn out cascade of nonsense with Thorne waking up again completely unharmed, ready to repeat his own hell all over again. He answers the phone at work, it’s the hooker screaming bloody murder again, and the whole thing starts over again. The next time he wakes up, he just shoots himself in the head with a gun, which implies he can make choices in this “hell” of his…so why not just NOT answer the phone then, genius?

He wakes up a third time in the green-lit hotel room after the hooker has already been murdered, which makes sense, because that’s totally congruent with how he’s supposed to just repeat the same thing over and over again…oh wait…no, this movie is just retarded.

To add a cherry on top of this whole delightfully wrong-headed festering abomination of a movie, there’s more narration over the top to point out that Thorne is living in hell, as if we couldn’t guess that by now – thank you, movie! Thank you for treating your audience like a bunch of sloped-forehead mongoloids! Thank you for having no logical story or cohesion at all! Thank you for absolutely DRIVING ME UP THE GODDAMN WALL WITH YOUR BULLSHIT!

This movie is a complete disaster! It’s not as bad as the last movie, but GOD DAMN did it nearly drive me nuts! There’s just nothing sane about it; it’s completely bizarre, ridiculous gibberish with no higher thought put into it than ‘durr, I wanna make a movie about psychological stuff, that’ll be REALLY deep!’ Well I spit on you, Hellraiser: Inferno. I spit on everything you stand for! Maybe instead of talking down to the audience next time, fix your own plot-holes and inconsistencies. How does THAT sound, you bunch of…

Wait…no, what’s happening? I feel like I’m being…sucked in….NOOOOO!

I realized at last that I died at the end of the Bloodline review from how awful the film was, and that I am now being punished in Hell forever for making fun of the Hellraiser films. With horror and dread I realize that I am doomed to repeat this review forever. I know you could probably figure that out on your own without me writing this italics-bullshit, but hey, I don’t think you have the mental capacity to think for yourself. I think you need to be held by the hand and led around like a child, because I’m a condescending prick who doesn’t know how to tell a good story. Oh well, off we go!

….

Project Hellraiser Log: I seem to have woken up in an unfamiliar place. It looks like a motel room. The wallpaper is paisley-patterned and the lighting is all a rather puke-ish green. Weird. And it all feels like I’ve been here before…

Director: Scott Derrickson

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229440/

Hellraiser: Inferno is the first Hellraiser sequel that didn’t have “creative genius” Clive Barker involved, which means it doesn’t have the same goofy slapstick-style horror and ridiculous over the top plots that the previous films had…but is it any good? Actually, I’ll spoil it for you and say no; no it isn’t. In fact, it just replaces what was bad about the first four films with entirely new flaws…

Project Hellraiser: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

Project Hellraiser Log: How can mankind create such films? I watch this film and feel myself slowly drifting off into the land of sleep, countless times! The hooks of its chains dig into me and force me to keep my eyes open. No, I can’t sleep; they won’t ever let me again! The movie is sinister and terrible. I have no choice but to go on and do…well, what I usually do…

Director: Anthony Hickox

Starring: Terry Farrell, Doug Bradley

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104409/

I mean seriously, how is this movie THIS BORING? I can’t even describe how boring it is except to say that I couldn’t remember what happened in it right after I finished watching it. Hellraiser III is a miracle of bland characters, nonexistent story and phoned in directing so perfectly unmemorable that it will be like you never watched the movie at all, and isn't that the ONLY way to watch a movie? After all, that way it will seem BRAND NEW again when you watch it a second time, and brand new after that when you watch it a third time!

Wait...no, that's actually really stupid.

The movie begins with some asshole discovering the big pillar of Cenobite faces that rose from the ground at the end of the last movie. It’s still not explained and never truly is, so let’s just skip it.

Then we see our new main character Joey, who is very different from Kirsty as a main character, in that she’s about three times as annoying. Joey is a TV journalist who is hard up for stories and needs a good one to send her career on the right path because her manager seems to think he’s Billy Mays and shouts all the damn time. So in response, she shouts at everyone else in a loud, commanding voice, because being intimidating is DEFINITELY gonna get you some good interviews! Grade A journalism! Two thumbs up!

"I'm a crappy journalist who can't even emote the simplest lines into anything resembling the same ballpark as credibility! Hooray for incompetence!"

Oh, and her cameraman is Hulk Hogan:

"I was the stunt double from Mr. Nanny. I think this is a step up!"

…or Hulk Hogan’s stand-in, I guess…

Okay, so the story seems to be that Joey is in the emergency room hunting stories when they drag in a guy with bloody chains dangling out of him and a black haired goth-looking chick. The guy with the chains has a seizure from Hell as the chains whip out and start to attack everyone and electrocute him somehow – it’s never really explained, don’t worry; the movie isn’t getting any smarter on us magically. Joey of course thinks this is the coolest thing ever and wants to do a story about it!

Her first step is to go to this night club called The Boiler Room and just ask around if anyone has seen a pretty girl. What, does she expect the bartender to just point her in a random direction and go “there’s the only pretty girl in the entire bar”? I guess she did, because that’s what happens, and the black haired goth-chick from before tells her no dice. So Joey’s response is to go home and have a contrived flashback dream that serves no purpose at all, except a rather empty scare way later in the movie:

"If I open my mouth wide enough, people will take me seriously and really believe that I'm in battle in this bright, sunny, peaceful-looking field."

So then she gets woken up by a call from the goth chick, whose name is Teresa, and who wants to come over and talk now. Joey tells Teresa her entire backstory about how her dad died in the war, or something, because I guess telling random strangers intimate details about her past seems like the logical thing to do. The weird thing about this scene is that even though Teresa wanted to come over and talk about the stuff Joey wanted to know about, she still gets mad and starts screaming about how she doesn’t want to talk about that stuff. So why did she come over at all then? Because she’s a terribly written character.

"Don't judge me, I'm a pouty stripper with a heart of gold! I'm supposed to be the emotional connection in the movie so I'm gonna over-act times a million to try to get any measly little reaction out of you!" 

Oh, and the acting in this movie is awful, I mean awful. Nobody in this movie is any good. The chick playing Joey is just terribly bland and unconvincing, reciting every line like she’s reading it on a cue card. Is this really the best actress they could get? The Hulk Hogan lookalike who follows her around is somehow even less convincing. But on the other end of the spectrum, the girl playing Teresa over-emotes everything and acts like she’s on crack the entire time. I can’t even decide which one is worse!

Then we flash back to Mr. Discovers-The-Cenobites, the guy from the first scene who owns the bar, who is having sex with a random chick from said bar. He acts like a douchebag to her afterwards and she gets really surprised for some reason I’m not sure. Did she expect him to sweep her off her feet and marry her? “Oh no, the guy I slept with at a sleazy bar is treating me like crap? HOW UNEXPECTED!” Pfft. Then she gets eaten by the Pinhead statue and turned into a high school biology diorama:

There's a caption contest for you!

The Pinhead statue goes on a long rant about how Mr. Bar Owner Guy has to help him out because they’re both the same kind of evil. Mr. Bar Owner Guy tries to say he isn’t, but Pinhead says “The evil has been in you since you killed your parents…” Wait, what? He killed his parents? That’s an interesting plot thread…will it be elaborated on or even brought up ever again? Of course not! It’s just one throw-away line shoved into one of the last scenes this guy is in. This is just astronomically stupid! It’s like if I made a movie about a bunch of real estate brokers doing normal things except for one line where one of them says “I remember when I was a space traveler from the seventy-sixth dimension of Zaxar…” and then it’s never brought up again. HOW IS IT THIS HARD TO TELL A COHERENT STORY?!

So he kills Teresa – glad she was in the movie – and then Pinhead comes out and starts wreaking havoc on the whole bar, killing everyone inside:

Death by CDs! That'll teach you to pirate music.

...no, I have no idea WTF the filmmakers were smoking when they made this scene, or why there are no other deaths in the entire movie like it. It's just a strange aberration of nature.

Afterwards, Joey is walking outside when she’s attacked by the cenobite versions of all the people killed in the bar. Her cameraman Hulk-Hogan-lookalike has been transformed into a cenobite with a camera lens sticking out of one eye, and the DJ has been transformed into one that can shoot CDs like bullets – it’s really ridiculous and gimmicky, but…no, actually I have no ‘buts.’ It’s just ridiculous and gimmicky. I especially love the stupid little lines the Hogan lookalike says after he kills people, like when he kills the cops, he says “That’s a wrap.” And when he kills this other guy, he says “Ready for your close-up?” It’s like a 60 year old trying to be hip and write “witty” lines for the kids. Both funny AND embarrassing at the same time!

They get killed off and Joey is chased into a church by Pinhead himself. The priest in the church assures her that she must be delusional because there’s no such thing as demons…wait, really? A PRIEST says there are no such things as demons?! Isn’t that a bit counterproductive to their whole belief system? Oh well. Pinhead does a whole thing where he crucifies himself in mid-air with some nails out of his head, and the scene was pretty obviously just made for the trailer…

Joey finds some kind of portal to the past where the human version of Pinhead for some reason is telling her how to stop his evil side, although it’s not really clear why, as in the last movie he wasn’t portrayed anything like this. I expected it to be some kind of farce or trick, but SPOILERS, nope actually, not at all – it really is just his human form trying to suddenly foil his demonic form, without any kind of deeper subtext or explanation to it besides ‘WE NEED A CLICHÉ GOOD VS EVIL SUBPLOT IN THIS MOVIE.’ Go figure.

Pinhead ties Joey up in some bondage BDSM stuff and hangs her from the ceiling because….because. Then he meets up with his old human self and…this happens:

Okay, seriously, whoever commissioned this part needs to be locked up.

Personally, I liked Scott Pilgrim’s version better:

Joey escapes and decides to hide the puzzle box in the first random place she sees, which is the wet cement of a new construction site right nearby, because THAT isn’t stupid as hell. Seriously, why doesn't she just take it home and bury it in her attic or something? Oh, right, because then we couldn't have any more brilliant sequels, and the makers of the franchise couldn't rob the audiences of any more money. Excuse me for being so dense. 

God this movie sucked; it was just so…lacking in anything resembling life that I couldn’t even stand it. Hellraiser III was like the first two movies on Ritalin. It was completely tired and unexciting in every way possible. I’m serious; this shit was putting me to sleep for most of the runtime. Even Doug Bradley wasn’t as good this time, and he didn’t use his cool deep voice at all, instead opting for a more generic British-accented voice that sounds like a third rate James Bond villain or something. And if you don’t have Doug Bradley being awesome in a Hellraiser movie, then what do you have? Nothing, that’s what.

But at the end of the day, this was just a boring movie. It was forgettable and it didn’t leave any real impact on me at all. It was just a big old lump of nothing and while I gained nothing from watching it, I technically didn’t lose anything either. Some people think these sort of movies are the worst, but then again, some people haven’t seen Hellraiser IV: Bloodline…

Project Hellraiser: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Project Hellraiser Log: A week ago I started on my journey to review the Hellraiser films. I didn’t know what it was I was getting into, but I knew I wanted to know. I had to know. It was simply consuming me beyond all else. Little did I know that even the first sequel after the original one would already bombard me with nonsensical plot devices, ridiculous imagery and a lack of any real substance. But it did have lots of gore and weird things on screen, so clearly I had a lot to wade through. It would be a long torturous journey, but then, I chose this hell. I had to deal with it. So let us recap the exact events that led me to this first log entry…

Director: Not-Clive-Barker

Starring: The special effects crew

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095294/

The movie begins right after the first one ended with Kirsty waking up in a mental hospital, and finding out that they couldn’t get her boyfriend to sign back onto the movie, so he just “left” the hospital already – yeah, sure. The detective with her has terrible bedside manner and in just a few minutes, he manages to get her screaming and shouting and throwing stuff all around the room. Glad to see someone good at his job! Oh wait…it isn’t opposite day.

So he calls in Dr. Channard and his assistant…well, I forget his name already, so I’m calling him GENERIC HORROR GUY #52789. Kirsty says that the blood they found on a mattress at her dad’s house means that good old Julia can come back to life, so they have to destroy it. How does she know that? When did she suddenly become an expert; in her dreams in the few hours before she woke up? What the hell?

Channard makes a phone call telling the cops to deliver the mattress to his house, and Generic Horror Guy #52789 overhears it and decides to go investigate, because he’s the super sleuth of our times! He luckily gets there just as Channard is calling in that generic ‘GET THEM OFF ME GET THEM OFF ME’ mental patient in every horror movie about a hospital ever made. He hands the guy a knife, makes him sit on the mattress and has him cut himself to bleed all over the mattress and summon back Julia, just like Larry accidentally did for Frank in the last one!

That’s all good and well, but…why didn’t Channard just prick his finger and bleed on the mattress himself? That seems like it would be the easier option, rather than dragging that other poor guy to be a sacrifice and making a mess all over the place. But I guess that would be too subtle for a movie with THIS in it:

Is this looking like your last really wild college party yet?

Ha ha ha…oh Hellraiser II, you are my everlasting disappointment. Don’t ever stop having all that dignity there!

So Julia is back, because I really wanted to see HER again…and she starts making out with Channard, because I guess she finally got over that whole Frank obsession from the first movie after GOD KNOWS HOW MANY flashback scenes of those two having sex. Seriously, this just pisses me off! We sat through all that garbage in the first movie about how much she wants to be with Frank again and now she’s just shrugged it off like last week’s food poisoning? What kinda crap is that?!

I guess the doc has a fetish for bald chicks with no skin. I'd say this surprised me but...no, it really doesn't.

Oh, and before I go any further, I forgot to mention one of the plot devices this movie has; this teenage girl the nurses nicknamed Tiffany for no reason, who likes to solve puzzles. Why, you ask? Because the movie really needs a plot device to bring the Cenobites back in! But that’s not for another few scenes, so shhh, spoilers.

Channard somehow brings Julia a ton of bodies within the span of like a few hours…glad that went unnoticed by anyone on the outside. She becomes human again just in time for Kirsty and Generic Horror Guy #52789 to get to the house to check it all out. Generic Horror Guy #52789 apparently outlived his worth in the movie, because he gets killed off immediately. Hooray for great characterization! Truly this film is a rallying battlecry for great writing.

Tiffany solves the puzzle box and summons the Cenobites, which take everyone to their own Hells – or they say they’re in their own Hells, but really they are all interconnected and in walking distance from one another, so it makes no sense really. Doug Bradley is still cool, but even he can’t save the appallingly hilarious and random imagery that follows:

What is this stuff? I don’t know; I guess the director just wanted to record one of his acid trips or something. Seriously, it’s a clown…with bloody eye sockets…juggling his own eye. And it still isn’t the weirdest thing this movie has in it! God, this is ridiculous. It’s like a circus created by Tim Burton and then visually raped by a troupe of one-legged, eyepatch-wearing midgets with sloped foreheads! And that still doesn't even describe how random it is!

Oooh, her skin just came right off! That’s not stupid at all, right?! No.

They get back into the real world only to find that everyone in the whole hospital has puzzle boxes now and are using them to summon back the Cenobites as well as the now-evil Channard. What, are those things just mass produced at Toys ‘R Us now? If so, I’m going to have to put it on my Christmas list this year.

And…okay, I mean really; was there just a contest in the studio to come up with the worst, most face palm inducing image in the film? Because this is pushing it; it’s really, really pushing it:

Ha ha ha...oh man, I don't even know...is that a rejected Power Rangers villain? A bondage fetishist with a penis growing out of his head? I'm actually curious as to how this was represented in the script..."weird-ass abomination of nature rises up through the window"?

Kirsty then appeals to the Cenobites’ humanity and gets them all to believe in their human selves again! This actually could have been a pretty decent plot device, but never fear a serious or emotional moment, because the movie is here with more ludicrous garbage to rob the scene of any kind of tension:

Aww...that's kind of sad actually. You see, Pinhead used to be a human before he was sent to Hell by a random act of fate and tortured for an eternity and...

Is this movie even trying anymore?

Okay, okay, the guy who put flowers and human fingers in those weird tentacle things wins that ‘worst image in the film’ contest. I concede defeat.

Then they…somehow just get back into Hell without even using any rituals or anything, where they face off against Channard one more time. It’s revealed that Channard once…did something to Tiffany’s parents, it’s really vague and unclear what, and so she cries about it and stuff, but then Julia comes back and makes out with Channard to distract him…and then somehow kills him…I’m not entirely sure what happens, but if it gets this movie closer to ending, then hell, I’m all for it.

Only then it’s revealed that it wasn’t Julia at all, it was Kirsty dressed up in her skin! Uh, no, movie, I’m not buying it. There’s no way she could just slip on that skin in that short of a time AND have it look realistic! I bought it in the last movie because of the supernatural implications, but here it’s just ridiculous! I don’t even care that the movie ends with the characters smiling and happy and what not; there’s no saving it. I’m past the point of buying this crap. Hellraiser II, I can buy clowns juggling eyeballs and naked red people wrestling on the floor, but THIS IS JUST TOO FAR!

Oh, what’s that? There’s an ending scene where some moving guy just touches the bloody bed and a giant pillar with Cenobite faces comes out…okay, well we got a late entry for the ridiculous images contest, but this one is a definite contestant for winner:

WhoooOOOOOOooooo random images!

I might have to re-evaluate the results after all.

…what? Are you waiting for that usual bit where I end the review by summing up my thoughts on the movie?  No; I'm not doing it for this one...it isn't even worth my time. See you for Hellraiser III!