Hellraiser 2022 - Time to Play Again

Well, we made it.

It’s Halloween here at The Third Row and I’ve now made my way through the complete, at times troubled arc of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.

Time to sit back and…wait, what?

Well, this changes things.

So, in my earlier telling of the behind the scenes history of this series, there is one detail I must confess I omitted. I want to say that was my way of cleverly teeing up this article, but I’d be lying. This intro is just a happy accident.

While Miramax was engaged in its long game of Kick the Intellectual Property Can with tenuous sequel after tenuous sequel, there was an effort, starting back in 2007 to try and reboot Hellraiser. Whether this was because they recognized the sequels were getting stale and farmed out, or they simply felt a fresh start was the key for new audiences, I’m not sure. Whatever the reason, they recognized the need for a reset.

For a long time, these attempts fared even less favorably than the sequels they kept churning out to hold the brand. Writers and directors were swapped in and out, with little to show for their efforts.

Two things happened that ultimately got the ball moving again -

First, David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween reboot/sequel played to critical and financial success that showed there was still potential in revisiting a classic with the right approach.

Second, and more importantly, after years of the series being out of his hands or involvement, Clive Barker was able to legally regain the American rights for Hellraiser.

So not only was the reboot moving forward, the circumstances were right for the original creator to rejoin as an executive producer.

Finally, in October of this year, the movie officially premiered - the first Hellraiser to debut to streaming.

And with that preamble and very long road getting here, I have to say - it was a pleasant surprise.

How pleasant? Well, let’s dig into that.

First off, let me emphasize the use of the term ‘reboot.’ This is completely separated from the prior ten movies. That lack of continuity baggage frees director David Bruckner and the writers (David S Goyer, Luke Piotrowski, and Ben Collins) to tell a story that feels both thematically familiar and also different.

The familiar, to start, feels like a very welcome return to the early movies. While the Cenobites are prominently featured in the marketing (as seen above), and they are certainly a menacing force in the film, they aren’t the focus the way the series made them over time. Instead, this goes back to the two major aspects of the early years - the puzzle box and the people who are, one way or another, drawn to it.

In particular, we have two people who bring two very different perspectives on the accursed object. At the start, we have Voight (Goran Višnjić), who fits the more traditional mold as a wealthy, powerful man who comes to the box to sate his worldly desires, no matter the cost. Subsequently, it winds up in the hands of Riley (Odessa A’zion), a recovering addict who first comes across the box as a trinket to pawn and is then drawn into its mysteries by chance, unaware of what she is toying with until it is too late.

Mystery around the series lore is a big part of what sets this movie apart from much of the run before it. Besides the fact that Riley doesn’t fully understand just what she’s become a part of at first, the movie also offers a different perspective on what the iconic infernal device offers. This time, it doesn’t just present itself as an object for thrill-seekers, but instead offers a broader series of desires to fulfill, provided one completes the puzzle’s necessary steps.

And among those steps, is a steep price to be paid, of course.

This is one of the aspects that I appreciated the most after how convoluted the roles of the box and the Cenobites have been for the better part of twenty years. The vision this movie offers feels more in line with the diabolical nature that Barker first floated, and the contrast between those who would seek it by choice vs those who would be bound to it by chance. Even our hero’s desires, while born of good intent, are framed in this dark world as coming with a bloody toll, and the final payoff may not be as good as it sounds.

For their part, the Cenobites are also a welcome return to form. Rather than the later movies where they are seen as the main monsters (okay, mostly just the one) with the box as part of the package, the group once again serves to fulfill the will of the box, and by extension, Leviathan. Outside of this aspect, I’m a bit more divided. As the good goes, these are some of the best looking Cenobites the films have had in ages, especially as the post-Bloodline movies seemed to default to very generic designs for anyone that wasn’t Pinhead. The designs this time are visually striking and unique, and in a few cases feel informed by The Hellbound Heart, most notably in the case of the Weeper.

This wound up reminding me a LOT of the Cenobite
originally framed as the leader in The Hellbound Heart.

Of course, once again, the primary focus is on the one with all the pins. True to Barker’s wishes, the character is credited as the Priest, and is now played by actress Jamie Clayton. When the casting was first announced, I was intrigued, knowing her skills as an actress, but still uncertain without knowing how the role would be played. Having seen the finished product, she is easily the MVP of the movie. Rather than make another Doug Bradley, as the later sequels tried and failed, she brings her own spin to the role, exuding a presence that is menacing as well as otherworldly.

There is one scene I want to shout out in particular, but I also don’t wish to give too much away. It’s about halfway into the movie, during a scene involving one of the people the box has marked to be sacrificed. Watching it, I was genuinely pleased, both with Clayton’s performance, and for the fact it was one of the scenes that feels the most like the role the Cenobites served in The Hellbound Heart - creatures to whom it’s not about a quick death, but about exploring new levels of pain and pleasure with mortals as their unwilling canvas.

I have to borrow a comment from a friend of mine for this one:
"Oh no, she's hot."

Conceptually, there is a lot I love about this movie. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always carry over visually. One reveal involving a character’s granted wish (I won’t say further as this is still fairly recent) is a big example. The idea we’re presented is very Barker, and it is honestly one of the creepiest concepts in the movie. Presentation-wise, however, the on-screen product looks lackluster and doesn't sell the nightmarish aspects as strongly. Likewise, as striking and inspired as the new Cenobites look (and the practical effects for them are solid), their arsenal is marred by the awkward CG of the movie’s straight to streaming budget.

The other issue I have, albeit a smaller one, is that at two hours, this is the longest Hellraiser movie to date. While it doesn’t feel like it drags to the point of distraction, it is still a movie that feels like a bit of tightening could have taken it from being pretty good to great.

As it is now, there’s a lot to like in it. There is also a lot to improve on, and hearing this has lit a fire under Barker to want to do more with the setting again is encouraging. After over ten years of watching this series run on fumes, this is the first time I’ve felt like the series had some energy in it, and, even with its faults, that rubbed off on me in the process.

I’m interested in seeing where they go from here, anyway. Especially if Barker continues to serve as producer and Clayton is there to continue to collect victims to pay for Leviathan's offerings.

I’m glad this is the note we’re going out on. As much as I loved the start of this series, the middle was a really draining experience. To the point where…well…you saw my read on The Scarlet Gospels, and I still stand by that as a meta-middle finger.

Despite that, it’s refreshing to close with a feeling of something new. Yes, a new Hellraiser in general isn’t exactly the pinnacle of innovation, but to have a Hellraiser that genuinely feels mysterious and engaging again makes me feel like this journey was ultimately worth it.

With that note, it’s time to pack up the franchise spelunking gear for another year and wish you all a Happy Halloween.

…oh, what the Hell! For once, I’ll actually rank this whole experience.

1. Hellraiser (1987)
2. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
3. The Hellbound Heart
4. Hellraiser (2022)
5. Hellraiser: Bloodline (Original script)
6. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
7. The Scarlet Gospels
8. Hellraiser: Bloodline (movie)
9. Hellraiser: Inferno
10. Clive Barker’s Tweet disavowing any connection to Hellraiser: Revelations
11. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
12. Hellraiser: Hellworld (again, not good, but at least incredibly fun to riff on)
13. Hellraiser: Deader
14. Hellraiser: Judgment
15. Hellraiser: Revelations

Okay. NOW. Good night and Happy Halloween. With any luck, I’ll be back up to some new chicanery before next October, but we’ll see.

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (And In the Studio)

Hello and welcome back to the Third Row. Where the journey into Hellraiser continues on as we ask the awkward question - when your second movie takes you to the bowels of Hell, where do you go next?

After the better part of three years and extensive money troubles, the answer, apparently, was a nightclub.

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth marks a major turning point in the series based on the aspects I’ve been focusing on. Most notably, the two men at the center of it - original creator Clive Barker and the Cenobite affectionately known as Pinhead.

As Hellbound was under production, the question of where the series would go was already being explored. Contrary to what many would expect, Barker didn’t see the future riding on Doug Bradley’s butcher’s apron clad shoulders. Rather, his plan was to keep the focus on Julia as the main antagonist. This makes sense given how she’s framed in the first half of Hellbound - after being Frank’s mildly reluctant accomplice in the first film, the second sees her elevated to an agent of Leviathan and potentially outranking the Cenobites.

There were just two problems with that - the first was that Claire Higgins had declined to stay on, resulting in her character being written out at the end of the second movie. The second being that most ominous and powerful force in cinema known as marketing. Despite his supporting role in the first two films, Pinhead was (and is) synonymous with the Hellraiser name. With Higgins not coming back, that meant the most logical decision was to bring Bradley to center stage.

Once they got past the part where Pinhead and his associates were killed at the end of the second movie, that is.

"Ah, I'll be fine. It's Hell, I've been through worse!"

Of course, a dead antagonist wasn’t the only problem the series had at this point. Despite ambitions to keep the movies going, distributor New World Pictures was in dire financial straits all around. Eventually, the studio went into bankruptcy and one of their executives started a new studio that picked up the Hellraiser rights, though part of the tradeoff now was that the new rule for the next movie was ‘cheap and nasty’.

This approach caused friction between the rights holders and Barker, who objected to the lower budget the studio wanted the next movie made on. It didn’t help that Barker was coming into this fresh from being jerked around by Fox on his movie Nightbreed, so he was less likely to want to compromise and be left holding the bag a second time. He would eventually be persuaded to come back as an executive producer, but by that time, the movie was in post-production, so the story was made without any contribution from him.

Instead, the new course was plotted by Tony Randel and new director Anthony Hickox (a choice Barker was less than thrilled with due to feeling his sensibilities weren’t right for the series.) The pitch they went with, per the studio’s interests, was smaller scale (despite its title) than the previous entry’s journey into Hell itself and made Doug Bradley’s demonic priest central to the story.

In trying to solve the question of their main villain’s death, they took a cue from the previous movie’s final scene - beginning with a demonic pillar bearing Pinhead’s likeness on it (among others.) While this movie is ultimately divorced from much of the earlier story of the ill-fated Cotton family, this still takes some inspiration from those earlier movies. Pinhead spends the first act of the movie in a position similar to Frank, if less taxing from an effects standpoint - his death rendering him without a body and a need to feed on others to restore himself. Not a bad idea on its face, but one hindered by the fact that, instead of Frank’s half-formed appearance, Pinhead is just a talking face in a pillar. Unable to do much beyond talk and use hooks on anyone who gets too close, the result feels like a mesh of Freddie Krueger and Hannibal Lecter - a talkative monster that seems like he’s trying to verbally dissect his prey to get them to do what he wants.

I have to give them some credit. It's hard to make a talking pillar menacing.

It's an idea that’s not devoid of potential, but it also requires more time and patience than this movie is willing to offer. The idea of leaning hard on temptation, and by extension corruption, could make an interesting thematic continuation of the series, but here it feels more like a means to an end than a major idea to explore. Once Pinhead is out of the pillar, the earlier idea of letting people doom themselves is forgotten and it’s time to make with the slaughter.

And oh, what slaughter do we get. This marks another area where you can tell marketing had a say - with his old team dead, Pinhead was going to need new Cenobites. In an unexplained shift from the previous movie, there is no need to send people to Hell or have them use the box themselves. In fact, this time out, Pinhead just creates new Cenobites seemingly at a whim. The result feels less horrifying than the earlier Barker designs and, at times, flat-out silly (though I suppose that IS part of why the CD Cenobite is so well remembered.)

Oh, I can't stay mad at you.

For what it’s worth, I’m not going to say this movie is a complete write-off. It’s a weird shift in themes and ideas from the earlier movies, but for what they have to work with, Randel and Hickox are making a game attempt at trying to keep some of the old flavor going. It doesn’t really land well, and it really calls attention to the absence of Barker for most of the story process, but their hearts were in the right place, even if the end result feels far more like a traditional horror sequel that marketing had a finger on the pulse for.

Besides that, the movie isn’t without its charms. It’s definitely a far cry from the dark fantasy of the first two movies, but it’s still a fairly brisk movie that has a certain silly appeal for how hard it goes for that ‘Hell on Earth’ title (on a budget, of course.)

I will also concede, by this point, I have made my way through the entire viewing block, so that may be helping my positive take on this one. In any case, what it lacks in the mystery or thematic weight of the first movies, it makes up for just in its enthusiasm to be the Hellraiser movie that the advertisers had been trying to sell since 1987.

It certainly did well enough to get them one more bite at the cinematic apple, in any event.

But that’s a tale for next time.

See you again soon as we make one last trip to the theater for the highly ambitious (and even more plagued) Hellraiser: Bloodline.

Till then.

This October – The Third Row Goes to Hell

Summer has ended. The days are getting cooler. The nights are coming sooner.

Fall is here.

More to the point, October is here.

I had debated whether or not to do the franchise run again this year. Life's been all over the place, and part of me was still irked that last year didn't quite go to plan. For what it's worth, the Godzilla run DID lead to a video presentation for those who are interested in seeing it.

In truth, I only really started really feeling the itch to make another run this year in early September.

So, after weighing options, and putting it to a poll, here I stand poised for a fairly busy October. Because like I said up top – we're going to Hell this month. Repeatedly.

That's right – starting now till the 31^st, we're diving in the labyrinth of skin ripping and BDSM puzzle enthusiasts that make up Clive Barker's* Hellraiser series.

*Okay, PARTIALLY Clive Barker's. We'll get into that later in the month.

And oh, what a month it shall be. Ten films, the novel that started it all, the upcoming Hulu reboot, and Barker's (at the time) final word on the property.

I've had the better part of a year to rest up for this one and I intend to make up for the lost time in a big way.

So put down some newspaper and limber up your fingers. The first spin at the puzzle box will be coming real soon.

Till then.

The OctOmen - Not With a Bang, But With Two Paperbacks

I don’t care how weird it sounds to say, this is the entry I was looking forward to all month.

Not because it’s the end of the month – though this has got me itching to get back to working on this site with more regularity – but because I was looking forward to finally checking these books out first hand.

For a long time, these sequels were something I had only known about in passing. In fact, for the better part of several years, there was only one thing I knew for certain about them – when faced with the question of ‘What do we do now that Damien’s dead?’, Gordon McGill’s solution was, and I say this with only the slightest shred of irony, to pull his answer out of someone’s ass.

No. Really. If you’ve heard of these books before this, chances are, it’s largely thanks to the genuinely bizarre origin story they give to their newest antagonist, Damien’s offspring known in the fourth book only as The Abomination before taking on his father’s namesake in the final installment.

For anyone who hasn’t heard this and is wondering what the Hell I’m getting at…well, let’s just rip the band-aid off: as the book sequels present matters, the scene in The Final Conflict between Damien and Kate Reynolds – I’m reluctant to call it a love scene because there is a VERY rapey vibe during it – was carried out through anal sex that then led to Kate giving birth to the Abomination via--I know, I know. Human anatomy doesn’t work that way. At all. It’s part of why these books have been on my ‘Now this I’ve gotta see’ radar.

It's not the sole reason to read this, but it DOES make for a memorable hook to get started on.

As I worked my way through the first three books getting to these, with their own weird elements worked in, I was genuinely starting to look more forward to them than I was the movies. And having completed the five-book cycle – it’s one of the high points of this month’s run.

Let’s be clear – the crazy is there. Quite a few other examples of it too, things like a priest being buried alive by dogs, The Abomination praying to Damien’s embalmed corpse, and the fourth book’s finale, which combines nuclear war with an act of betrayal that’s one part The Passion of the Christ and one-part Weekend at Bernie’s.

Amid all the craziness, the story McGill puts together, to my pleasant surprise, works as a next step for the series, both in terms of sticking to Bernhard’s ‘let the Bible be a road map’ method, as well as just presenting (relatively) logical growth of established plotlines to this point.

It also helps that McGill avoids the mistake The Awakening made – he realizes you can’t just redo the first movie. Instead, we follow the Abomination as a teenager coming into his own with his identity already all sorted out to his followers. We still have outsiders trying to piece things together, but the book also presents much of it in a way that says to the readers ‘yeah, you’ve been on this ride for the past three novels; you already know the score.’

To that end, The Abomination isn’t just a younger Damien – though he shares his father’s looks and abilities, and later his name, it’s established early on that he doesn’t share his father’s goals. Where Damien seeks to rule, using chaos to unite all of humanity under his rule, the Abomination wants destruction, seeking to use his father’s instruments of chaos to plunge humanity into one final, fatal war.

If I’m being perfectly honest, a lot of the positive points I’ve mentioned are more confined to Armageddon 2000, the fourth book in the series. This isn’t to say that the last novel, The Abomination is bad, but it is the weaker of the two. For lack of a better term for it, the problem with The Abomination as a book is, after the ambitious effort to continue the series in Armageddon 2000, The Abomination feels more like a victory lap. It has some memorable pieces to it, including two memorable crucifix-related deaths, but much of the story feels like it’s repeating the beats of the fourth book to diminished returns.

Even the finale, save for an eleventh hour return by a character that lands on the wilder side of these books’ plot points, mostly feels like a more drawn out version of the previous finale, with the betrayal lacking the same interesting rationale behind it that the prior entry offered.

It’s still not a bad read on its own, particularly if you wish to complete the series and see all the plot points wrapped up, but it feels like a step down after the weird, yet entertaining, outing that Armageddon 2000 brings to the table.

It’s a shame these weren’t the stories that got tapped to continue the brand on screen. That first reveal would be a tricky one to pull off – it’s worth noting McGill goes for a book and a half of couching the origins in vague references before finally just putting out on the table in The Abomination, albeit in tasteful wording – but in the right hands, it could have been presented in a way that still fit the feel of the earlier movies.

Or even if they just leaned in to the oddity and stepped on the gas, it would have at least been more entertaining from a sheer ‘we’re actually going there’ perspective than the lackluster reheat we did get.

But that’s, if you’ll excuse the term considering how I started this, hindsight for you.

If you feel curious about these books, either for the closure, the alternate ending compared to that fourth movie, or just for the odd elements like butt birth and corpse hauling, I’d say they’re worth trying to track down. They’re quick reads, and even if your library doesn’t have them (check them first), they’re easy to find cheap on the second-hand market.

Don't feel too discouraged if your library doesn't have much luck with these. I'm not entirely clear if The Abomination got an American release or not. But, again, you can find the British versions cheap enough. And by cheap enough, I mean shipping will likely cost more than the book itself.

And with that, I can now bring this month to a close. This was an interesting ride. A change from Phantasm last year, but not necessarily a bad one, even with my grievances along the way.

As I said before, I’m finally getting back into a feel for this again. So look here soon, there is more coming. Some horror, some otherwise.

Feels good to be back, and a Happy Halloween to you all.

Till next time.

The OctOmen - Take 2: The Omen: 666 (2006)

This IS rare – a double header!

In my defense, both of these were…they were something else, and while I could have just took things past deadline, I really want to close this month proper with the books. I meant what I said, I’m having more fun with those than I expected.

But that is for Halloween proper.

For now, I want you to travel back in time with me once again. The year is 2006, and Hollywood is still madly in the throes of its love affair with horror remakes. With degrees of success coming from rebooting The Ring, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead and The Hills Have Eyes, just about every horror property was getting sized up for a modernization for one reason for another.

The OctOmen - The Made-for-TV Edition - Omen IV: The Awakening

Death is but a door, time a window, and horror franchises have never stopped because their villain was killed off before, so once again, we return to the Damien-less world of The Omen.

This has been an interesting month for me. I stand by my opinion that Damien: Omen II and The Final Conflict are both movies that could have been more than they were, but it was still interesting to find the good elements in them along with the shortcomings.

Watching this movie in light of that, I have to wonder if I have a monkey’s paw on me somewhere, because this sequel feels like it decided to address the horror shortage in the worst way possible.