Hellraiser - The Straight To Video Round-Up

Well, the projector is no longer rolling, but the films keep coming.

Welcome back to the Third Row, where the October descent into Hell(raiser) continues, even if the theater remains empty.

Following the troubled, chaotic shoot on Bloodline (as well as its rather decisive finale) one would be reasonable in suspecting that Miramax and Dimension were ready to hang it up and call that their finale.

One would be wrong in doing so, but not unreasonable. Especially as Clive Barker and Peter Atkins were both less than thrilled with the idea of continuing the series after how things shook out making Bloodline. Atkins in particular felt like there was nowhere else left to go creatively, especially as they had made a movie that basically closed the narrative circuit.

Not that that has ever stopped a studio when money or IP rights were on the line.

Following Bloodline’s release, they shopped around several ideas for where to go next, ultimately choosing to release sequels not in theaters, but straight to video.

At the start of this month, I contemplated the idea of giving each of these entries their own write up. I promptly discarded that idea. 

Partly because six extra writeups were more than I was willing to take on. Much more prominently because, as I started watching them, I found my issues with them tended to be the same ones over and over. So this became the best way for me to address them without just repeating myself over six separate articles.

So buckle your seatbelts. We’re going to the realms of cinematic Hell that Clive Barker refused to touch.

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

The biggest mark of distinction this movie has is that it’s the directorial debut of Scott Derrickson (now more fondly remembered for movies like Sinister and The Black Phone.) Besides that, it also marks what will become a popular refrain in reviews for these films - it’s an alright movie, just not a good Hellraiser movie.
 

I agree with that assessment here. On its own, this is about 80% a serviceable thriller in the vein of unreliable narration horror like Angel Heart and Session 9. The remaining 20% is where it stumbles - the presence of the puzzle box and Pinhead feel like they were cut in to justify the brand, rather than because they help the story. The fit is so jarring that it’s led to a back and forth debate over whether this movie marks the first of what will become a running pattern of Miramax farming standalone spec scripts and rewriting them into Hellraiser movies. At this point, Doug Bradley has maintained this was a spec tag-in, Derrickson maintains otherwise. 

Overall watchable, but would have been better served as its own thing.

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

Everyone, wave to Clive. This is the closest he’s going to get to any of these sequels by choice (we’ll come back to that.) He wasn't too involved, but they at least came to him for notes on this after they had filmed a rough cut.

Besides that gesture, this movie feels like it made a more conscious effort to connect to Hellraiser than its predecessor, trying to bring back original protagonist Kirsty Cotton. It’s nice to see Ashley Laurence and Doug Bradley squaring off again, and I will give the movie that. Just one problem though - it’s functionally Inferno all over again with more concrete Hellraiser ties.

No. Really. It is otherwise the same arc of an amnesiac protagonist reconstructing their memory while being haunted by random Cenobite visions as people keep turning up dead around them. It’s surprising that no one working on this stopped and asked ‘Didn’t we just make this movie?’

Tenuous connections aside - I think Inferno is the more watchable version. What it lacks in cohesive ties, it makes up for in Derrickson’s direction and an all around stronger cast, including Craig Sheffer and James Remar.

(Plus, I’m sorry, Hellseeker - after seeing his later work in 30 Rock and as the All State Mayhem character, I see Dean Winters in your movie and I’m already anticipating finding out he’s playing a secret bastard, so time kind of ruined that twist.)

Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

Good news - after two movies giving us almost the same story, we’re getting a different plot this time.

Less good news - this officially marks the point where Miramax is just openly farming spec scripts to keep the Hellraiser rights.

In terms of how it survives that jump into being a sequel, this lands in the middle. It makes a bit more of an effort to tie itself in than Inferno does, but with clunkier results than Hellseeker. The most overt choice being to tie its antagonist into the Le Marchand family from Bloodline. It’s an idea that could have been something with more focus, but in the finished movie, it just feels like an attempt to justify why this movie’s sinister cult has a puzzle box.

Otherwise, it’s playing a lot of the same notes Inferno and Hellseeker played - especially the idea of the protagonist being plagued by hallucinations of the Cenobites and scenes of Hell.

I’d be curious to see what the original script for this was like before being rewritten. Inferno, if it was a spec script, is one where the transplant (or extraction) is easy to figure out. By comparison, Deader has a lot of threads that could still play in a standalone, but a few that raise questions of what they were like before the Cenobites were added.

It’s not that far from the familiar refrain - as a standalone cult horror movie, it’s okay, nothing special. As a Hellraiser movie, I have no idea what this is doing besides letting Bob Weinstein re-up Miramax’s rights.

Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)

Speaking of doing things to appease contracts…

Of the straight to video movies, this might be one of the more watchable ones. I should say, that comment falls in the vein of damning with faint praise.

As a sequel, this is a WEIRD direction - after years of the puzzle box being a secret item traded in whispers, it’s suddenly a popular online game (and holy Hell, the internet in this movie looks painfully dated for 2005.) Why is this suddenly an online game? Is Hell involved in any way? Don’t go holding your breath for answers. They’re not coming now or ever again. In fact, were it not for the movie’s ending, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a movie that takes place in ‘reality’ and the decision to make Hellraiser into a game instead of a movie was purely for legal. For most of the movie, Pinhead and the box are just window dressing.

The movie they’re window dressing for? That’s more watchable, if not necessarily good. There’s a nugget of an interesting idea, but it’s lost in a pile of contrived twists and turns and some absurdly over the top acting.

To that end, I want to give a shout-out to this cast (for good and ill.) This marks the last time Doug Bradley suited up to play Hell’s resident torturer in chief. It also has arguably some of the most prominent star power of any of these later movies. Part of this is thanks to scoring the likes of Henry Cavill (who is gnawing scenery most of the time he's on screen) and Katheryn Winnick before they were famous.

The other part? Remember how I started with that line about contracts?

A large part of why Hellworld exists is because of a condition in the contract they made to film Deader in Romania. In order to fulfill that condition, they had to rush Hellworld into production. As a result, several of the cast members were scouted because they were in the country and they were available - most notably, that allowed this movie to land the great Lance Henriksen, who brings a nice bit of gravitas to the proceedings.

Of the later sequels, I feel like this might be one I’d be inclined to recommend, preferably with a group. Inferno is the better movie, but this has some GREAT riffing potential.

Hey, I’ll take what silver linings I can get.

Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)

Revelations is notable for two big reasons.

The first, is that this is the first movie to not have Doug Bradley in the role of Pinhead. On reading up on why, I have to give a shout-out to the man as a performer. Over the course of seven movies, he brought a genuine presence and menace to a role that, frequently, seemed to be at the mercy of studio indecisiveness. Despite the numerous behind the scenes problems, he kept trucking and bringing it every time.
Then Revelations happened and he had to draw a line.
As he tells it, following the rushed production two-hander of Deader and Hellworld, Bradley wasn’t so much formally made an offer for Revelations as he was privately approached by people involved. After mulling over the pitch they made, his conclusions, to quote him directly: ‘The ink is barely dry on the script, and it is scheduled to be in front of the cameras in two weeks time and in the can by the middle of next month’ led him to turn down the offer.
The man was a consummate professional for over thirty years, and I can’t fault him for finally looking at a rush like that and deciding ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

The other notable reason?

Everyone, wave to Clive again, but try not to be too offended by the middle finger.

(source if you don’t believe me: 

https://twitter.com/RealCliveBarker/status/105189711416524800 )

I’ve gotta side with both Barker and Bradley on this. If I had to say something nice for it, it's that, this one doesn't feel like a spec script - thanks in part to how much it lifts pretty openly (and far less effectively) from the first movie. That, however, is undermined by how rushed and cheap the finished movie is - largely because this was done to help Miramax maintain its hold on the Hellraiser rights.

Part of me feels like I’m kicking a guy while he’s down on this, but there’s really no polite way to put it - this movie feels less like an official sequel and more like a fan movie that Miramax decided to buy to keep their hold on the brand.

Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)

So, here’s an interesting one for you.
We’ve had Hellraiser movies. We’ve had spec scripts reworked into Hellraiser movies. We’ve had what we were told was a Hellraiser movie that could have easily passed for a spec graft.

Then we have Judgment. Judgment started as a Hellraiser film. Then it got repurposed as a standalone movie. Then it got turned back into a Hellraiser movie because the IP rights had to be refreshed again.

True to custom, this lands on the side of ‘pretty good horror movie, less good Hellraiser movie’ (hey, I told you this risked repetition.)

In a move that feels like this franchise decided to give me the Monkey’s Paw treatment, this sequel tries to expand the larger vision of Hell beyond Pinhead. In this case, that comes in the form of a new branch of Hell known as the Stygian Inquisition. It’s the kind of idea I’d been wanting from this series since part II, so I feel like I should be happier. The problem is, it’s coming after nine movies of being the Cenobite show. So rather than just feeling like a natural expansion of the strange mythology Barker set in motion from the beginning, it feels more like a backdoor pilot for a new concept of eternal damnation as a way to work around their tentpole actor cutting ties (his fate being one that causes this to break sharply from what Bloodline had set as an end game).

In short - could be better, but as the post Barker years go, this is still one of the more watchable movies.

—

And so, we come to the end.

Well, one ending, anyway.

The original run of movies is over, but we still have two more entries to come after this, because Hell isn’t in this business of staying quiet.

We’ll be closing this month on a new beginning, but before that, everyone get ready to wave to Clive one more time. Amid this stream of increasingly tenuous sequels, he finally took it on himself to close the door on his creation on his own terms.

Till next time, when I dig into Barker’s less than fond farewell with The Scarlet Gospels.

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.