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.)
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.
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