hellraiser: inferno (video 2000)
“ah, the eternal refrain of humanity. pleading ignorance. begging for mercy.”
the dtv era starts with a movie brave enough to ask the question “what if hellrasier was a really plodding noir?” the director/co-writer forcefully denies the persistent rumor that this was an unrelated script that got massaged into a hellraiser movie, but pinhead himself claims it was, so honestly who the fuck knows? whatever the case may be, it sure is pretty bad!!
like, when i realized this was a noir i thought there was a strong chance of me actually enjoying it in spite of its badness? but they would’ve needed to turn up the noir elements to almost parodic degrees of intensity for it to have worked on that level. so instead we just have a pretty boring noir with some occasional awesome (but not nearly enough) cenobite shit. alas. d-rank
hellraiser: hellseeker (video 2002)
“which do you find more exhilarating, pain or pleasure? personal, i prefer pain.”
i’m a guy with amnesia who every single woman in this movie wants to bone for some reason. i’m going to spend the whole movie trying to piece together whether or not i murdered my wife. all i know for sure is my car went flying into a lake in the first few minutes of this movie, shortly after you realized i was played by the guy from all those insurance commercials. what were the odds. and with your cut-rate insurance, you could be paying for this yourself. so get allstate. you can save money and be better protected from mayhem. like me.
okay but seriously, this one is weird as fuck? but that actually makes it a slight but noticeable improvement over both its predecessor & its successor. i was rolling my eyes at this movie throughout quite a bit of its runtime, but that’s still better than sighing with disinterest, y’know? also there was some genuinely kinky shit in this. though it frequently was like two seconds sandwiched between various women throwing themselves at the mayhemtagonist in the most thoroughly cable tv unsexy “sexy” ways ever. fucking straight people, i swear. maybe that’s the real torture.
also this desperately needed more pinhead, every scene he was in was 10x better than the rest of the movie. i could say that about almost all of these, but y’know. c-rank
hellraiser: deader (video 2005)
“you opened the box and your soul belongs to me.”
annnnnnd we’re back to violently disinteresting. lovely.
again there’s some actually okay bondage in this (not nearly enough, though) and i did get a kick out of the protagonist summoning the cenobites for the, uh, rescue? i fucking hated the ending, though. i really hate when movies use suicide as a cheap plot device. it just makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
not the worst of these, i don’t think, but pretty fucking bad. d-rank
hellraiser: hellworld (video 2005)
“what wonders we have to show you.”
early on, i thought the deal was that they were in a hellraiser video game where if you die in the video game you die in real life, and honestly that woulda been exactly the kind of bad i woulda happily embraced? but it turned out they were doing something so similar it might as well have been that but they weren’t quite going that route. i have no idea why the half measure, but it’s a hellraiser movie from the dtv era so it’s kinda whatever?
i love how the like most popular game ever (the impression i got was that it was meant to be a stand-in for a like even more popular version of world of warcraft) looks like a pretty bad flash game you’d play in your browser, and the way people played it made actually no sense? it literally read like someone who had never played a video game trying to imagine what playing a video game was like. it’s like one of those scenes where somebody’s playing an arcade game and their buddy is looking over their shoulder cheering them on, only they’re doing it on a boxy pc with a crt screen and it just reads as kinda sad & hilarious?
speaking of truly pathetic depictions of something that’s meant to be cool, yeah i’m sure the goth bdsm kids would be super into this extremely normie tv movie party. you know, the kind where there’s uncopyrighted music playing in the background and everyone is just sort of vaguely holding their hands up and not quite waving their arms but not quite not waving their arms? you know! a party!
look, i’ve basically never been to a party and i’m clowning on this movie’s party, so that should give you an idea of what a good party it is, okay?
the saving grace here is that there’s actually kind of a ton of bondage in this? and torture? so that rules. this super isn’t the worst hellraiser movie or anything, but it’s frustrating how easily it could’ve been like 10x better, and also i just kind of can’t stand unkinky depictions of kinky people, sorry. c-rank
hellraiser: revelations (video 2011)
“this trinket of sensation you feel now will be a delight compared to the onslaught of agony that awaits at our hands.”
yikes, you can just super tell this was made for no reason other than to hold onto a copyright. like i enjoyed a few of the scenes with the cenobites, but that’s kind of par for the course for these? but yeah i just don’t know who or what i was supposed to care about in this movie. probably nobody & nothing?
i mean, this is literally at the very minimum of what is unambiguously considered “feature length.” it was written & shot in a matter of three weeks, and it shows it. it’s pretty abundantly clear what was happening here, and i don’t really want to waste any more of your time digging into the cinematic equivalent of realizing you have a paper due tomorrow, panicking, and then spending more time tweaking the font & margins to hit your page count without making it obvious that you fucked with the font & margins than you do writing the thing. d-rank
hellraiser (comic 2011-15)
“of course. every ruler needs subjects.”
boom studios’ run of hellraiser comics, comprising the hellraiser ongoing, hellraiser: the road below & hellraiser: the dark watch was characterized by a much tighter continuity than the epic comics days.
the overarching plot is sometimes admittedly a bit tedious when you zoom out & consider it in the aggregate, with the whole thing basically centering on elliott spencer, kirsty cotton, and harry d’amour playing musical chairs (or i guess musical pins?) with the role of pinhead. but the moment-to-moment experience of at least having a coherent storyline and characters to follow made the actual experience of reading it quite a bit less tedious than the epic comics anthologies. (minus book of the damned which was just brilliant.)
part of it is just the fact that we get to see a hell of a lot more of the cenobites. which is just. all i’ve ever wanted from this shit. it’s again kinda hit or miss with how often it’s overtly kinky, but there are a few pretty great moments of kink in there.
it wasn’t until their last miniseries, hellraiser: bestiary, that there was a limited return to more anthologized storytelling, and admittedly this was responsible for some of my favorite moments of boom studios’ run.
none of this was groundbreaking or anything, but it was definitely a more consistent experience. i had a feeling going in that i was going to enjoy boom studios’ time with the license more given that i read a lot of their current stuff today, so it was nice to have that vindicated. (plus i added a few things to my “to read” list from old ads of theirs in these comics, so that’s also nice.) b-rank
sherlock holmes and the servants of hell (novel 2016)
by paul kane
“by all means, explore. we will find you. then we shall spend an eternity exploring your flesh.”
the weirdest thing about this is that it’s available at bookstores rather than on ao3?
okay in all seriousness, this started out pretty strong and just really got less good as it went on, unfortunately. the first third of the book is from watson’s perspective and is written in the style of one of his first person accounts (though it is apparently a journal he is writing to work his own feelings out & intends to burn afterwards), the second is a third person narrative from holmes’ perspective, and the third alternates between the two perspectives.
the first third is by far the strongest, and got me super excited for this rather ridiculous crossover. the second third is also pretty consistent in quality, i have no major complaints about it. but the final act, which ought to have been the payoff for it all, was frankly just kind of tedious.
each chapter alternates between watson’s first person narrative and the third person narrative that follows holmes, but the vast majority of these chapters overlap so you end up retreading the same ground over & over.
i can see where that kind of perspective layering could actually be pretty interesting but with the chapters from holmes’ perspective not even being first person it just doesn’t have that much of an impact? and if i can be 100% honest it truly started to feel like padding, as if the author needed each of the three parts of the book to be roughly equal in length or something. idk.
again a lot of this is actually super compelling and a whole lot of fun to read, it just badly overstays its welcome and that ended up contributing quite a bit to my impression of the book since the more tedious bits of it are what determined what kind of taste was left in my mouth. i know it’s not entirely fair, but neither is solving a rubiks cube and then getting tortured for eternity, so. c-rank
hellraiser: judgment (video 2018)
“here endeth the lesson.”
i’m not sure what’s weirder: that hellrasier’s response to the saw franchise was so belated, or that it was such a capitulation to the latter’s ownership of the genre. a sort of… exchange… of power, you might say.
okay, half-kidding aside, let’s be super blunt here. this is absolutely not the response i would like to see this franchise make to saw. i like the saw movies just fine. they’re extremely silly. but i don’t want a hellraiser sequel that apes them, i want it to double down on its own shit. i want it to come out swinging with like, “hey, you assholes might run the torture porn biz these days, but let me just fucking remind you who started it.”
most of all, i would want it to double down on the things that make it so different from movies like saw and hostel. it isn’t about some fucked up moralizing or about weird xenophobia. pain isn’t a means to an end in support of some fucked up worldview. pain is the point. pain is the altar upon which we worship, and the thing we worship upon it. (on our fucking knees. where we fucking belong.)
as previously alluded to, it’s also just kinda weird that someone seems to have finally decided that they had to respond to saw at this point? this movie’s release was not only fully after saw’s mainline run of 7 films in 6 years, it was even spiral? you guys remember spiral, right? the reboot/prequel that you probably haven’t thought about a single time since you heard they were making a reboot/prequel to saw?
for real, guys. i just thoroughly don’t get it.
like, don’t get me wrong. this is definitely one of the… “best” of the later saw sequels? the scare quotes are doing quite a bit of load-bearing in that statement. because even though it was measurably more competent, i would frankly rather watch the allstate commercial guy flail around like a dumbass or the one that was just barely too cowardly to literally do “if you die in the hellraiser video game, you die in hellraiser real life!”
i’d just rather be having fun than be watching a fairly competently-made but ultimately pointless torture porn/police procedural mashup. like… it wasn’t the worst way to kill an hour and a half, but it sure as hell(raiser) wasn’t the best. c-rank
hellraiser (movie 2022)
“greater delights await. we wish to see you proceed.”
this isn’t terrible. like, it’s the best hellraiser sequel since the first two and it isn’t particularly close. but what it is is disappointing. because it had all the potential in the world to be the best hellraiser movie period, and it’s certainly not that.
the characters are… fine. like, i got invested in them pretty early on. it felt like we spent more time establishing them than we needed to, actually, and then didn’t really actually do much with them, which would be fine except it makes all that time feel wasted. like, the reason to get people invested in characters in a movie like this is to put them through some serious shit, and they kind of forgot to bring the serious shit imo.
the story is… fine. the stuff they did with the box having different configurations and needing blood was interesting enough i guess? like, it made it feel like there was always something going on, and it wasn’t until we were closing in on the end of the movie that i really started getting pretty impatient like, “okay, is this it? i guess this is it. i guess this is all we’re getting.”
the pacing is… not fine. this needed an editor something fierce. this is the only thing i can really say was “wrong” with the movie in any kind of technical sense. and it’s just kinda weird? because every single movie in this franchise to this point has been a tight 90, and it does not feel like this movie had more than 90 minutes worth of stuff it needed to cram in, so why they would let the runtime balloon to a full two hours is kinda beyond me.
the gore is… okay, the gore is kinda great, actually? but what’s missing is everything around that gore. it isn’t sexy. it isn’t menacing. you don’t feel like it’s always waiting around the corner.
hell, no one even talks about pain enough in this movie. it’s just a generic horror movie with some pretty 101 level shit to say about addiction. and like, that’s not a bad movie to make, but it isn’t a fucking hellraiser movie.
none of that is why this was so personally disappointing to me. well, except for that last bit, but that also plays into the bigger issue here. which is that i was so excited we were getting a fucking trans woman pinhead??? and she’s barely in it. and like… she’s glorious, but they just don’t give her nearly enough time to chew the scenery and promise us a world of pain & delight that will have the audience licking her boots and begging her to slowly torture us to death.
look, pinhead & friends not being in one of these things enough is nothing new, but it’s just super disappointing in this specific case because of how much i was looking forward to having a trans woman queen of pain.
the real problem here, hulu, is that tease & denial is just thoroughly not my kink. and every time the walls of reality parted to open a gateway to the cenobites’ realm, i found myself scooting to the edge of my seat & thinking, “yes, yes, this is about to get so good,” and it just never did.
what i kept wanting from this was more. more cenobites. more torture. (any torture at all, really.) i can see all the potential energy contained within jamie clayton’s performance as pinhead. given enough time to really let loose & enough dialogue about how she was going to fucking torture the protagonists to death & make them like it, she would absolutely own the screen and everyone watching. why she wasn’t afforded that time & that dialogue is beyond me. i mean, i need to reiterate that this is the first hellraiser movie that’s 2 hours long. how the fuck are you stretching things out that much and not devoting some of that time to your fucking trans goddess of pain?
look, i’m sorry, i know i’m really fixating on this, i just… when i heard they cast a trans woman (and a trans woman who i already knew was a brilliant actor at that) to play pinhead i thought they got it. and when we actually started watching the movie and i saw that two of the main characters were a gay couple, i was even more hopeful. but this is just… not it.
like, holy shit, over the years this series has had flashes of sadomasochistic brilliance. at its best, this franchise has given us cenobites that taunted their victims, that played with their food, and delivered their ultimate torture with exquisite relish. i really thought this remake was going to grasp the core appeal and push all their chips across the table to support it, but instead we got… this.
for fuck’s sake, please make these movies kinkier & gayer. please. please have the gay couples be less chaste. please have the cenobites taunt their victims more. i waded through so much mediocre straight shit to get here, you fucking owe me.
here’s hoping this does well enough to get a sequel but not well enough to get a nearly-identical sequel, because what we need is for jamie clayton to get her unrestrained hellraiser 2/3-esque sequel where she can really go all out.
let’s go, hellraiser. you have such motherfucking sights to show me. you fucking owe me. c-rank
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