by Nelson
At one point, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series was a promising new franchise of terror, but, in many ways, it fell victim to the success of the big names of 80s horror. It wasn’t so much that Freddy and Jason were more popular than Pinhead, it was that the films got caught up in trying to appeal to the expectations of those movies’ fans. Audiences were packing theaters to cheer on the bad guys as they took out teenagers in one elaborately creative death scene after the other. The Cenobites weren’t really intended to follow that trend. Uncle Frank’s main squeeze, Julia, is technically the big bad of the first two flicks, and, in the second chapter, her new boyfriend depowers and murders Pinhead and his buddies. The original concept had way more to do with corrupt, evil human beings than it did with the leather clad monsters who pop up whenever a puzzlebox known as The Lament Configuration is solved.
But, let’s be honest, Pinhead looks cool. The Cenobites look cool. People wanted the movies to revolve around them. I wanted the movies to revolve around them. And so, starting with Hellraiser III, the man with nails in his head takes center stage and becomes a full on supervillain with aspirations of world domination. After that, it was off to space in Hellraiser: Bloodline – a film so plagued by studio meddling and abrupt rewrites that the director, himself, refused to put his name on it. Now, I could write a whole article about how Bloodline is actually pretty awesome, but this isn’t that article.
Instead, I’d like to focus on what happened after raising hell went intergalactic. Regardless of how much the Cenobites taking out a band of space marines may please me, the fourth entry in the franchise proved to be so unpopular that the Lament Configuration transformed from puzzlebox to VHS tape. Like Children of the Corn, the Cenobite saga continued outside of theaters via the magic of Direct-to-Video horror. Most, if not all, of the entries originated as non-Hellraiser scripts with the mythos shoehorned in, but Doug Bradley stuck around as Pinhead for the first four. They’ve definitely got their ups and downs, but they at least merit taking a look at. They’re not all great, but they are a million and one times better than the Children of the Corn DTVs.
Inferno kicks off the video store saga. It’s also more or less the template for all of them. It follows Detective Joseph Thorn, a cop who likes his puzzles, his prostitutes, and his cocaine. Needless to say, the character isn’t particularly endearing – especially since he’s got a wife and daughter that he neglects to such an extent that he actually goes home just to let the family know that he’s headed out again.
Anyway, Thorn encounters the puzzlebox at a murder scene. Since he’s super good at puzzles and all, he solves the Lament Configuration and unleashes the Cenobites. Well, sort of. We don’t get any chains or flesh ripping, but Thorn finds himself on a collision course with a mysterious, seemingly omnipotent, criminal mastermind known only as “The Engineer.” He sinks deeper into a nightmarish world of severed fingers, perverted ice cream truck drivers, and karate kickin’ cowboys. Inferno is never going to be one of those movies that the Hellraiser enthusiasts point to as a series highlight, but any movie that devotes an entire sequence to a shitty cop being beaten down by ninja cowboys is alright by me.
Everything comes to a head when Thorn’s therapist reveals that he was really Pinhead the whole time and that the detective has been living in his own personal Hell ever since he solved the puzzlebox. He even makes a point to tell Joseph what an absolute bastard he is, which delights me to no end. When you’re such a horrible person that the “High Priest of Hell” is giving you a sideways glance, then you absolutely deserve what you get. And, in this case, we get a satisfying conclusion when it’s revealed that the puzzle loving detective is stuck in an eternal loop and doomed to repeat the events of the movie over and over again.
Hellseeker and Inferno both have quite a bit in common. They focus on awful male characters, and they’ve got a very similar premise. Even the big final twist is essentially the same. The main difference is that, in this one, Kirsty Cotton returns to the series for the first time since Hellraiser II. That microscopic particle of continuity is so refreshing that you can almost ignore that Hellseeker is Inferno but with a gold digging, cheating husband instead of a dirty cop.
The story picks up with a guy named Trevor after the disappearance of his wife, Kirsty, in a car accident. That’s right, Kirsty is already gone by the time this movie kicks off. She pops up in a few flashbacks and dream sequences, but I’d call it a safe bet that Ashley Laurence finished all of her filming in a few days, a week tops. Trevor is suffering from a head injury and can’t quite seem to remember what happened to Kirsty after the couple drove off a bridge Maitland-style. To make matters worse, random women keep showing up and trying to seduce him. And the cops totally think he may have killed his wife. Oh, and terrible things keep happening around him, from witnessing grisly murders to watching his best friend commit suicide. As if that wasn’t enough, poor Trevor is even forced to share a bus with a big guy who won’t turn his boombox down. Horrific.
Of course, if you watched Inferno, you’ve probably got a decent idea of where things are going. In the theatrical movies, opening the puzzlebox causes a bunch of chains to shoot at you before the Cenobites show up and tear you apart. In the direct-to-video movies, opening the puzzlebox means that you live through a 90-minute nightmare before Pinhead pops up at the end and gives the bad news about having to spend an eternity in Hell.
Even though it still uses the “you were in Hell the whole time” twist, I do think it’s neat that we don’t really find out how Kirsty has managed to outplay her husband until the very end. I go back and forth between this one and Inferno when it comes to having a favorite DTV entry. Sometimes I think Hellseeker has the edge since it brought back the lead from the first two flicks, but, when you find out that the director cut a scene between her and Pinhead that would have fully fleshed out their bargain in the movie and served as a bridge of continuity between the theatrical and DTV entries, it makes you want to take this one and ritualistically burn it in a pyre.
Deader has always vexed me. Franchise fanatics seem to like it. I’ve seen the fact that it was filmed overseas heralded as the series “returning to its roots.” I’ve even encountered fans who believe Deader comes the closest to getting back to the concept of the first few movies – bad people who try to use the box for bad things and get what’s coming to them; this causes me to wonder what they thought was happening in the previous two movies. Nevertheless, I’ve run into so many who swear by Deader as the highlight of the DTV entries that I’ve genuinely set out to try and appreciate it….
But I just don’t like it. At all.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s me. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I’m just not as much of a Hellraiser fan as I thought. Or maybe people like this entry so much better because it stars Kari Wuhrer instead of a cokehead detective and a cheating husband?
Deader’s main character is Amy Klein, an investigative journalist who is willing to go in real deep to get a story. When we meet her, she’s just getting back from hanging out in a crack den because apparently The London Underground’s readers absolutely demanded a firsthand account of life in a crackhouse. Her latest assignment is to investigate a weird suicide cult led by a guy who brings folks back to life and really, really wants someone to solve The Lament Configuration. Amy winds up getting the box and opening it. As always, surreal and horrific things start happening around her. We’re constantly jumping from one dream sequence to the other, and there are lots of abusive childhood flashbacks. Then Pinhead shows up at the end and kills everyone. Oh, and apparently the cult leader is a relative of the guy who designed and built the Lament Configuration. But that doesn’t really matter because, by the time we find this out, he’s being torn to shreds.
The last Hellraiser to feature Doug Bradley in the Pinhead role is almost universally regarded as the worst. It’s easy to see why, too. Part VIII tries to pull a Wes Craven’s New Nightmare on the audience, except that instead of saying that all of the other movies were “just movies,” Hellworld has the audacity to say that all of the Hellraiser stuff is “just a computer game,” an idea that is made even more asinine by the fact that the computer game, Hellworld, literally plays soundbites from the films.
The story centers on a group of friends who were really into the game until one of them went all-in, Leroy Jenkins style, and set himself on fire. A year later, the surviving friends are invited to a big Hellworld party in a big mansion. Right about the time you’re getting ready to call an audible and turn it off, Lance Henrikson pops up as the guy hosting the party (and he’s literally called “The Host”), and you find yourself with a slight hope that things may not be so bad. But Henrikson didn’t show up to offer script rewrites; the man is there to get a paycheck, and his presence doesn’t mean a thing except that a good actor not named Doug Bradley is part of the cast. Hellraiser VIII uses a “it was _____ the whole time!” twist just like its predecessors, but, instead of “you were in Hell and didn’t know it!” it’s “you were drugged and in a coffin and being buried alive and didn’t’ know it!” Then the real Pinhead shows up to kill The Host and launch a lawsuit against the makers of a game that used his likeness and voice without permission.
I don’t know how many more DTV Hellraisers we got, and, lazy as it may sound, I genuinely don’t care to look it up. I know that Dimension put them into production in order to retain the franchise rights, and I know that they feature a Pinhead played by someone other than Mr. Bradley. That second factor is all I really need to know. Apparently, the series is getting a reboot with a fully reimagined take on the Lead Cenobite soon, but, again, I’m not really interested. You see, I’m a part of the problem when it comes to Hellraiser fans. While I can appreciate and enjoy (most of) the series, at the end of the day I just want to see Pinhead kill people and say cool stuff. Sue me.
Doubtfire 