Pinhead off of Hellraiser is back and is an lady

[Famous Mortimer]

There's no other thread for this, and as it's new-ish, might as well allow people to read my bollocks about the earlier films too.

It's a slick, modern horror thing, with everything good and bad that entails. I feel like the weight of the good Hellraiser films was the sense that they didn't come for you unless you went looking for them, and that's largely ignored here (Goran Visnic is too minor a character for it to be about him, even though that's sort of his arc). I don't like the new Cenobite designs, particularly, and there's zero reason to have Pinhead in this again, unless it's now the official uniform of the main priest of whatever unknown God is their boss.

The motivation of the boyfriend was completely hidden from the audience, I feel like - why didn't he take the cube, open it and kill...hookers? Homeless people? Racists? Letting Riley take it and keeping his fingers crossed she opened it seems odd, and being cool with the big chance of his girlfriend and her friends dying. Also, what if she'd gone "I'm not breaking into this safe. I'm off to beg my brother's forgiveness"? I'm prepared to be proved wrong, but I don't feel like his endgame informed any of his actions.

I'd be surprised if we see any more Hellraisers in this particular thread. Maybe Hulu will knock out another one for a quarter the budget then quietly retire it?

[Famous Mortimer]

Because I wanted to like the new one more, I decided to watch the last old one, Hellraiser: Judgment from 2018. Turns out my "this'll be shit, I reckon" previous thought was entirely correct.

The Cenobites now have a bureaucracy, truly the most hellish of all things. The Auditor, who just has a bit of a slashed face (he wears a suit!) invites criminals, gets them to tell him all the bad stuff they've done, types it up and then an entirely unscarred middle-aged chubby bloke comes in and eats the pages, vomits them into a hole in the wall, and three topless women go through the vomit and decide whether they're guilty or not. They're then flayed and sent off to the Cenobite dimension, or whatever.

But most of the movie is a police procedural, where the Carter brothers, both cops, are on the trail of the Preceptor, who's killing people for breaking one of the ten commandments. They're joined by Egerton, who's in it because...not sure. She's a good actor, but sort of a fifth wheel, plot wise.

Spoilers ahead. Older brother Sean goes to a house to investigate things, and happens upon the Cenobites office. He's tortured a bit but Jophiel, one of the very first angels, demands he be released because he didn't do anything. His typed up confession causes the chubby bloke and the topless ladies to die, as well. He then starts having visions of the cenobites and freaking out.

(there's a funny bit where the auditor goes to find Pinhead to ask his advice, and Pinhead is just sat in an empty room, doing nothing. That's your legendary horror movie villain, everyone!)

So, Sean's the Preceptor, and has killed a whole lot of people to this point (his confession poisoned them people because it was so evil, which you'd think would be right up their street). The only reason you'd even suspect he's the baddie is because there are like 8 people with lines in this and it had to be one of them - the movie itself gives us no indication it's him until the second he reveals himself, and the other cops have zero suspicions.

It feels like more of a real film than "Revelations", which was found footage bollocks designed to keep the filming rights. Gary J Tunnicliffe, much better known as a special effects guy (to be fair, the effects here are decent and gross) writes and directs - his last directing effort was a Jack and the Beanstalk movie with Chevy Chase and Gilbert Gottfried in it from 2009. It's like he didn't want to make a Hellraiser installment, so makes them kind of boring and largely irrelevant, and also makes them subordinates to the angel Jophiel. I guess the thing about them being outside all that good and evil stuff is a long distant memory.

Oh, and the ending is stupid, of course.

Nowadays, it feels more like a Leprechaun or Critters-level franchise than it does a Halloween one, and given how popular it once was, I think that's a bit of a shame. As if to rub your nose in that fact, fourth-billed is Heather Langenkamp, who's on screen for maybe 20 seconds. The new Pinhead is fine, though, even if he's just doing an impression of Doug Bradley (way better than the bloke from part 9).

One last thing about this rotten waste of a movie - they refer, several times, to the Lament Configuration being a wooden box. I'm pretty sure it was made out of metal, right? It's definitely got non-metal workings inside it, and was once made into a massive space-station. Also, in this, there are bunch of boxes sat on a dusty fireplace, and they're barely relevant to proceedings.

This sucked! A serial killer thriller where the cops have no idea until the killer literally bashes them over the head with his identity, and a Hellraiser movie where Pinhead is introduced doing nothing in a blank room in a derelict suburban home.

[SteveDave]

I reckon "Deader", the one about the journalist going to Eastern Europe for some reason, is my favourite of the later installments.

WE HAVE SUCH SHITE TO SHOW YOU

I've watched all of these awful films over the last month and "Deader" is the only one I abandoned. It had all the production qualities of Channel 5 porn. "Revelations" was awful but at least that looked like American porn.

"Inferno" (5) was the best with "Hellseeker" (6) being a close second. Both didn't have much Pinhead.

[Sonny_Jim]

I bet she's never even played a real pinball table, only Space Cadet pinball on Windows 98.  And she's got the gall to call herself a 'pinhead'.

[Famous Mortimer]

WE HAVE SUCH SHITE TO SHOW YOU

I've watched all of these awful films over the last month and "Deader" is the only one I abandoned. It had all the production qualities of Channel 5 porn. "Revelations" was awful but at least that looked like American porn.

"Inferno" (5) was the best with "Hellseeker" (6) being a close second. Both didn't have much Pinhead.

Maybe my appreciation of Kari Wuhrer from her time on "Sliders" carried me through "Deader", but I enjoyed it. Better than "Lance Henriksen programs a computer game to specifically trap the kids he thinks are responsible for his son's death", aka Hellworld, surely?

I've read a little bit more about "Judgment". Tunnicliffe had been lobbying to make a Hellraiser movie for years, which makes the crap he ended up with even worse. Barker had a script for a remake / reboot, but Tunnicliffe decided to go with his own script, which was "se7en" with demons. But the stuff about the demonic bureaucracy is moderately accurate to Barker's books, apparently?

I bet she's never even played a real pinball table, only Space Cadet pinball on Windows 98.  And she's got the gall to call herself a 'pinhead'.

Is that why there's a pinball machine in the boyfriend's apartment?

[SteveDave]

Maybe my appreciation of Kari Wuhrer from her time on "Sliders" carried me through "Deader", but I enjoyed it. Better than "Lance Henriksen programs a computer game to specifically trap the kids he thinks are responsible for his son's death", aka Hellworld, surely?

"Hellworld" had Superman and one bloke from "The Walking Dead" in it though versus "Sliders" and the "Actually she's now my wife" man from "Four Weddings And A Funeral"

"Deader" did regain the "Where the fuck is this supposed to be taking place" feeling from the first two "Hellraiser" films though. At one point the American woman who's been undercover with a drugs gang in London for however long bribes a Bucharest landlord with a twenty dollar bill.

[Alberon]

Am I right in thinking that after the first two or three most of these were non-Hellraiser scripts at first?

[Famous Mortimer]

"Hellworld" might be the stupidest of all the Hellraisers, which at least makes it different to all the later sequels which are just police-chase-a-killer.

Am I right in thinking that after the first two or three most of these were non-Hellraiser scripts at first?

According to a previous discussion, I think all of 5-8 were non-Hellraiser scripts, and it really shows with a few.

[SteveDave]

Just finishing off "Judgement"

I'm enjoying the Angel that appears to be being played by Jenna from "30 Rock"

The Pinhead looks vaguely like Doug thingy in this one.