‘Like a bad horror movie, isn’t it?‘
Well, we’ve reached the eighth entry in the Hellraiser franchise, and, depressingly, things haven’t improved. As this one was filmed back-to-back with Hellraiser: Deader in Romania and also boasts the same director in Rick Bota, it’s perhaps unsurprising that both entries are fairly similar. They were also both retooled from screenplays that initially had nothing to do with Pinhead and the Cenobites, and, once again, this too is obvious from the finished product we are left with…
There is a Hellraiser video game (for some reason) that is so addictive that a kid called Adam commits suicide while playing it. Two years later, five friends respond to an invitation to take part in some kind of event based on the aforementioned video game. Henry Cavill plays Mike, one of the five; genre legend Lance Henriksen pops up as the Host; and everyone else involved is so forgettable that I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup despite the fact that I only finished watching the film moments ago.
I wrote in my review for Deader that that film felt cheap and incoherent. Well, this one feels slightly less cheap whilst still being even more incoherent than the previous entry, if anything. Some characters appear to be ghosts, large parts of the film are revealed to be a hallucination, the third-act twist makes no real sense and the kiss-off at the end only confuses matters more rather than providing clarity. Cavill demonstrates nothing to suggest that he would go on to become a household name and while Henriksen is always good value, we have seen this kind of performance from him many times before. Although his mere presence does push this slightly ahead of the film that preceded but only by a nose. Doug Bradley is back as Pinhead but is given absolutely nothing to do (his big payoff line at the end is once again disappointing), the practical effects have been mostly replaced by cheap-looking CGI and the whole thing seems like a misguided attempt to cash in on the torture porn craze that had kicked off with the success of Saw a year earlier.
Characters entering a kind of cyber world and a nu-metal adjacent soundtrack? This could only be 2005. And that’s where this film should stay. On to the next one.
