8-17-08: Been a week since I finished the Hellraiser series in one go. Parts of this and the end of the first movie are the only images sticking with me (and scaring me!). The corpse scene in 'Deader' is firmly planted in my fear garden and I can easily see myself setting up a nightmare in which I am on the Deader
ritual table. Added half a star, even though I still hate the plot and think the head Deader wasn't cast well.______This entry has potential, as there are some really cool sets, a decent lead, and a return to a more Cenobite-grounded story. But the mistake this movie makes is not making any sense whatsoever. With any sort of subjectively/cryptically ordered plot with dream or hallucination sequences, things get tricky for writers and teh audience can quickly be left behind if the director can't put the right visual cues on screen to make up for what the writers didn't do. This movie can't pick up that slack, so it's story becomes quickly frustrating. PLOT SPOILERS BEGIN: I don't think there needed to be another reference to the leMerchant line because that was what ALL of Bloodline was about! And it does NOT at all explain how this Merchant descendant is able to harness supernatural powers. I get that he's trying to solve the lament configuration by using other people, but I don't understand how he is able to bring them back from the dead as deaders, or how he is able to elude Pinhead's powers using these people as buffers, which would seem to me that these people would just make him more vulnerable to Cenobite attack than fortified against it.SPOILERS ENDAnyway, now I'm totally fed up with most of the movies ending by Pinhead doing the signature chains-n-hooks tears you apart sequence made famous by Barker's work in the first entry, and this movie gives us another one.This movie did creep me out on some levels though. In terms of making me weirded out by freaky Euro trash scenes, this is a million times better or cooler than Hostel because this is actually freaky, whereas Hostel is just fuckin funny and stupid. The scene with our heroine and the corpse in the beginning of the movie, who becomes a secondary character, is pretty damn cool and memorable - great cinematography and shot angles (someone actually tried!). If the script wasn't so supremely muddy and indecipherable, like most of the Hellraiser movies, I'd be mass recommending this, even with the worst ever ending chain-hooks sequence in BAD BAD CGI.
August 13, 2008
