A crooked detective becomes caught up in a world of murder and intrigue after investigating a homicide seemingly connected to the Lament Configuration. Soon, he also discovers the connections they all share with a mysterious figure known as "The Engineer."
Hellraiser: Inferno was the first film in the franchise not to be given any theatrical release, and therefore, one has to assume the bar must be set incredibly low, especially given how mediocre the previous installments had been. For starters, it decides to ignore continuity in favor of just trying to scare the viewer with a few scenes of torture and peppering it with a whole lot of the usual "Is he crazy?" angles. Secondly, it has no sympathetic lead. Say what you will about Kirsty Cotton, but at least she felt like someone you could identify with and feel sorry for. Joe Thorne, played by Craig Sheffer (if the guy isn't related to C.B. Dollaway, then he's a filthy liar), is a douchebag through and through. He's a cheating and dirty main character, and you don't feel an ounce of sorrow for the guy at any point in the film. Most horror films rely upon having SOMEONE you can feel for or root for, but I suppose the writers for this installment just decided to forsake that.
This film's biggest problem is that it barely feels like a horror film. True, we get some decent gore for the budget it has, but it feels like a cop drama mixed with a psychological thriller, while deciding to occasionally throw in a cenobite cameo or two. Hell, we even get a scene of cowboys trained in martial arts attacking Joe. What does THAT have to do with Hellraiser? A quick bit of research suggests that this wasn't even originally supposed to involve the franchise whatsoever, but for reasons I'm not 100% certain of, they opted to use this script instead. Pinhead doesn't even get to speak until about the last ten minutes of the film. Mind you, the minimum use of the cenobites worked incredibly well in the first Hellrasier, but for some reason, it just doesn't work here. And for fuck's sake, Doug Bradley has one of the most memorable voices in horror history! You could probably get chills just hearing him read brownie recipes, so why silence him for so long?
Even after all that bitching though, I'll have to say that it isn't terrible. Sure, you'll probably stumble across this on SyFy or one of the many subsidiaries of Showtime in the future, but you can find worse ways to kill time.
Trevor Gooden awakens in a hospital following a terrible car accident. Suffering from a rather bad head injury, he is unable to distinguish reality from truth, though he does know that his wife Kirsty, is missing or presumed dead from the day of the accident. Not long afterwards, he stumbles across the dreaded puzzle box, and will soon discover the ties it has to all of his problems.
Oh.
Yeah.
Um, this is a MUCH worse way to kill time. Unless you're desperate for seeing semi-attractive women get topless.
Hellrasier: Inferno got slightly better the more I thought about it. This one will most likely stay a steaming turd as long as I can remember it, which may not be for long. It says a lot when you can bring back Ashley Laurence and still make a bad Hellraiser film. It is rather unfortunate that she's only in the film for about a total of ten minutes, and most of it is in her schmuck husband's memories. No disrespect to Dean Winters though, he's a credible actor in his own right. You'd never be able to tell here however considering he sleepwalks through his performance. Truth be told, most of the people here do as well. Like the previous installment, you don't particularly feel a lot of sympathy for this lead, and they even play with the whole "troubled marriage" deal yet again. It was one thing in the first film, it was another with Inferno, but now, it is beyond frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating, this movie LOVES to play with the "What is real" spiel like it has nothing else to offer. It gets to be irritating after about the twentieth time Trevor has a flashcination (you can never fucking tell which it is until the end, and even then, that's debatable), and it doesn't help that most of it feels eerily similar to Jacob's Ladder at times, minus the Vietnam War background. Like the film before it, Hellseeker originally had no relations to this franchise, but again, Dimension wanted to cut costs, and decided to throw in Kirsty and the lot in hopes that it would boost sales. I'm not sure how much this sold on DVD, but I can ensure you it probably wasn't a lot.
Don't bother with this one, unless you are a purist and absolutely MUST watch every single Hellraiser film ever created. It isn't scary, it isn't entertaining, it isn't clever, it just...isn't. In fact, just go listen to Harm's Way-Scrambled. It contains the only bit of good dialogue from this wretched work coupled with some insanely heavy riffs.
All of that being said, come back tomorrow as I descend further down the rabbit hole (if the rabbit was in bondage gear with skin being torn off) with HELLRAISER: DEADER & HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD.
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