This movie terrified me as a child, but how do I feel more than thirty years later: Is it a legitimately scary film or was I just a whiny little diaper-baby? Hold on, am I still just a whiny little diaper-baby?
First off, let me just acknowledge that Scott has already covered this one pretty recently, but when I reviewed the original Hellraiser a couple of years ago I had designs on a series exploration in the vain of the one I did for the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Plus I’ve mentioned in a couple of reviews that watching this movie at eleven years old was a formative horror experience for me, so I figured I would throw my analysis into the ring. Results from my recent viewing were very mixed, but it left me with plenty to talk about.
In many conventional ways, Hellbound is a successful follow-up to the first movie. Everything that made Hellraiser both baffling and iconic, Hellbound escalates. Sadomasochism and psycho-sexual imagery? Double it. Roundabout, confusing plot? Part II makes the original seem like a stock episode of Charles in Charge. People walking around without their skin for like 10% of the run time? Hah, make that 75% of the run time. Ordinarily, that’s what we demand from our horror sequels – give us the thing we liked and give it to us more. The trouble with that approach when applied to Hellraiser, is that the original movie is so weird and strikes such a delicate balance with all of its unconventional elements that heightening everything just kind of turns it into an aggressively gory and batshit car wreck. Like, that would be my pull quote for the advertising campaign – “An aggressively gory and batshit car wreck! raves(?) Flip Flop Slap Fight” – and it kind of describes everything I liked and hated about the movie in one fell swoop.
Let’s start with that gore. Holy shit, man. I wondered if I had somehow built it up in my mind over the years, but no, this is some grisly business. The movie seems to revel in the presentation of viscera and body horror, not so much in a torture-porny type of way, but as the majority of its characters’ natural state of being. There is a scene where Dr. Channard, the film’s primary antagonist, summons one of the first film’s antagonists, Julia, from Hell by coercing a mentally deranged psychiatric patient to slice himself to ribbons with a straight razor on the mattress that she died on. That sequence, followed by her rebirth and finally an extended, quiet conversation where she… oozes over everything sans skin, is probably ten minutes long, but it might as well be ten lifetimes for as uncomfortable as it made me. There are elements of this movie that are ridiculous and incompetent, but the same cannot be said for the sheer, visceral believability that you are watching the inside of another human being as they ambulate around Channard’s chic, contemporary 1988 apartment.
Overall, this is a more poorly made movie than Hellraiser, and despite the Fangoria bona fides of the sequence described above, there are plenty of set pieces that more closely resemble a scene from your local haunted hayride experience. Plot-wise, it actually tracks remarkably closely to its predecessor, but woe be to anyone who watches this movie without having been through the first film (like, I don’t know, a not-particularly-horror-savvy fifth grader at a slumber party), because there would be no way to make sense of it otherwise. The direction is pretty clunky, and reads as more of a knock-off of Clive Barker’s style than a reasonable facsimile. There are good moments, however, like the re-introduction of the Cenobites and Julia’s resurrection (as unpleasant as it might be). Still, its impossible to call this a well-crafted movie, and I understand its pedestrian Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings. Not all mediocre movies are constructed the same, however. Offer me a slickly produced and rote slasher, and, well, who are we kidding, I’ll watch it. But I won’t remember it. Hellraiser II, on the other hand, stuck with me for 33 years before I watched it a second time, and I expect it will stick with me another 33 again.
Here is what makes Hellraiser II more interesting than a thousand other movies that are technically better at what they set out to do. The first is unpredictability. Horror movies are nothing if not formula-driven, and I’ve seen a billion of them, but I couldn’t predict a single thing that happened in this film. Even the idea of who is the real antagonist shifted constantly, and I was once again confounded by the fact that Pinhead and his crew were relegated to ostensible window dressing for the second straight installment. Pinhead even has a minor hint at a face turn towards the end of the movie before he’s ever even really been established as the primary heel of the franchise. The second factor is impact. Like it or not, this is a movie that achieves a feat that is remarkably rare for the genre – in the parlance of young people circa 2015 or so, it made me feel some type of way. I don’t think that Hellbound is as good as the original installment, or even a good movie at all, but impact is a gift that is so rarely bestowed during these marathons that I have come to cherish it. Such sights to show me, indeed.
Comments