Let’s see what type of mischief our favorite S&M hardware enthusiast was up to in the early nineties, shall we?
Did you know that there were ten Hellraiser movies before the 2022 reboot? That makes ELEVEN fucking Hellraiser movies in total. It boggles the mind. Look, Clive Barker is one of our premier demented old perverts, and I think his inaugural entry into the series is underrated for its surreal imagery and unconventional take on supernatural horror. Yet, by Hellbound (part 2), he was relegated to a mere writing credit and the quality of the filmmaking had taken a steep nosedive (despite some highly successful elements that have stuck with me for decades). I do question if I will have the constitution to complete this series exploration over the next several years, particularly if that downward trajectory is maintained. After watching Hell on Earth, I have reason to be both delighted and concerned at the prospect. How fitting for a cinematic universe where the duality of pleasure and pain is a central theme.
Let’s start with the bad, because this is clearly a bad movie at its core. The drop off from the second to third installments is just as steep, if not steeper, than the drop from the first to the second. The acting is uniformly poor, with one major exception, and the effects are far less convincing than the best of what the previous films had to offer. The feather in Hellraiser’s cap to this point has been its ability to convincingly depict a living person with no skin, but that trick has lost a lot of its verisimilitude this time around, despite a much more limited screen time to try and keep up the illusion. The creation of a host of new Cenobites, something that should be a highlight, is likewise pretty dire. Basically, Pinhead assaults a club full of partiers and an unlucky handful are transformed into his new squad. The transformations would have been hokey in the early nineties, but much more so with the advance of time, reliant as they are on technologies that have since become obsolete. Case in point: A DJ has a bunch of compact discs lodged into his head, a pretty fun kill but a goofy as hell design for a Cenobite, and one that had a shelf life of like 15 years before CDs gave way to digital music on a wide scale. Another one of the freshly minted demons, a former television camera man with his camera awkwardly mashed into his skull, is written as a third-rate Freddy knock-off, throwing out groan-inducing zingers that are completely at odds with the type of philosophical eldritch terrors that the Cenobites are supposed to be.
The positives of this film mostly start and end with Peter Bradley’s portrayal as Pinhead. I’m on record as being perplexed by how little focus the first two films placed on the horror icon, but Hell on Earth puts him squarely in the primary antagonist role. Bradley brings a bit of theatrical gravitas to his performance, though it’s hard to say how good he really is because he is surrounded by such inept acting that you might assume he is the world’s greatest thespian in comparison. In what is a pretty magnetic performance, Bradley gets to deal the coolest kills and chew the most scenery and generally seems like he is having a lot of fun, which translates to the audience. I will also give the movie credit for creativity, although it lacks the tools to pay off its ideas with very much visual flair. Similarly, the sequel maintains the series’ surreal and dreamlike feel, although I truly question how much of that boils down to the filmmakers’ inability to craft a convincing narrative as opposed to a deliberate aesthetic choice. The bottom line is that, while this is not a successful movie along any conventional dimension, I had a lot of fun watching it. The film’s quality may have dipped well below acceptable levels, but the level of batshit crazy stayed right in the target zone for my particular tastes. I’m not sure I relish the idea of reviewing nine more of these movies, but I’m not prepared to jump off the blood-spattered ride just yet.
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