Starring: Doug Bradley, Bruce Ramsay, Valentina Vargas, Charlotte Chatton, Kim Myers, Adam Scott,
Director: Alan Smithee (actually Kevin Yagher).
Sometimes I find myself wondering if the real reason people hate this so much is because of the "Alan Smithee" thing. For those of you who may not know, "Alan Smithee" is a pseudonym used by film-makers who ultimately want to distance themselves from a finished project. In this case, acclaimed make-up effects artist Kevin Yagher finally walked into the director's chair and was ultimately so frustrated with the process (and, supposedly, a great deal of studio interference) that when he finished the job, he didn't want to sign his name. The reason I think it affects the film's overall reputation with fans is that people find themselves thinking "Well, how can it be good if the guy made it hated it so much" and aren't willing to give it a fair shake. I also don't think Clive Barker deciding to ditch the franchise after repeated run-ins with the studio himself. I'm not saying Hellraiser:Bloodline is an underrated classic or anything-far from it, it's actually kind of a piece of shit anyway-it's just that I wonder how much of the hate comes from any place of reason or analysis.
Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and TRY to like it and see what happens. I know how this game ends, but I'll play it anyway.
This is also the third and final installment written by Peter Atkins, who took over writing duties after Barker stopped. I don't know if I have any actual reaction to that...just a fact. It occurred to me while watching Part 3 last night that it kind of worked out neatly that 2 and 3 both ended in a way that led into the next one and wondered idly if the next writer just had to work with what they had...and then I looked it up and saw that Atkins wrote all of them, and then took off and wrote Wishmaster which I'm sure we're all so very thankful for.
Conceptually, I like the idea of a Hellraiser Anthology film, using the box as the general hook: the box is created, moves on somewhere else, ends up someplace else and so on...but in order to do that, you kinda need to leave Pinhead out of the whole thing and that would be downright nutty. But I'd watch the hell out of that film. I don't think it would, y'know, need OUTER SPACE in it, but I'd watch the crap out of it. There's certainly a way it could work, considering the mythology was more or less...well, touched on, if not entirely established. There is a mythology there that could be mined for a few stories, but instead we focus on one guy's family line fighting Pinhead every couple of hundred years or whatever with little real establishment or interest. The guy just kinda shows up here out of nowhere as three different characters who, mostly as a result of the lackluster performance by Bruce Ramsay, aren't particularly distinct from one another. You might as well have just made him a time traveler and play one character. Instead there's a half-assed "cursed bloodline" where a guy and his descendants are apparently just hell's arch-enemy because he did them a favor a while back...you're telling me no agent of hell was capable of severing that bloodline?
But, anyway, there are segments happening I probably should be talking about.
As is usually the case with anthology films, characterization is never really there. We see our poor Toymaker Phillip L'merchant, who builds the box despite his Wife kinda not thinking much of it("It doesn't do anything." "It's my masterpiece!") and takes it to some powder-faced rich dude who wants to use it to open the gates of hell, which is something it can do because reasons.
Side note, because it's a good line: If you ever wanted to see Adam Scott choke a prostitute while wearing old timey clothing, this is the movie for you. I'm sure that's someones idea of a good time.
Before we can know much about L'Merchant, he's dead and Adam Scott and his demonic paramour are too busy boning to notice L'Merchant's Wife wandering in and taking off again...I don't know. The segment has some competence to it, even if it's primarily a collection of cliches, and there's something about it that does work, maybe it's just because it offers a promise that it ultimately doesn't keep, but it's kinda cool.
The second segment is the weakest to me, despite...well, outer space. It's also really stuffed, and it doesn't really need to be: we have prophetic dreams, a high rise made of apparently more boxes, Angelique from the first segment (who ditches Scott, despite there being something interesting about his character, including how he survived without aging for two hundred years...it sounds like a much more interesting story), an infidelity story, a small child, twin security guards who exist only for an ironic death scene and chatterer-as-a-dog. It's really busy, and has no time to develop in any meaningful way. Both sequences have that feel, in a sense: the first segment chokes itself off before it can tell a coherent story despite having one to tell, while the second crams too much story in despite not having much to say.
That cramming results in really poor pacing. A scene between Pinhead and Angelique is disrupted a total of three times by the twin security guards, seemingly in an attempt to create suspense of some kind, but all it does is crush all narrative flow for both individual scenes. It also occurs in similar fashion during scenes between Merchant and his Wife(played by Kim Myers of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2), who have a couple very brief, halting discussions about his well-being that don't really go anywhere...it just seems like, somehow, these two segments were originally individual films that were crammed together. Hell, maybe they were. There's an actual narrative structure(in the sense of a beginning, middle, and end) for the most part, it's just rushed. There's some really poor line reads all over the place either way.
Then we're back to PINHEAD...IN....SPAAAAAAAAAACE. Which, I don't really think they had the money for. It's a fairly straight-forward exercise: Nu-Merchant has a space station rigged to blow up hell or whatever, so he has to summon Pinhead so he can go ahead and blow up hell or whatever. Before he can finish, space marines show up and get picked off by the cenobites...but we don't know who they are, so why should we care? Also, much like the second sequence, most scenes are cut up and put back together, leading to a narrative hiccup that kills all interest. I mean, some of this has interesting visuals but there's no real continuity to any of it: just a bunch of stuff that happens.
Final Thoughts: Uh...geez, I got nothing. There's some decent visuals but it fails on every other conceivable level. I don't know that I believe a lot of it to be Yagher's fault, though:it feels like a lot of issues with this film really came in the pre-production stage. But, no matter who is really at fault...it's a bad movie.
Final Rating: One and a Half Star.
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