MOVIE JAWN

THE HELLRAISER SERIES: AN EXERCISE IN HELLISH PATIENCE

By Zooey X

Let me start with this: Happy birthday to Clive Barker, as of October 5^th! I love Hellraiser. The eerie dark blue color scheme, the chains and gore, the way “Pinhead” transforms throughout the series. I could take or leave most of the later storylines, but not ever am I disappointed with Doug Bradley’s (Pinhead) performance, although as I’ll later mention, one installment doesn’t even have him to save it. The first film of the nine was written and directed by Clive Barker himself, based off of one of his short stories, The Hellbound Heart (which almost definitely would have made a better title for the film series). Barker is an artist of all kinds, writing, painting, directing, producing, he can do it all, and very well. The content of his work is almost exclusively horror-related, with themes of hidden worlds, psychological distress, extreme polar opposites, and sexuality. Despite these themes, Barker’s creativity is versatile enough that he wrote a series of books aimed towards young adults, as well as creating several lines of comic books through Marvel. I’m almost tempted to write this entire piece about Clive Barker, but goddam if I didn’t spend an entire week watching and re-watching the nine-part Hellraiser series in preparation for writing this. So let’s get down to it…

The first Hellraiser (1987) is my favorite in the series, although it was originally supposed to be set in Britain, and the studio claimed it would be a bigger hit as an American film. Midway through production, some adjustments were made in cast and setting, creating some discrepancies throughout the story line. It opens with Frank Cotton (played in human form by Sean Chapman) in Morocco buying the notorious puzzle box from a mysterious man. He brings the box home to his dead mother’s house, solving the puzzle in the attic. The puzzle box opens, hooked chains tearing into his flesh and quite literally pulling him apart. The series begins with such intense gore that the first time I watched this scene, not knowing quite what to expect, I almost became ill. Frank’s soul is possessed by the Cenobites, horrifying creatures from the depths of hell, (nicknamed Pinhead, Butterball, Chatterbox, and DeepThroat by the film crew, if that tells you anything), and he is dragged with them back to their dimension of utmost severe pleasure and pain.

Frank’s brother Larry returns to their childhood home with his second wife Julia, who happened to have a steamy affair with Frank the evening before (or maybe after? It’s almost impossible to tell) her marriage. While moving in to the house, Larry cuts his hand open, spilling his blood all over the ground where Frank’s remains lay underneath. Now, this is where it gets great. Frank’s body, ever so slowly, returns to our world. Two stubby bone and flesh arms pop from the floor, followed by his brain regenerating, muscle sliding over the bones, and eventually becoming a full flesh skeleton. The stop-motion animation that was used to create this scene is ground breaking to me, using $25,000 to complete the gory animation. Before seeing this film, I’d never seen anything like it. It was horrifying, terrorizing, scaring me to pieces! This is the point where I got into my bed and put down the ice cream. Frank returns with all but his skin, surprising Julia as she yearns for him ever-so-eerily and begs her to bring him more blood so his body will fully heal. She of course is frightened, but once realizing it is her long-lost lover, Julia quickly agrees to do whatever Frank asks of her, picking up men at bars and bringing them home for her lover to drain the life and blood right out of, eventually allowing Frank to kill Larry and take his skin to use as disguise.

An important piece of the story I’ve left out thus far is Kirsty, Larry’s late-teen aged daughter (Ashley Laurence). After discovering what she thought was Julia having an affair, Kirsty follows her stepmother into the house to find the still-skinless Uncle Frank (who for some reason repeats the phrase “Come to daddy” throughout this movie…. YUCK!). Kirsty happens upon the puzzle box, and in order to escape from Frank, throws it out of the window of the house. Kirsty escapes alive, exasperated, and collapses outside with the box. She wakes up in the hospital, where she is not allowed to leave. Her doctor allows her to keep and play with the box, when she solves the puzzle and opens the gateway to hell. The wall of her hospital room slides open, in a way that almost looks hand-drawn, but convincing enough as a hellish portal, filled with cobwebs and bleak dust. This is the point it becomes apparent that funding got a little tight for the film, with the Cenobites appearing via squiggly neon electric light, giving us our first real intense glimpse of the creepy Cenobites. Pinhead makes his verbose debut here, and part of the reason I think this scene is so excruciatingly scary is because of Doug Bradley’s ability to convince me that he IS Pinhead and that he WILL tear my soul apart!! As the series goes on, his character evolves in many fashions. He starts the series in just absolute evil form, scary and devilish as can be and through the next couple of movies, he transforms through the stages of shameful almost human conscience, struggling demon, to an absolute God of Hell, and then right back to how he began.

In the concluding 30 minutes of the first film, Kirsty makes a deal with the cenobites to allow her to keep her soul in exchange for bringing them back the escaped Frank. She returns to her father’s home to find Larry and Julia seemingly waiting for her. There’s small details noticeable in this scene, the collar of Larry’s white shirt tinged pink, his strangely scabby hairline (did I say small details?), the speech patterns different from the Larry in the beginning of the movie. Larry claims to have put Frank out of his misery, and that all would be fine. Kirsty is doubtful, demanding to see his body for herself. Julia leads the way, revealing a decomposing corpse on the floor of the attic. Frank reveals himself to be disguised as Larry (uhhh didn’t see that one coming!) and chases after Kirsty to avoid being found by the Cenobites. Little smart pieces from earlier in the story pop up in the conclusion of the film, like a dead body popping out when Kirsty is attempting to hide from her uncle. Frank eventually reveals himself, summoning the Cenobites to drag him back to hell! Chain-hooks emerge from every which direction and begin to pull Frank (still in Larry’s body) apart, gifting us this gem of absolute terror, when he croaks, “Jesus wept,” a line that originally was supposed to have been “Fuck you,” but I think it has more lasting substance this way.

I wish that this role hadn’t been quite so career-defining for Ashley Laurence, because she honestly played the best female protagonist in a horror film that I’ve ever seen, strong and unforgiving with her tenacity. She is the main character in the second film of the series, Hellbound, and appears again later on in the series. As far as I know, not much she’s done through the rest of her career has been quite as successful as the first two films of the Hellraiser franchise.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II was released only a year after the original. The film opens on Doug Bradley (sans makeup) in a US Army bunker, leading to “the creation of Pinhead”, and includes a quick recap of the first film. Clive Barker didn’t actually direct this one, allowing for first time director Tony Randel to take the driver’s seat, although it’s quite obvious that the creative team still had much respect for Barker, as well as his hand still in the producing mix, as the style of the movie is still very reminiscent of Barker’s “fantastique” aesthetic, ranging from the special effects and makeup of the Cenobites to the landscapes of Hell, not to mention the variety of cadavers on the side lines. Thank goodness for the ambience of this film. If it wasn’t so darkly beautiful, I don’t know that I would find it quite so brilliant. Ashley Laurence stars in this sequel as well, kept in a mental health ward following her escape from the Cenobites, forced to stay there by the wicked Dr. Channard, who brings Julia back to life the same way Frank was brought back in the first film, who is accompanied by his more innocent or perhaps just unaware assistant, Kyle MacRae. Kirsty confides in these men about her experiences with the box and the Cenobites. Dr. Channard, evilly enough, uses Kirsty’s information to join the ranks of the cenobites in Hell, as someone who is utterly fascinated by the box.

"And to think... I hesitated."

This sequel successfully builds a little bit more mythology to the boxes, the one that resides in Hell, called Leviathan,s quite reminiscent of Sauron, “the all-seeing eye,” from the Lord of the Rings series, and to Hell, dubbed The Labyrinth. While stuck in the hospital, Kirsty (who is mistakenly called “Kristy” during some parts of the film) finds an assumedly mute friend, Tiffany (Imogen Boreman). The two later make the descent into the Labyrinth together, living through several nightmarish, fear-invoking scenes. The doctor eventually lives his dream of joining the ranks of the Cenobites, assuming a pretty hilarious but disturbing new character. He surprises the other Cenobites with how powerful he is, using some pretty weird finger-snake-tentacle-like-things to attack his victims, and eventually the other Cenobites as well. Kirsty confronts the Cenobites with their past identities, in hopes of gaining some sympathy and reminding them of their human forms. Except for the malevolent Dr. Channard, who chose life in the Labyrinth, the Cenobites falter, recalling their human lives. Will Kirsty and Tiffany make it out alive?? Of course they do, after a really strange scene where Kirsty dresses up in Julia’s skin. The movie ends with a tower of body parts rising from a bloody mattress that’s supposed to be representative of Pinhead’s evil soul. I really love this sequel for how goddam scary Dr. Channard is, even though he lets out these animalistic screams, which are bizarrely eerie and hilarious, and for the mythology they created for the story to revolve around.

The next in the series is Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth, introducing a new storyline and new characters. This one is arguably the only in the series to seemingly be hilarious on purpose. It was released into theaters in 1992, centered around aspiring journalist Joey Summerskill and wealthy club-kid JP Monroe. JP is a purchaser of the occult, strange, and dark curio, acquiring the Pillar of Souls from the ending of the last film, where Pinhead’s soul is trapped inside. Joey is attempting to do a groundbreaking piece to kickstart her career as an investigative journalist, discovering video tapes of Kirsty from the second film while she was stuck in the mental hospital, Joey and her new sidekick Terri becoming witness to many situations revolving around the puzzle box. While all this is going on, Joey is contacted by the human spirit of Pinhead, Elliot Spencer, who was revealed to us in the second film and became separated from Pinhead.

Without the balancing effect of his human spirit, Pinhead transforms into a pure evil demigod, abiding by no laws, neither in the realm of the Labyrinth (the law being that Cenobites kill only those who ask for it by opening the box, which from this point forth will be broken continuously throughout the series) nor on Earth. Spencer begs Joey to reunite him with Pinhead to bring them back to a single being. Slowly through the second half of the movie, everyone in Joey’s life that she has come to care for in this movie is taken by Pinhead and transformed into Cenobites, all going after Joey. This is where it gets really comical. There’s a Cenobite with CDs in his head, throwing CDs as weapons, one with a camera mutated into his face, a fire-spitting bartender Cenobite, a cigarette smoking Terri Cenobite, the list goes on. Pinhead delivers a magnificent performance while Joey seeks asylum on the sacred ground of a nearby church. The powerful Pinhead follows her into the cathedral, busting out all stained glass windows, and wreaking pure evil havoc before delivering an almost satanic sermon and feeding a priest his own flesh, preaching, “This is my body, this is my blood, happy are those who come to my supper.” WOW, what a damn beautiful scene!! As it so happens, I won’t experience another spellbinding moment like this throughout the rest of the series.

The fourth film, Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), the last of the franchise to be released in theaters, is sort of all over the place. So much so that the directors assumed pseudonyms because they didn’t want their names on it. Ouch. It was supposed to be a three-tiered story line telling the expansive back-story to the puzzle box, but obviously the funding was cut, making it a much shorter film for theater release. It begins in space in the year 2127 (SERIOUSLY?? We’re only on movie four here, SPACE??), where an outlaw is manipulating a very Terminator-esque robot into opening the box. A future-space-SWAT-team shows up to capture this outlaw, named Dr. Merchant (a reoccurring name throughout the film). The story then jumps back to 1795 in Paris, France, where the puzzle box was created by a toy maker named LeMerchand (uhhh). The two dudes who commissioned the creation of the box were an aristocrat named Duc de L’Isle (Mickey Cottrell) and Jacques (who just happens to be played by Adam Scott, which I could not take seriously AT ALL). This evil duo also summons a demon, who comes unto the Earth in the body of a beautiful woman Jacques had murdered, Angelique (Valentina Vargas), who will eventually go on to be the only Cenobite shown in the films who was always a demon, whereas practically all of the Cenobites are human-transformed-to-Cenobite-demons. Angelique and Jacques join forces and live together immortally for about two hundred years, when she eventually kills him for what seems to me like no good reason. Her character raises a lot of questions for me... Where did she come from? Did she and Pinhead (who really only makes small and sparse appearances throughout the film) previously know each other from the strange depths from which they came? Angelique was a demon summoned through hell, but Hellraiser lore says that the Cenobites don’t reside in hell, they have their own realm... So why do Angelique and Pinhead act like such frenemies?? Why doesn’t Pinhead seem to fit into the equation of this film at all? I’m sure that if this film were about an hour and a half to two hours longer, maybe they would’ve been able to complete an actual full story line that would have made sense.

The film then jumps to the “present day” (I guess ‘96?), showing us an architect named, what do you know, John Merchant, who has ignorantly designed a skyscraper featuring many of the same characteristics of the puzzle box. Angelique travels to America to confront John, who she deems as a threat to Hell. She finds the puzzle box in the foundation of his skyscraper (where it was placed by Joey in Hell On Earth), convincing a dense security guard to open it for her, summoning the notorious Pinhead. The pair eventually join forces, after a strange intellectual spat, to kill John Merchant, who they believe is creating some kind of an anti-Box of light that will destroy the gateways to Hell forever. During their seemingly uneasy alliance, Pinhead abandons Angelique to try his hand at influencing John to give-it-up, attempting fruitlessly to kill John’s wife and child, succeeding in killing John in the process. Angelique retaliates to Pinhead’s treason by attempting to open the anti-Box to send him back to Hell, which fails as it was only a prototype. John’s wife, however, is able to open the original puzzle box and send both Pinhead and Angelique back to the Labyrinth. Back on the space station, less than two hundred years later, Dr. Merchant, after a whole rigamarole of explaining to the space-SWAT-team that he should be left well alone to destroy the demons, and is met with disbelief, Pinhead and Angelique are summoned again, this time both as Cenobites (sexy, sexy cenobites). Merchant is able to open the anti-Box and uses a whole bunch of light to destroy Pinhead and his fellow hell-mates, FOREVER. You heard me right. The powerful demigod Pinhead... destroyed... by LIGHT?! What a bust! Anyways, this creates an inconsistency with the last film that I’ll mention later on. LIGHT?!?!

Hellraiser: Inferno, released at the turn of the century, had nothing to do with Clive Barker. He wouldn’t touch it. I have to admit, with the most unpopular opinion, that I really enjoyed this movie. It gets a lot of flak, understandably so, due to the lack of Pinhead appearances that were made common with the first three films, not to mention the sort of basic “gritty cop movie” feel to it. Looking past that, however, I consider it what I would call “an overall good movie”. We’re introduced to a new character, Detective Joseph Thorne (Craig Scheffer, of Nightbreed fame), a classic bad-boy cop, good at his job, sleeping with prostitutes, doing cocaine, and pushing away his wife and kid. The morning after a night in a hotel with some blow and a lady he picked up, Thorne encounters a gruesome crime scene, the woman he’d slept with brutally murdered and strung up in the hotel room shower, while also coming across the puzzle box. Just like every other poor sad sack in these movies, our anti-hero opens the box, unleashing a more subtle hell upon himself this go-around, hallucinations of wild looking (and sometimes strangely sexy) demon-esque creatures that we, the audience, know to be Cenobites.

He seeks therapy from the police force psychiatrist while working on a strange case- his friends and acquaintances are strangely dying at the hands of someone he believes to be called “The Engineer,” who leaves a severed child’s finger along with each corpse. At the pinnacle of the film, the psychiatrist reveals himself to be Pinhead, who long-windedly describes to Thorne that he has been in a psychological prison since opening the box; that Thorne himself had committed the murders of those he loved, while the child’s fingers represent innocence, which he had destroyed through his careless and hedonistic actions. Thorne’s actions earned him his own special place of eternal torture, the repercussion of his life choices and for the pain he had inflicted upon others. Pinhead only appears at the end of the movie, in a somewhat similar fashion to Bloodline, which I was able to accept once I immersed myself in the story, instead of worrying about where my favorite villain was. I loved the weird ending of this movie, it made me recall the beginning of the film when Thorne and his detective partner discussed palindromes: the movie began and ended with Joseph stuck in the hell he had created for himself, with no chance of redemption.

On to Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002). Barker requested to remain uncredited in this one, although he consulted with the production and gave his opinion on where the storyline should go. This sequel brings back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty years after escaping the puzzle box and the Labyrinth, with the unbearable Dean Winters as “Trevor Gooden” starring alongside her as her husband (who, incidentally, I think looks just like Glenn Howerton. Is that just me? Okay moving on…). While in the midst of some apparent marriage troubles, Trevor accidentally drives his car off a bridge, barely escaping with his life. Unable to save Kirsty and her body never to be found, Trevor wakes up from a month-long coma to find he is the lead suspect in a murder case of his wife. Since waking up, Trevor experiences terrible headaches and many strange memory-like hallucinations, while constantly being questioned by two detectives who believe he played a larger part in his wife’s death. The story line is confusing, mimicking a similar narrative to Inferno but not quite holding up to its predecessors’ moral charm. I spent a good portion of this movie scratching my head and wondering what the hell was happening, or more to the point, WHY. So most of this story revolves around Trevor, but in the end, it’s all about Kirsty. She still has Pinhead and the Cenobites following after her around for most of her life, and eventually ends up offering them a trade of five souls in exchange for leaving her the hell alone. She exacts her just revenge on Trevor, who had been cheating on her all along, plotting with his lover to kill Kirsty and steal all of the money left to her after her father’s “bizarre” death. The accident in the beginning of the movie is eventually retold to show Kirsty shooting Trevor in the head, trapping him in his personal Cenobite-created hell, reminiscent again of Inferno. I didn’t like this installment nearly as much as the one before it, as it seemed like a cheaper, less clever knock off with little to set it apart, other than the fact it featured my favorite actress of the series, but even with Kirsty to give it some character, there are strange plot points that I just don’t fall for. Somehow she was able to make ANOTHER deal with Pinhead, escaping his hellish grasp unscathed! AGAIN! Unbelievable! And trading her shitty husband and four other somewhat innocent people’s souls in exchange for her own? This character is so far separated from the girl I loved in the first two films! Unfortunately, from this point on, the films don’t really get much better.

Have you ever seen a sequel to a movie that just seems completely unrelated to the original story, other than that it briefly shares some of the same characters? That’s what we have on our hands here with Hellraiser: Deader, the seventh movie of the series. Actually, that was the case for Inferno and Hellseeker as well, although I think they were integrated a little bit more gracefully than this seventh installment. Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is an edgy young investigative reporter, chain-smoking her way through life and writing articles with imaginative titles such as “How to Be a Crack Whore.” Amy is given an assignment after watching an eerie tape thanks to her boss (and I guess friend, although there’s only a couple lines of dialogue and a photo on a shelf that allude to this supposed friendship) to go to Romania and immerse herself in research on a cult that call themselves “The Deaders,” led by a character Amy will eventually discover, named Winter LeMarchand (gee, where have I heard that name before?) who claims to be able to resurrect his followers after murdering them in ritualistic manners. Amy travels to Bucharest to find the source of the video and discover the secrets of the resurrection cult, immediately finding and opening the puzzle box, coming across dead bodies and partying euro-trash on subways galore on the way, all the while reliving childhood memories of her disgusting and sexually abusive father. Amy is eventually captured by the Deader cult, is killed and resurrected by their leader back into a world where Pinhead and fellow Cenobites appear, killing off the cult, then telling Amy she would soon be reunited with her father in the depths of the Labyrinth. Personally, I find this turn of events disturbing and in very poor taste. As opposed to being dragged to hell, Amy commits suicide by stabbing herself in the stomach, the very same way she killed her father years before. I’d rather eat my own foot than watch this movie again, and that’s how I’ll leave that.

We’re down to the last two of this drawn-out motherfucker. The eighth movie is called Hellraiser: Hellworld, also released in 2005, and only a few months after the seventh installment. “Hellworld” is a video game based on the puzzle box that a seemingly mid-20s group of friends is addicted to playing. The film opens with the group at a funeral for their friend Doug, who committed suicide after becoming too consumed by the game; the rest of the friend group consequently blame themselves. Two years pass, and the group reconvene after receiving an invite to a Hellworld-themed party, held at a secluded mansion with other cult followers of the game (who all look like early 2000s version of “club kids,” by the way.) The best thing about this movie is the character The Host, and then later when the main chick in the movie roundhouse kicks him in the face. The Host is played by Lance Henriksen, who had been offered a role in the original Hellraiser film, but turned it down for a feature role in Near Dark. The different characters from the group of gamer-pals wander through the hellishly decorated manor, exploring the different areas and dying off in strange situations one by one, with Hellworld seeming less and less like “just a game” as the movie progresses.

Hellworld made it very clear that this was just another script lying around the studio that needed a guaranteed audience, so they slapped Pinhead right on in there for about 10 minutes total in a 95 minute movie and made literally no more effort to integrate it into the bigger Hellraiser story line, similar to the past few movies, although I had much more appreciation for some of the earlier sequels; this one is reduced to a Scream-esque plot line, picking teenagers off one by one in gruesome but non-entertaining scenes. Spoiler alert: The Host is actually their dead friend’s father exacting revenge on these kids for “causing his son’s death,” trapping these kids in some underground coffins, never actually at a party at all and forcing them to experience hallucinations somehow to make them believe the illusion The Host had created. Confused? Yeah, me too. My first and most important issue with this movie is that no one opened the box. It doesn’t even appear until the end of the movie, so how are these kids experiencing these dream-like sequences of Pinhead and box-like terror? I don’t get it! Also, the first death to occur in this shit-show is carried out by The Host, not Pinhead, which immediately tipped me off that I should have just turned the damn movie off… I didn’t. Despite the grace of Henry Cavill, future Superman, cast as one of the dumbass teenagers, I spent these 95 minutes experiencing pure regret.

So here we are. The last chapter. Hellraiser: Revelations of the year 2011. What a sad, sad ending to what began as a beautiful and blooming series. At a merciful 75 minutes, this one packs a whole lot of bullshit into a small time frame, a very weak and loose remake of the original Hellraiser film. Where to even begin… The story starts with two teenage assholes, the “good kid” Steven Craven (which I’d like to imagine is a tip-of-the-hat to Wes) and “bad boy” Nico Bradley, who dip out on their white-boy privileged lives to run to Tijuana, Mexico to bang broads and get wasted, all the while filming their experience using a handheld camera. Wasn’t I just talking about how tired I am of the whole handheld horror shtick in “Big Screen Bullshit” this month? I hate it, it’s not innovative and it makes me queasy, dammit. These two boys are supposed to be (very poor) surrogates to Frank and Julia in the 1987 film, doing nothing to set this movie apart from any other of the crappy most recent sequels. The story jumps back and forth between the boys’ experience in Mexico and their families (the two sets of parents and a girl, Emma, who doubles as Nico’s girlfriend and Steven’s sister), who are distraught by their disappearance. Somehow the boys’ belongings are returned to their parents, including the video camera used to film their escapades. Suddenly, a year has passed, and the mourning families are having an evening of reminiscing their missing boys and dinner. Emma is feeling very estranged by her lack of closure, and sneaks a look at the videotape her parents had kept from her. Here she discovers that the two runaway degenerates had been blasted at a bar one night, when Nico picks up a girl and Steven films him banging a girl in the bar bathroom. Emma puts down the camera and finds the puzzle box instead.

So along with glimpses of the tape filmed in Mexico and the “present day” families, we also get unexplained flashbacks to the trip to Mexico. Inside one of these flashbacks, we see that Nico murdered the girl he had banged in the bar that night, refusing to let Steven call the cops, claiming he would paint the picture of Steven as an accomplice if he were to report the crime, committing Steven to finish their “vacation” together.

As the duo discuss their plan of action of what to do with the rest of their time in Mexico, a homeless looking man, suggestive of the cricket-eating man in the first film, approaches their table, engaging them in conversation and eventually offering up the box to Nico, who accepts the box, much to Steven’s chagrin. Nico solves the box in their hotel room later, summoning…… Wait a second, who the fuck is that? That’s not Doug Bradley! It’s true; Bradley finally put his foot down, turning down this role. Apparently the film was produced in just a few weeks, with a budget of $300,000 in order to keep Dimension from losing the rights to the franchise, and Bradley believed the script needed some work, not wanting to be a part of such a low-grade sequel. Compared to how bad some of the previous films have been, that says A LOT. That’s not to say that Bradley’s substitute didn’t give a good performance, or that the speeches written for him weren’t reminiscent of the infamous long-winded speeches given by Bradley. Stephan Smith Collins actually impressed me with the way he was able to match the voice and the cadence of speech that Bradley was known for, but his look was just not quite right for the role. I honestly would have preferred if Pinhead had been left out of this film completely, perhaps using some new powerful cenobite to bring these boys and their families diabolical pain.

Anyways, so the long and the short of it is Steven reappears at his parent’s home, repeating “they’re gonna get me, they’re gonna find me,” sort of things, until in some sort of trance, he recounts the events that occurred in Mexico. Once resting again, his sister Emma brings him some soup to ease his pain, because we all know soup is the chosen meal for that. Things get real weird, leading to a very uncomfortable kissing scene. Steven eventually pulls a gun on the two families, and recounts what really happened while he was gone. Steven films Nico opening the box, his soul gets torn apart by not-Pinhead and taken back to hell, leaving Steven cowering in Mexico to figure out what to do next. Surprise, he goes out and gets wasted, picking up a prostitute who he will later have very disgustingly rough sex with, overcome by violent rage when Nico communicates with him through the box, telling Steven to kill the woman. He strikes the woman repeatedly in the head with the box, either knocking her unconscious or killing her. Her blood leaks onto the mattress, summoning Nico’s body back from hell, in a mirrored form to the original film. You can kind of guess what happens here, Steven assisting his friend in coming back from the dead until all he needs is some new skin. Steven finally refuses, but unwillingly ends up sacrificing his own skin for his “friend,” revealing who they all thought was Steven was actually Nico. Emma opens the box, summoning the cenobites to their home, where not-Pinhead comes back with a new Pinhead in tow, the actual Steven. I loved this knock-off Pinhead costume to be honest; it was gruesome enough to keep me, if not interested, then attentive to the ending of this movie. Does this all sound very confusing and all over the place? That’s because it is. I can appreciate that this script was specifically made to be a part of the franchise, but outside of that and the Steven-Pinhead costume, I have very little good to say about this movie, the cheap production quality nulling the little atmosphere there was, and the terrible script pretty unsupported by the terrible quality of the actors.

I have hopes that remain high, however, for a proposed remake of the original, with a much bigger budget and both Clive Barker and Doug Bradley back on board, although this has been a supposed thing for three years now and I haven’t really heard much more about it. Without a definite confirmation on the somewhat legitimate-sounding remake of the original, I’ve resorted to reading fan-fictions of the original, finding many more relevant stories to the lore of the original than I found in many of the sequels I’ve watched again and again over the past couple of weeks. Despite the affection I had for Inferno, this series would’ve been much better off if it had been put out of its misery 19 years ago.