Streaming Availability: Tubi
Hellraiser II is not directed by Clive Barker, but it well-imitates his style. He was writer and producer, and helped keep it well within the lines drawn by Hellraiser 1. We keep the same gray, vague, Transatlantic atmosphere of being America but not America. New director Tony Randel is solid at just doing what Barker did. Most of the core cast returns, whether living, dead, or in-between. We also get an expansion of the lore of the Cenobites and their world, most of which would never be remembered by the sequels.
Needless to say, Clive Barker would never again have any real say in the franchise. As far as I'm concerned, Hellbound the end of Hellraiser. By Hellraiser III, we are fully in the Pinhead series. You got Cenobites Taking Manhattan. They're at war with the NYPD, one of them shoots CDs, it's very stupid, it is fun... but it isn't really Hellraiser anymore. It's just demons in Clive Barker's art style doing silly mischief.
The real problem with the Hellraiser/Pinhead franchise is that everybody misunderstood the strength of these first two movies. Doug Bradley as Pinhead is an icon, he's great on the mic delivering lines like "Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell!". I get it, I love Pinhead too. I can do a half-decent impression, it's fun. But the real villain of Hellraiser, the real star, was never one of the Cenobites, it was Clare Higgins as Julia, the step-mother driven by lust towards nastiness. She gets top billing in Hellraiser II, for good reason. She's better in this movie than she was in the first. They let her put her hair down and she can really chew scenery as a smirking prophetess of doom. Much of Hellraiser II is setting her up for bigger things which never happen.
We pick up right where the first movie ended. After the police found the Cotton family home full of corpses and maggots, they arrest the lone survivor, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence). Kirsty's stories about puzzle boxes and demonic dimensions land her right into a mental asylum commanded by a sadist, Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham). Channard has been seeking evil for decades, so is easily seduced by a reborn skinless Julia (body-doubled by Deborah Joel). After Julia has drunk her full of a few asylum inmates and gotten her skin back, she can deliver lines like "They've changed the rules of the fairy tale. I'm no longer just the wicked step-mother, now I'm the Evil Queen". Chills, man.
Then the entire cast goes down to Hell and things both get simultaneously interesting and also completely fall apart.
We've had plenty of movies about things from Hell coming to Earth, but all month we have never gone down there ourselves. Stories about visiting the underworld are ancient and very common, everybody from Jesus to Ishtar to Dante have done it, and along the way you get to meet a whose-who of demonic entities. The underworld had evolved a lot the course of Abrahamic imagination: at first it was a gloomy place of quiet emptiness and later became a fiery inferno of suffering. But Hellraiser II has stranger geometries at mind: Hell is an endless labyrinth of stone corridors. And at the center is a god, a giant octahedron radiating darkness that Julia tells us is "Leviathan". (Named for the kaiju-sized sea serpent God is very proud to be able to slay in the Book of Job, not that such boasts really are any help to Job with the, you know, dead family stuff.)
Here is where we see the true extent of Barker's cosmology. This is a universe centered around an unknowable and bizarre entity whose only method of communicating with us is to transform our bodies into nightmarish sex ghouls. The transformation is horrible but also liberation, your true self brought out. "...And to think, I hesitated" says a born again Channard.
That however leads to one of the problems with Hellraiser II. Who is the villain here? Hellraiser 1 is not ambiguous that the real villain is Uncle Frank (Sean Chapman). The sequel though has about four candidates. There's Julia herself who sets off the entire events of this movie. There's Doctor Channard, now a Super-Cenobite - apparently more powerful than the others with his silly tentacle hands. Pinhead and his cohorts have to job for this new threat, and are all easily defeated. (The crowd is not pleased, boo-birds are flying.) Oh and Frank is back for one scene. The various possible villains all bounce into each other while Kirsty and her silent, possibly autistic companion, Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), wander through Hell.
Kirsty really has nothing to do and this reveals one of the key problems of Hellraiser 1 and 2, even as I love these movies. Why is Kirsty here? Pinhead keeps saying that Kirsty wants to play, implying she truly desires what is befalling her, but we get no sense of that. Julia is the one who is lured into the eroticism of Hell. Kirsty just wants to date mediocre men that somehow all look like Paul Reiser in Aliens. Ashley Laurence's performance does not give any sense that she wants any part of this except to scream. Meanwhile, Julia has never been more herself than she is in Hellraiser II. I'd love to see what was next, except she basically trips and falls down a pit, and thus leaves the franchise forever.
I'm not sure that giving the Cenobites a backstory was a good idea. Turns out they're all humans once, and who cares? Doug Bradley is impressive in the costume but out of it, turns out he's just a short bald English guy. (There's a good reason we never got to see David Prowse's face when he played Darth Vader.) This is the one bit of mythology the sequels kept, for whatever reason. It is diminishing, all the mystery is gone.
Hellraiser II is only ten minutes longer than the original but it feels much flabbier. I like a lot of things in this movie, but I'll admit, there are issues. It feels like there were two or three scripts are badly sewn together, there's one too many characters. Still, I cannot say enough good about Clare Higgins. Julia's big murder scenes are some of the nastiest in the series, it's remarkable how long they are. This is a grosser, more extreme movie than the first, if you can believe that. They even get away with showing a few shots that the censors made them remove from Hellraiser 1. But it still remains less scary.
If you're actually interested in the ideas Barker brought out about a
kind of demonic religion of pleasure: this is it, it ends with Hellraiser II. "Leviathan" might get a shout-out in the script, that's it. Both Barker and Clare Higgins refused to return for Hellraiser III, and that was that.
You know the rest the story already. Two more sequels went to theaters, I reviewed one of them in 2021. The rest were all straight to video and mostly are bad. Some are embarrassingly cheap movies made just to keep the rights. Hellraiser is not getting better any time soon either. David Bruckner talked a good game about being "truer" to the Barker vision for his 2022 reboot, and then made just another slasher movie - a really bad one too. He clearly had no interest in Hellraiser either as a metaphor for sexuality or as a spooky vision of Christianity. There's a female Pinhead in that one and nobody does anything horny with the idea. Come on!
It's a shame.
Next Time! Can we top the Devil as a giant geometrical figure in terms of abstraction? How about if Satan was a jar of green radioactive slime? Check that out in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment