"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth

Fair warning, I will be using this screen grab for now on.
Fair warning: I may be using this screen grab whenever possible for the rest of my life.

You wanna see a movie that throws all the creepy forbidden-ness and atmosphere of the HELLRAISER movies out the window in favor of inexcusably stupid ideas, terrible taste and corny datedness in a horribly failed attempt to be more like ELM STREET 3? Hey, you’re in luck! HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH is just such a shameful embarrassment!

We leave the unspecified, overcast town where the Cottons live for the majesty of New York City. As portrayed by Greensboro, North Carolina. We follow this asshole J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt, KICK OR DIE [I never heard of that movie, but I like the title]), who owns a big dance club called The Boiler Room which is actually three rooms: one a cheesy ’90s dance club with a DJ playing Soup Dragons, one with a heavy metal band performing live and one a fancy restaurant with classical violin players. J.P. seems as sleazy as Frank, but way stupider and douchier. He doesn’t seek hell and hooks. He just buys what he thinks is a cool sculpture. It’s actually the petrified (or something) column where we last saw Pinhead’s face. So when a rat crawls out and bites J.P. and he splatters his blood on it the face comes to life and starts talking to him, trying to make a Julia out of him.

Maybe the most inspired part is when one of his many one night stands gets hooked by the statue, de-skinned and then swallowed sideways. But even this is symptomatic of how less thoughtful the HELLRAISERs have gotten by this point. Julia’s victims were macho businessmen indulging a male fantasy, thinking they have power over this timid woman, and they find out otherwise. J.P.’s victim is portrayed as just a dumb bimbo who gets naked and then gets killed. The usual target of bad horror movies.

mp_hellraiser3Kirsty, the hero of parts I and II, is seen only in a T2-inspired mental hospital exposition tape. The new protagonist is Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell, BACK TO SCHOOL, Star Trek Such and Such), your usual “TV reporter who isn’t getting the respect or the stories she deserves” character. She stumbles upon a story when she sees a Boiler Room clubgoer dragged into the ER covered in magic hooks and chains. She follows a girl, Terri (Paula Marshall, WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME), who turns out to be one of J.P.’s mistreated girlfriends, and ends up letting the poor thing stay at her apartment.

This time there are reoccurring dreams involved, because why not? Something about her dad being a soldier, and also Elliot, the human form of Pinhead, who ends up facing off with Pinhead in “the window of Joey’s mind” because “it’s my domain” or some bullshit like that. There is some makeup effects involved but also, I’m afraid, some morphing.

Pinhead wastes no time proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that his power in the movies comes partly from his absence. Here he has way more screen time, dialogue, and chances to totally blow the character’s mystique, like when he angrily yells at Joey or, worst of all, when he stands and cackles like a goon in a fucking dance club.

Yes, he decides to manifest in the Boiler Room and massacre everyone there. A metal band called Triumph is playing, girls are dancing in cages, people are playing pool, and the weird sculptures made of barbed wire, dolls and mannequin parts start movie. Then Pinhead comes down the stairs and somehow everyone knows to be scared. He shoots some hooks and rips people up but also does rejected Freddy type shit like having the ice cubes in a cocktail morph into his head and then into a knife that stabs a lady. Boo.

I suppose we can give it points for getting there before VIRTUOSITY and BLADE, and it’s pretty disturbing when it cuts to outside with blood pouring out from under the door and the sounds of screams and chains inside. Later Joey walks through the aftermath and there are just bodies piled everywhere, at least in the region 2 Anchor Bay special edition I watched – I guess it’s a gorier version. She wakes up to a news report about the “catastrophe,” but doesn’t notice that HER TV ISN’T PLUGGED IN! OH. MY. GOD! I’m unclear why when she gets there the cops have all left and the bodies are all still there. Seems like an odd thing to pack up early on.

But if you were looking for a way for Pinhead to jump over a shark, you could not do much better than the asinine climax where he sends a group of “hand made” dance club Cenobites to walk the streets of fake New York City. My vote for the stupidest one is the club DJ who gets his CDs stuck in his head…

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(historical note: DJs did not use CDs at that time), who throws a CD at a taxi driver who screams in terror, somehow knowing that it will slice him up as if it is an actual weapon and not a fucking flimsy plastic CD that could not possibly hurt anybody for crying out loud did you live on the planet earth when you came up with this idea and spent time making it into a major motion picture.

But a close second is Joey’s cameraman Doc (Ken Carpenter, TAMMY AND THE T-REX). In a scene that I’m sure haunts Barker’s nightmares, he uses his zoom lens eyeball to smash the random longhair who ran into Joey and had this great exchange:

Dude: “Hey baby, where ya going?”

Joey: “Run! Get out of here!”

Dude: “Relax! It’s cool!”

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Then somehow the camera lens is long and powerful enough to punch a hole all the way through his head (at least we get a Sam Raimi style shot looking through it), splattering his blood across a window display of Airwalk brand skateboard shoes.

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Cowabunga dude! Honorable mention goes to Kool-Aid Man Cenobite:

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played by screenwriter Peter Atkins. He starts out as the Boiler Room bartender, so he carries a shaker filled with gasoline that he uses to light police on fire.

The end credits are a good symbol for the kind of tone we’re dealing with here. They start with Christopher Young’s tremendous HELLRAISER theme, which abruptly fades out and is replaced by a newly commissioned Motorhead song called “Hellraiser.” We can thank Freddy and his Dream Warriors for that, I guess. But at least that was a movie about outcast teens. It was thematic.

(Barker himself directed the video for the Motorhead song. It has Pinhead sitting down in stadium seating watching the band, and then losing a game of cards with Lemmy.)

To go from two such otherworldly, envelope pushing gems to this type of clueless, teen-pandering bullshit is somewhat unprecedented. It’s not even like the budget got lowered or it was made for video or anything. The series just gave in to the temptation, made a Faustian bargain to become a big hit in the mainstream, where pleasure and pain are indivisible. They got screwed though – it made only a little more than part 2, which was still less than part 1.

Director Anthony Hickox had previously done the two WAXWORK movies and SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT. He followed this with WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON and the Mario Van Peebles vampire film FULL ECLIPSE. Eventually he directed BLAST (DIE HARD on an oil rig starring Eddie Griffin) and SUBMERGED, which is on the low end of Steven Seagal DTV films.

When Hickox was a kid he played the young version of one of the characters in THE ADVENTURERS. His dad directed THEATRE OF BLOOD, my favorite Vincent Price movie. His mom edited LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, RAW DEAL, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, OUT OF SIGHT, and, uh, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.

So, shit. He wasn’t just trying to live up to HELLRAISER I-II, he was trying to live up to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. How is he supposed to show this shit to his mom? “Yeah, it’s about, they come to earth. It’s hell on earth. See, and he has CDs in his head. They shoot out and everything. Hell on earth.”

That’s alot of stress there. Sorry bud.

Appendix: For context, here are some of the horror movies that came out between HELLRAISERs II and III:

976-EVIL and 976-EVIL 2: THE ASTRAL FACTOR
ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION
BASKET CASE 2 and BASKET CASE 3: THE PROGENY
BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR
CHILD’S PLAY 2 and CHILD’S PLAY 3
C.H.U.D. II
CLOWNHOUSE
DEMONIC TOYS
EDGE OF THE AXE
THE EXORCIST III
FRIDAY THE 13THE PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN
HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS
HIGHWAY TO HELL
THE HORROR SHOW
HOUSE IV
HOWLING V: REBIRTH and HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS
INTRUDER
JACOB’S LADDER
LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III
MANIAC COP III: BADGE OF SILENCE
MISERY
THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
NIGHTBREED
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD and FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE
OMEN IV: THE AWAKENING
THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS
PET SEMATARY and PET SEMATARY TWO
PLEDGE NIGHT
PROM NIGHT III: THE LAST KISS and PROM NIGHT IV: DELIVER US FROM EVIL
PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING
PUPPET MASTER and PUPPET MASTER II and PUPPET MASTER III:: TOULON’S REVENGE
SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER and SCANNERS III: THE TAKEOVER
SHOCKER
SILENT NIGHT DEAD NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT! and INITIATION: SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 4 and SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 5: THE TOY MAKER
SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND
SLEEPWALKERS
SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III
SOCIETY
SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE II
STEPFATHER II and STEPFATHER III
TWO EVIL EYES
WARLOCK

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 at 10:34 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

59 Responses to “Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth”

  1. Yes, this is the beginning of the end for the series. But still, as I have mentioned before, this is my most watched HELLRAISER, simply because of my ongoing celebrity crush on Terry Farrell.

  2. BTW, I love the moment when even Pinhead acknowledges that his new Cenobites aren’t as good as the old ones. I wonder if this was in the script from the beginning or Bradley (Or someone else with a certain amount of common sense) snuck it into the movie.

  3. I really can’t wait for Mr. Subtlety to come here and try to justify himself.

    Here is his incredibly wrong-headed review to tide us over: http://wearecursedtoliveininterestingtimes.blogspot.com/2012/10/hellraiser-3-hell-on-earth.html

  4. The very 90’s Cenobites in this one (like CD guy and Video Camera head) always made me wonder how far they were going to take it if the series kept going well past the 21st century. Of course we have yet to still see Smart Phone Cenobite or Prescription Pill Dependent Cenobite.

    I think the biggest disservice this one does is trying to get away from the mythology of the first 2 while still reinventing and cribbing the elements that made the first 2 work. They wanted to have their cake (completely reinvent) and eat it too (maintain familiar elements and narrative tropes) and didn’t manage to do either without coming across as completely crass and clueless. It’s like the first attempt at the very common “rebootquel” system that is so firmly in place in today’s movie landscape. I suppose in that sense HELL ON EARTH was ahead of it’s time.

  5. Oh and Motorhead’s song for this soundtrack isn’t really something done by committee as much as it is a cover of a superior 90’s era Ozzy Osbourne song.

  6. Selfie Stick Cenobite? MINION CENOBITE?

  7. Oh goody, another chance to be he one defender of a widely hated franchise sequel. And for good measure, I get to throw in that I’m lukewarm at best on HELLRAISER 2, which I find clumsily plotted and redundant. Looking at that old review, I even compared it to EXORCIST PART II! That seem unduly harsh now, like comparing a political opponent to the Nazis. I rescind the EXORCIST PART II comparison, but I still generally stand by the rest of the review. I think The first 3/4 of HELL ON EARTH are pretty strong, especially for a 90’s horror movie. Hickox has a fairly sharp cinematic eye, and it’s quite well-edited in many places (I particularly like the opening scene at the hospital, where while the reporter is waiting, more and more extreme medical tools are being carefully placed out by a nurse, and of course the scene Vern referenced where the blood leaks out under the door and the camera lingers there just a moment too long and it becomes increasingly uncomfortable and horrifying). I can’t really defend the last 1/4, with the ridiculous “hand-made” cenobites (which Pinhead at least has the decency to admit are “a shadow of my former troops”) but oh well, it’s not a dealbreaker for me, especially since the finale is so crazy (holy shit, did the puzzlebox just grow a whole building like she planted a seed?!) There’s a lot of dumb cliche here, but at least it’s pretty well executed on almost every level.

    Is this a total betrayal in every imaginable way of the brilliant original? Yeah, can’t really argue that. I guess the fact that I wasn’t crazy about part II kinda lowered my expectations and I was able to enjoy it just for what it is: a slick, dumb, but fairly well-constructed 90’s horror sequel with plenty of violence and a bunch of fun gimmicky bullshit (and also a bit of gimmicky bullshit which is pretty lame). Would it be better if it continued with the vibe of part I and II? Ehhh, I don’t know that there was a lot more to squeeze out of that concept, so if HELLRAISER had to make the jump to its own doofy franchise, this seems as benign a way to do it as could be imagined. And I actually like that it gives us a little more of Captain Elliot Spencer’s backstory… that kind of thing is usually death for a horror icon, but Bradley gives a pretty good performance as his alter-ego and I think it’s kinda cool that he gets to literally confront his dark half. So even if it’s a completely different kind of movie, at least it still sort of works with the Hellraiser mythos, unlike the later sequels which were written as other movies and inelegantly grafted into Hellraiser sequels at the last minute.

    I mean, if you guys are mad at THIS unnecessary Hellraiser sequel… shit, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I worked my way through the whole series a few years back (

    ) and I gotta tell you… it doesn’t get any better from here (except arguably part V, which is about as good, maybe a little worse).

    Anyway, this isn’t a good enough movie for me to really want to stand up and fight for, but I think it’s better than its rap, especially considering the horrors that followed it. As far as the wasteland of 90’s horror goes, this is one of the better made ones, and there’s plenty of blood. You could, as the rest of you will learn, do a LOT worse.

  8. This movie sucked balls and that’s too bad because Pinhead deserves better. Terry Farrell does her best, but man, what the fuck were they thinking?

    Anyway, this plays like a made for TV movie and is generally early 90s garbage, the less said the better.

    “Hellraiser” was first released on Ozzy’s NO MORE TEARS, and I bought that the day it came out in 1991. I was super surprised when Lemmy and Motörhead played it on The Tonight Show in 1992 (it was written by Zakk Wylde, Ozzy, and Lemmy – so it’s ONE HUNDRED PERCENT BADASS, music-wise at least.)

    That’s awesome trivia about Clive Barker directing the video. I’m off to YouTube to watch it right now!

  9. Also, I take Baker’s direction of the amazing and hilarious Motorhead song as a tacit sign that he understood the series was going in a new direction and was giving it his blessing. It’s not like he didn’t know it wasn’t in the spirit of the original for Pinhead to lose at cards to Lemmy and knock the table over. He just also knew it was the best thing ever, and went for it.

  10. Dan – Replace the Lemarchand’s box in Pinhead’s hand with a Nexus or an iPhone and it’s perfect.

  11. This movie is painfully terrible. Though, Vern, you touch on the one and only good moment in this entire movie, the cut to outside the club as Pinhead massacres everyone inside.

  12. I think this is also the one where they started replacing Pinhead’s makeup with a full head prosthesis – including rubber nails – for faster application / removal / re-use. Every time Pinhead talks, the “nails” around his face all wobble and bend. Looks terrible compared to the first two.

    also – totally sending that Minion Pinhead (“Pinion”?) pic to my nephews. Let Mom try and explain it…

  13. Going right from the first two to this one is a bad idea, but I still like it. It’s just a dumb supernatural slasher sequel in one of the last years when you could get away with that sort of thing. Which happens to be a sort of thing that I like. I think of it like the JAWS sequels: not even a hair on the original’s ass but pretty fun on their own mercenary terms.

  14. AnimalRamirez1976

    October 14th, 2015 at 4:01 pm

    I was done with the series after this one, so I’ll have to watch the rest on Netflix to follow Vern’s future articles. I didn’t hate it but that’s about the nicest thing I could say about it. There is honestly not a single frame of this film that I would call competently directed. Everything looks fake, even a simple shot of some people playing pool. Simple actions like standing, sitting and walking are not convincingly staged. Terry sitting like a lump on the bed, weeping, her arms outstretched towards PJ, is a particularly egregious example; no one has sat like that in the whole history of sitting. The first two Hellraisers had some crazy ideas, but I never thought the directing was better than “pretty okay”; in this one, it is considerably worse.

    And the ideas are worse too. Everything about the club is stupid. “Rock ‘n Roll Pinhead” is a dumb idea but, as Mr S points out, it may be a legitimate direction for the series to go. But it’s not even done well! In some shots, the patrons of the club look like 12-year old girls, in others, they are middle-aged dudes with long hair and loud shirts. Not consistent with the meathead-metal vibe of the music. I would also point out that in 92 there were plenty of bands like NIN, SWANS and Electric Wizard that seem a better fit for Hellraiser than the schlock they used.

    Also, the SAW series wrung quite a bit of millage out of its original mythology, so I’m not convinced that HR had to go this way, at least not so quickly.

    I have to admit, I laughed when Doc said “That’s a wrap”, the worst line in the movie.

    Also, that DJ is billed as “CD the DJ” so what else was the guy going to use for his sets?

  15. I’m not sure if I would want them to explore the concepts from 2 more to be honest. I mean maybe a different direction than this sure, but I think what made 2 so strong was the ‘what teh fuck is going on’ kinda vibe it has. I’m not sure I want to know more about the leviathan then we know becuase then the mystery is gone. And I mean, if you look at where Barker took hellraiser with his The Scarlet Gospels, it kinda ruins everything fun about the series weirdness and just turns it into typical judo christian mythology shit.

  16. I saw this in the theater when I was 16, and being a huge sports fan then and now, the one thing I immediately noticed was that one of the victims in the club massacre was MLB outfielder (and erstwhile Mariner) Danny Tartabull. I sat through the rest of the movie thinking, “nah, that couldn’t be him,” as getting your faced ripped apart after no lines seemed odd for a guy making millions. But sure enough, it was him. There’s a random Hellraiser III fact for ya…

    Yanks' Tartabull In `Hellraiser Iii'

    New York Yankee outfielder/thespian Danny Tartabull made his acting debut last week. He plays a five-second role in the horror movie ``Hellraiser III.''Tartabull does not have any lines. His job is...

  17. That CD cenobite was way goofier than I remembered, and I already felt it was terrible when I first saw it.

    What a huge comedown from the first two movies. I could never understand how it ended it up like this after two really great unique movies. I disagree that there was nowhere else to go. There are plenty more tales that could be told with the theme.

  18. caruso_stalker217

    October 15th, 2015 at 12:09 am

    This film was so terrible that the only way to top its shittiness was to send Pinhead into space for Part 4. And they couldn’t even do that right.

  19. Ha ha ha, I’d forgotten about the shot of the DJ looking up at the CDs menacingly floating above his head. Saw it in the cinema in my early teens, because I had missed the start of the other film that was on, Reservoir Dogs.

    I remember quite liking it at the time, but even then I didn’t like that they copied the Elm Street sequels and made the cenobites suited to the one attribute the script bothers to give the character. The black-haired girl smokes so she is now Smoking Cenobite! Or worse, job related! Like, if Pinhead had appeared at a car showroom he would have made Dealer Cenobite who throws hubcaps at people or Volkswagen Cenobite who chokes victims with exhaust fumes.

    I saw the next one, Hellraiser in space (it’s rubbish), but skipped the rest. Is it true that they started taking horror films, tacking on a Pinhead scene or two, and then titling them as Hellraiser sequels? I think I read that somewhere.

  20. Actually it could work if a Hellraiser sequel used the idea that the Lament Configuration became an iPhone app. Imagine. It becomes the biggest most addictive game since Candy Crush. Pretty soon people everywhere around the world start becoming Cenobites. Let me get Dimension on the phone…

  21. Hellraiser: Genisys

  22. Hey, it’s no stupider than anything in parts 5-9.

  23. The Original... Paul

    October 15th, 2015 at 5:44 am

    Jack – they’d totally do it as well. You know it.

    I haven’t seen any of the HELLRAISER sequels, but Vern’s review and the subsequent comments do bring up an interesting question. What DIY Cenobyte would you be? Personally I work in an office (I would love to know what Pinheaad would’ve done if he’d invaded that place.) Not too much potential cenobyte creativeness there. I guess I just don’t have the imagination of someone who would come up with the idea of having a DJ Cenobyte with CDs embedded in his scalp.

  24. I guess you would be a stapler and/or hole puncher Cenobite.

    Can you imagine what would happen if Pinhead would invade a sex shop or swinger club or something like that? Poor, poor guy who will be a the Dildoface Cenobite.

  25. Selfie Cenobite would have a permanent duck face. I could also see Cenobites named Blue Tooth, Pumpkin Spice, and Yoga Pants.

  26. CD cenobite is hilariously lame, but this is not the only 90’s film guilty of trying to use CD’s as a weapon. DARK ANGEL and Jet Li’s BLACK MASK are two examples that stand out, but I am sure there are more.

  27. AnimalRamirez1976 — I disagree that the movie is not competently directed; actually I’d argue it’s quite a bit more competent than the majority of its peers. (By peers I mean, meatheaded slasher sequels from the late 80’s and early 90’s). Now, it’s not realistic at all. I would heartily agree with you that there’s hardly a single behavior undertaken by the entire cast in this movie which is recognizably human. But since when was that a legitimate complaint about a horror movie? Obviously, the first two HELLRAISERS had a very different vibe and style than this one does, but this one is clearly trying to do something different and I don’t think it’s really fair to compare the two. But as far as this type of movie goes, the acting is on average pretty decent, there’s even some little grace notes to humanize the characters somewhat, and there are well-crafted horror sequences throughout. I’ve seen badly directed horror movies, and you guys will too if you continue with this series; HELLRAISER III is dumb, but has quite a bit of attention to detail which you normally would not see in this kind of thing. It’s lit nicely, features quite a few memorable gore scenes, some well-edited tension-building moments. It’s not badly directed. You can argue it was a bad idea, but that’s neither here nor there.

  28. Charles – I don’t remember the BLACK MASK one, but the one in DARK ANGEL/I COME IN PEACE was an alien weapon that resembled a CD, so we can accept that it causes damage, unlike when this Cenobite throws actual flimsy pieces of plastic.

  29. I should also add that the villain in OLD BOY kills someone with a CD too, although he at least bracks it in half and does it with a pointy piece.

  30. Good point Vern, I guess the weapon from DARK ANGEL was not an actual CD, but I am pretty sure it is just a CD ebing used as a weapon in BLACK MASK. It has been to long since I have seen it to be able to tell you the exact scene, but below is a trailer for the Tommy Boy soundtrack for the American release of BM. It shows Jet using CD’s as a weapon right before the 1 minute mark. What makes it even more enjoyably silly is that the digitally superimpose the Tommy Boy logo on the CD’s for the add.

  31. Sorry for the extra posts not sure why but the video and/or link I referenced are not showing up in my post.

  32. What about if he fired off vinyl albums? It kinda worked for SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

  33. One last try.

  34. Hey Vern,
    You mention being perplexed as to why the cops and press would take off and leave all that carnage at the club. Well, I rewatched this after reading your review as I often do (watch movies again with your take in mind, NOT rewatching HR3 often).

    In the sequence of scenes after the massacre at the Boiler Room Joey wakes up from troubled sleep and sees the “report” on the massacre on television. She calls pre-camerahead Camerahead and tells him to turn on the news, which he does and asks what channel. “Channel 12, I think” Joey replies as she rushes to get dressed, “Can you meet me at the club?” she asks him. He turns to channel 12, no newscast. While he flips through ALL available channels he replies with some form of “Yeah” and his television never once shows a newscast of any kind. While Joey is leaving her condo, the camera at some point reveals that her TV wasn’t even PLUGGED IN (OMG the TERROR).

    All I’m saying is the police and newscasters and rescue workers were very likely NEVER THERE as the only place Joey (or the audience) ever saw them was on an unplugged television.

    Bam! Mystery Solved! I have now spent more time discussing HR3 than I have ever wanted to. I just have one more point to address…

    Goddamn CD Head, Fuck That Guy!

  35. The Original Paul

    October 15th, 2015 at 12:51 pm

    Yeah, and come to think of it, the whole CD thing should be a non-issue, right? I mean, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve spent hours organising about twenty years’ worth of CDs and digitising them; and let me tell you, those damn things can be sharp. I picked up a few nasty papercut-esque finger injuries.

    I can, just off the top of my head, name one TV series, two movies, and two videogames (albeit one of said games being based on one of said movies) that used weaponised HATS. Hats, people! And you guys are complaining about a guy with a few CDs lodged in his skull?

    I’m just saying, let’s keep some sense of proportion here.

  36. My favorite weaponized CD has to be the one used by the aliens in I Come in Peace. It’s even better that the filmmaker tried to pass it off as a piece of alien technology in 1990! Still, I Come in Peace is an all time classic of 90s action cinema whereas Hellraiser 3 just sounds like a slog.

  37. In BLACK MASK the CD is part of Jet’s arsenal. If I remember right he has them in his utility belt, they are not just a random item he uses as a weapon on the fly in the heat of battle. Actually, when I saw BM in theaters back in the day I dismissed it as nonsense because I thought it was so ridiculous that Jet was killing guys with CDs. However, after watching the footage from the clip I posted I have to admit I really want to watch BM again.

  38. Paul, I agree that CDs can have sharp edges but they make for completely unbelievable murder weapons.

  39. When I was a kid my brother threw a record at my head Frisbee style and I still have the scar, but it didn’t kill me or impact into my head, so at least there’s that. Never had a CD draw blood, though.

  40. So nobody’s willing to float the idea that maybe the magically created demonic hell spawn made of bone and flesh and metal isn’t just shooting standard-issue plastic CDs like you’d buy on a spindle at Target out of his face?

    I’m not saying this makes him not goofy. He’s totally goofy. That’s what I like about him. I like goofy monsters with novelty face weapons. There aren’t enough of them.

    I gotta go full Franchise Fred on this one. Sequels should have the right to go off in dumb directions as long as they pull off what they’re going for. I think this one does.

  41. My beef is not as much with them being magic hell CDs but with the taxi driver instinctively knowing that he was about to be chopped up by magic hell CDs instead of thinking “why is this asshole throwing CDs at me?” I think in the short story it said that cab drivers do not know that kind of stuff.

  42. Maybe it’s like how priests just instantly know their whole belief system is bullshit when they look at Rawhead Rex. You see a Cenobite and you know the score. Everything they throw at you is gonna be magical hell something.

  43. Majestyk, Franchise Fred approves you invoking my name in this context. I gotta watch III and IV again this month, but I have a feeling ’90s horror nostalgia will triumph over sense making and respectability.

  44. Mr. M, your logic makes perfect sense. I am running from a Cenobite and/or anything it throws at me.

  45. The Original Paul

    October 15th, 2015 at 5:45 pm

    Charles – if Bruce Lee can kill somebody with a piece of paper, if Bullseye can murder an old lady with a gobstopper, if freakin’ Oddjob can decapitate somebody with a hat… well, then a giant muscular blue-skinned humanoid demon, who by the way makes a really good receptacle for cheese cubes and / or pickled onions at parties, is not gonna have a problem slaughtering some guy with magically-enhanced shiny metal disks! These are the fuckin’ RULES, damn it!

    …I have no idea why I feel so strongly about this issue.

    By the way, does what’s on the CD make a difference? Does late-nineties house music sap your life-force more than, say, Pink Floyd or Notorious BIG? Or is it just playing the CD that has that effect? This is a very important question.

  46. Maggie, did you turn the tables on him? (groan)

  47. Paul, I don’t disagree. I believe that Cenobites have a MacGyver like ability to turn pretty much anything into a dangerous weapon. I am sure that a Cenobite could turn an plate of pancakes into a lethal instrument of death, but it would be a ridiculous (and delicious) instrument of death.

    Ridiculous and delicious the pleasure and the pain is indistinguishable.

  48. Hahahahahaha, this sounds really stupid, kinda like a “DUUUUUUUUUUDE! IT’S THE 90’S BRO! DEMONS AND SHIT! EEEEEXTREME!” version of a horror movie.

    “Of course we have yet to still see Smart Phone Cenobite ”

    I bet he would say “there’s an app for that!” before killing somebody.

  49. A point I just remembered; I remember thinking last time I watched this, when I was notably younger but old enough to know better, that maybe you could partially excuse Pinhead acting all Freddy in this because he was now a completely distinct entity from Elliot and was is a “pure” demon, whereas in the first two he still some residual humanity. The truth is probably just “more like Freddy=more money”, but I dunno, maybe that could have been on someone’s mind at some point.

  50. Yes, to many of us this movie will forever be known as “the one with the cd shooting cenobite”.

  51. I did not mind this as much. It was shit compared to the first two, and Verns arguments against CD and filmcamera-cenobites are valid if you compare this movie to the films that preceded them. But this one was the first shot in America so no wonder you´d end up with shit like that. I actually thought it was hilarious.

    Also, I am beginning with a friend of mine a HELLRAISER marathon this October. This was not as bad as I thought, but I expect a smooth shitrunning later on.

  52. Godspeed Shoot.

  53. Guys, they are releasing a new HELLRAISER film! Fingers crossed CD cenobite makes a long awaited return. However, I wonder what he will shot at his victims now that CD’s and physical media are going away?

  54. “Ow, those iPods hurt!”

  55. CJ, I guess he would be smartphone/iPod cenobite. Little known fact, smartphone/IPod cenobite has a lesser known unpopular little brother that is often forgotten Zune Cenobite.

  56. Just watched the trailer for the new HELLRAISER flick, and the first thing it made me think was “Hey, I wonder if Vern reviewed the HELLRAISER series…”

    And that’s been my morning.

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