HELLRAISER: REVELATIONS, the final nail in the head of Pinhead, has the audacity to open as a fucking found footage movie. Two young bros named Nico (Jay Gillespie, ANDROID COP) and Steven (Nick Eversman, VAMPIRES SUCK and this week’s episode of Agents of SHIELD) make a video of their road trip from L.A. to Tijuana, (which they think is hilarious to say in a fake Mexican accent). Nico in particular is an obnoxious dick begging to be punched in the face and/or torn apart by hooks, very reminiscent of the guys that get killed in the opening of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. He smirks with pride as he blows your fuckin mind by talking excitedly about donkey shows and hookers. Get it.
Jump cut to Nico shirtless on the floor in a square of candles solving the famous Lament Configuration puzzle box. And then Pinhead is there asking for the box. Or, wait… who is that guy? If you’ve seen BLOODLINE you remember it because Pinhead was in space, if you’ve seen REVELATIONS you remember it because they dressed some other dude up as Pinhead. (read the rest of this shit…)
The penultimate HELLRAISER, Rick Bota #3, is not really better than the previous DTV entries, and definitely way worse than any of the theatrical releases, but after three pretty samey ones in a row it was briefly refreshing to see the series, for the first time, try to pander to dumb young people. Elements include: an addictive internet game, an exclusive invite-only theme party, teen suicide, masked orgies, cell phones. Coming only 3 months after DEADER and from the same director it’s nice that it’s crappy in a completely different way.
You see, she is Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer, 
So here I am on part six. Of nine. Two thirds of the way through the HELLRAISER saga. But that’s only two fifths of the way into the ones I haven’t seen. The DTV ones. The difficult ones. And the God’s honest truth is that spirits are low. Morale is low. Quality is low. Every reasonable part of my brain tells me to turn back. But I won’t do that – I can’t do that – because if I give in now then I’ve come all this way for nothing. I’ll have put myself through all this just to be able to say “I’ve seen most of the HELLRAISER movies.” Not even most of the DTV ones.
Here we go yo, here we go yo, so what’s a what’s a what’s a sicario? In Mexico, the onscreen text tells us, it’s a hitman. And the movie SICARIO is a nightmarish portrait of the byzantine conflict such a hitman would be in the middle of. Literally that would be the War On Drugs but metaphorically, it’s easy to think, it could be about the War On Terror, or any number of seemingly intractable cycles of violence. This is, after all, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (
You know me, I’m fascinated by DTV sequels. They’re an interesting in-between medium, a way to get movies made with enough name recognition to make money but not enough to spend money on. There are some that are an enjoyable use of the format (
HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE is produced and distributed by Miramax and, in related news, directed by Alan Smithee. It’s a mess, and it’s not surprising that it ended up being the last theatrical HELLRAISER.
Holy shit, man. You talk about a part II. Somehow this sequel takes the dirty, forbidden, evil vibe of Clive Barker’s original and pushes it into the realm of epic (low budget) fantasy. It’s hard to believe I saw this sicko movie at Christmas time in a suburban multiplex, but I did. That’s just how we rolled back in 1988.
HELLRAISER is a rare event: a horror author, not necessarily an aspiring filmmaker, turns one of his short stories into a low budget movie, and it turns out to be a timeless horror classic. Like many prose writers Clive Barker had had a few disappointments writing screenplays (UNDERWORLD aka TRANSMUTATIONS, and 
