Weekly Cinemeh

Hello and welcome back to Weekly Cinemeh. This week we have such sights to show you, with Hellraiser 1-3. This is another one of the catch up weeks. I had seen the first Hellraiser and one of the other ones (I thought it was 2, but I was wrong) and Eshi hadn't seen any. I have odd feelings about the series because I like this kind of gory body horror, but it gets very silly very quickly. I also know that there are 8 sequels, which might be too many. Anyway, to the list!

1: Hellraiser
Hellraiser is a movie written and directed by Clive Barker, and is a wonderful example of why body horror is great. This movie introduced the world to Cenobites, demons who used to be people who were transformed by an obsession with sensation. The story isn't super complex, but it sounds odd. Basically, there is a puzzle box that if you solve it, opens a gate to hell and a bunch of Cenobites  come out and torture you to death. Hellraiser deals with a guy who accidentally escapes from this torture and convinces an old lover to kill people so he can be fully resurrected. Antics Ensue. For the time the effects are great and Andrew Robinson plays a great bad guy (he played Garak in DS9). Its a good movie if you like gore and creepy villains. Doug Bradley is also great as pinhead. There's a reason the character is so popular. Check it out if you like some good old fashioned body horror.

Eshi: I kinda feel like Hellraiser is inspired by the kind of porn watched by lovecraftian cultists. Pleasures man wasn't meant to know making monsters out of viscera and cum. Doug Bradley builds the character of Pinhead well, well enough to earn the cult following these films have gathered. Watching shitty person after shitty person get chain fucked into oblivion is a surprisingly resilient pleasure, as a full week of Hellraiser movies has attested to. The concept behind the Cenobites is joyous to me, both in their sensation seeking and in their relative neutrality. Hellraiser opens on the Cenobites being summoned by a willing (if ill-advised) man, torturing him for the psychedelic sadomasochistic pleasures of one and all, and then politely cleaning up after themselves and going back to hell. Those motherfuckers are classy, as movie monsters go. 

2: Hellbound: Hellraiser II
I like when sequels show off how the first movie impacted the world, and also add some context for the events of the first movie. In this case Hellraiser II shows the mental damage that the events of the first movie had on the heroine while also showing us the backstory of Pinhead and how Cenobites are made. It also includes a Doctor that had been obsessed with the puzzle boxes and cenobites and uses his influence to get all of the victims he can so that he can research them. Its a take on the Cthulian cultist and it makes him a very fun character to watch. Its not as good as the first movie but it gives you more of an interesting world, and fills in some interesting mythology. Its a fun movie, check it out.

Eshi: Hellbound strengthened all of my lovecraftian theories about the series. A trend to continue (spoilers). There is a moment in the film that, to me, perfectly encompasses the moment when an investigator becomes a cultist. It's beautiful. I'm not super keen on any of the cast in this one except Doug Bradley, so he ends up carrying the film despite his relative lack of screen time. Really, the world building makes this one, and makes it one of the better attempts.

3: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
I have a feeling that this movie is where the series started to tailspin. An investigative reporter starts looking into the death of a person due to hooked chains. This event causes her to become embroiled in a plan Pinhead has to break into reality permanently. The movie started out very similarly to the first two but goes out of fucking control when an army of cenobites start fucking shit up in the real world. Terry Farrel, who was also in DS9 as Jadzia Dax, plays Joey, the investigative journalist, is a competent actress and this movie throws a lot of shit at her character which she handles well. Pinhead is really good in this movie, as both his pre and post cenobiting incarnations, and kind of made watching the movie worth it. Its an interesting film, but the flood of silly cenobites made the ending a little laughable. Check it out if you saw the first two, but don't expect to much.

Eshi: There is a Cenobite that is also a robotic cd player, and that is probably the most indicative thing I can say about Hell on Earth.