The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[Ibnezra]

Too bad I couldn't get in on this earlier, but if its deemed appropriate, I'll list my top ten:

1. "Jacob's Ladder" (1990) Adrian Lyne
2. "Deep Red" (1975) Dario Argento
3. "Sante Sangre" (1989) Alejandro Jodorosky
4. "Fright Night" (1985) Tom Holland
5. "An American Werewolf In London" (1981) John Landis
6. "The Shining" (1980) Stanley Kubrick
7. "The Wicker Man" (1973) Robin Hardy
8. "Black Sunday" (1960) Mario Bava
9. "The Unknown" (1927) Todd Browning
10."Frenzy" (1972) Alfred Hitchcock

Perhaps some of these choices fit only loosely into the "Horror" genre, there are many films that fit more solidly into the genre that I love, but not as well as these.

[domino harvey]

This week's viewings, and some weird synchronicity issues this round-- one day I inadvertently watched two films back to back that featured a character killing themselves by injecting their veins with air, and then the next day I saw three films where one of the protagonists accidentally kills their friend instead of the villain!

the Descent (Neil Marshall 2005) A frustrating film given that there's several great scenes of stomach-lurching tension involving the mechanations of being caught in an unexplored cave, but on either side of these fine set pieces are either under-written attempts at providing the eventual victims with backstories (though this is such a standard practice in this genre that it hardy merits notice) and gratuitous but engaging monster movie standards. I don't object to the introduction of the creatures outright, but I wish they'd been conceived to make a little more sense-- I can buy that they hunt by sound, but if two girls are whispering five feet away from you in an otherwise empty cave, don't you think the monster's gonna hear that? Or notice if they walk on fire? But the film goes for broke trying to get you to overlook the multitude of glaring problems by amping up the gore and letting its protagonist (literally?) go crazy in the hopes that no one notices. I know my take on this is apparently pretty standard, but that's what happens when you don't get around to things like this for eight years!

Lifeforce (Tobe Hooper 1985) So, against all odds, I thought this was much better than its reputation led me to believe. Maybe the extended cut adds in things that smooth out some of the issues others have with the film, but I found this absurd sci-fi epic tale of "space vampires" surprisingly well-done and the best film I've seen from Hooper. It helps that Hooper takes a page from his Poltergeist helming and reigns in his more loathsome character tics-- maybe giving him a big budget causes him to turn down the volume on the grate-o-meter? It sure looks like it lost a money for whoever funded this! For a film where the antagonist is fully nude for almost her entire screen-time, the movie treats her and all of the bizarre events in the film without a wink to their absurdity, giving it the feel of one of those "boy's adventure stories" from Weird Tales or something.

Manhattan Baby (Lucio Fulci 1982) Unbelievable: When the taxidermied birds come to life and attack an Egyptian expert, they spend minutes clawing away at the skin on his face while leaving his eyes intact. Fulci, I don't even know you anymore! This movie is, like all Fulci movies though, utter nonsense. Something about an ancient amulet which transports some unlucky souls to Egypt in exchange for a pile of sand on our end or something? And that ugly little boy from another Fulci film from this era (they all run together) is in this too, which doesn't help. Best detail: the three American flags in the kids' room to indicate that this takes place in "America"

Mimic (Guillermo Del Toro 1997) An odd choice for a splashy American debut given its dank and unpleasant atmosphere, this one's very much a piece with its mid-90s monster movie brethren. A movie mostly set in grimy underground tunnels and starring giant bugs less congenial than cockroaches is probably not going to be a lot of fun in even the best hands, and the film's nastiness early on when it offs two ragtag kids leaves a bitter taste while still straddling the line between conventional Hollywood action film and dark horror flick. This was another one I'd seen as a kid and mostly forgotten and I suspect it'll re-earn half that fate soon enough

the Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski 1999) A silly film, but one told in a pleasant and slow-moving fashion. I was impressed with how leisurely Polanski managed to let this all unfold, and there's no indication that he takes the film even a little bit seriously. Frank Langella's brash Satan-obsessed collector is the best thing here, even if his character's not especially bright (his private code to everything is "666"-- how long do you think it'd take anyone to crack that?) and on-screen far too little. Johnny Depp's look in this one is "Some fucking douche who wants to talk to you about A Confederacy of Dunces in grad school"

the Puppet Masters (Stuart Orme 1994) About as good as I remembered it from some premium cable airing 15+ years ago, this bite at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers apple even has the gall to cast Donald Sutherland in its take on the covert alien invasion! Everything moves along at a brisk pace and there's of course great pleasure in seeing Richard Belzer in an action sequence. For those who've seen the film, I ran across a somewhat embittered response to the final film from one of the original screenwriters here, though he's far less charitable toward the final product than is warranted

the Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002) Well, in the plus column, there's a clear and well-defined visual palate at play here, with everything looking like it was shot unfiltered under fluorescent lights and minimal sets and backdrops. There's also a great sequence out of nowhere involving a horse on a ferry that's bizarre and the only thing here that showed a willful imagination. Otherwise this is by-the-numbers nonsense where characters find themselves in a ghost story and make up the rules as they go along-- ie no real stakes. The last-minute imparting of some hint at moral quandary was the most interesting element in play and then the film just ends instead of exploring it. Maybe the sequel focuses on how one goes on living their day-to-day life after making that choice, I foolishly thought to myself…

the Ring Two (Hideo Nakata 2005) … ahhahahahahahh no. It's hard to remember the last time I saw a sequel as bad as this miserable mess. While I was no fan of the original, it at least had some kind of internal logic, however arbitrary. This is just Goosebumps, with weird shit happening for no reason, countless dream sequences, and no reason for existing whatsoever. Poor Naomi Watts was presumably either trapped into a sequel contractually, or the studio threw enough money at her to hold her nose, because I cannot imagine anyone seeing this script as desirable on purpose. There is one good sequence with Emily VanCamp from Revenge where being exposed to the videotape is given parallels with date rape, but this comes and goes in the first ten minutes and all that's left is the worst kind of sequel tendencies-- watered down retreads of earlier events, insulting audience "rewards," &c. Also, the "unrated" tag on this one is particularly amusing given that I am positive this version of the film could be rated PG as-is

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Lee Harry 1987) If you're like me and have to watch any film all the way through, don't even bother with this. If you can compromise your viewing just a tad and skip the first 45 minutes of this bonkers sequel to a not very good slasher film, you might be surprised at the gonzo comic touches afforded this tale of a previously nonexistent brother to the protagonist in the first film. And if you haven't seen the original yet, don't worry, that's what the first half of this movie is. Once the clip show therapy session is over and the film can get to the new material, however, the movie delivers a series of zero budget set pieces that left me frequently laughing out loud at some of the funniest and most surreal movie violence this side of Dead Alive. The gonzo non-sequitur of "Garbage Day" is already well-permeated in the minds of many thanks to the internet, but there's plenty of equally strange and memorable moments, as when the brother stabs a loan shark with an umbrella and then opens it, exposing the bloody fan of fabric and wires behind the wound, or when the murderer's date brings him to the movies to watch… the first Silent Night, Deadly Night!

the Strangers (Bryan Bertino 2008) Relentless and effective suspense film concerning an unmotivated, unfair, and undeserved home invasion that's far more concerned with clever menacing than direct violence… at least, for a while. The pic's a slow-burner and does a good job setting the scene and gradually turning up the dial on the horrific actions, but I enjoyed the film far more when it looked like it was going in a Walking Dead direction (the Karloff film, not the TV show), with the perpetrators committing no actual harm to their victims but maneuvering them into dangerous situations by affecting their surroundings. Unfortunately, it veers into Funny Games territory by the end and it all becomes one big exercise in nothing. I'd love to compliment the film for being well-made, having a clear sense of tone, and accurately conveying a tense and legit scary situation, but it's all just employed at the service of pointless nihilism. Someone besides Liv Tyler should have asked "Why are you doing this?"

Wrong Turn (Rob Schmidt 2003) I'm obviously not as well-versed in the "mutant hicks" subgenre as I should be but I had some insurmountable problems with this despite it being moderately entertaining. Mainly, I had trouble understanding who these cretinous cannibal sociopaths were, how they'd survived so long, why they were so dead-set on going after Our Heroes, how they knew how many teens there were and where they were at all times, how they managed to remain unnoticed despite doing things like killing cops Fulci-style, why they needed to kill the stragglers once they'd already stolen anything of value, and how they were superhuman in strength and ability and stamina and speed and internal GPSing. I assume these questions and many others aren't answered in the plethora of direct-to-DVD sequels in this series

[knives]

RE: The Descent.

Spoiler

I thought it was pretty obvious that the monsters were just the main woman in The Descent.

[domino harvey]

Obvious? It was half-assedly suggested at best, and makes even less sense than the straight-forward reading. And let's say you're right (and I know you're hardly the first to make this supposition), the film is still as or more problematic than it was before! Which is a shame because there's a lot of good elements in play otherwise

[bamwc2]

I managed to get into an old dead laptop that housed a horror list that I prepared, but never submitted for this list over a year ago. I never submitted it. Here it is, but I think that probably the last ten to fifteen titles would be different now:

1. Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi)
2. Videodrome (David Cronenberg)
3. Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale)
4. Halloween (John Carpenter)
5. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)
6. Onibaba (Kaneto Shindô)
7. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch)
8. God Told Me To (Larry Cohen)
9. Carrie (Brian De Palma)
10. The Medusa Touch (Jack Gold)
11. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
12. Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg)
13. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy)
14. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
15. Targets (Peter Bogdanovich)
16. The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian)
17. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola)
18. Faust (F.W. Murnau)
19. Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman)
20. The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein)
21. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
22. The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)
23. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
24. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene)
25. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
26. Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
27. The Crazies (Breck Eisner)
28. Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindô)
29. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
30. Haxan (Benjamin Christensen)
31. The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth)
32. Frailty (Bill Paxton)
33. The Host (Joon-ho Bong)
34. Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima)
35. Der Golem (Carl Boese and Paul Wegener)
36. Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma)
37. Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski)
38. Seconds (John Frankenheimer)
39. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
40. Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hillyer)
41. The Black Room (Roy William Neill)
42. Secrets of a Soul (G. W. Pabst)
43. Day of the Dead (George A. Romero)
44. Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon)
45. The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg)
46. The Exorcist (William Friedkin)
47. The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni)
48. Black Christmas (Bob Clark)
49. A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman)
50. Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein)

[domino harvey]

Damn, the Crazies wouldn't have been an Orphan! EDIT: Frailty too!

[mfunk9786]

And more votes for The Wicker Man are always a good thing.

[Mr Sausage]

Nice to see someone else would've given The Black Room a boost (tho' I think swo17 almost voted for it). Probably Karloff's best performance(s).

[Mr Sausage]

During the last horror list project I'd been filling in the gaps of the major Hollywood horror series. I stalled out on this one, but since I've been perusing Clive Barker's written work I figured I should take up watching Hellraisers again. Hmm, when I see it written out like that I have to wonder why I would ever follow through on such a terrible idea. Anyway, the first four form a kind of series, after which the films cease having any connection to the original. So here are those first four:


Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987): A genuinely impressive film, even if I'm not much of a fan. The imagery is so effective that when I rewatched it again ten years after first seeing it in highschool, I found I'd forgotten nothing. Every part of it felt still fresh in my mind. The best parts of the movie are whenever the Cenobites turn up; the worst, everything to do with the family relationships as these characters are pretty flimsy. The movie drags when it's not indulging in its set-pieces. But the movie's most puzzling failure, as Domino said elsewhere, is that most of the Cenobites' actions seem non-consensual. The film still flirts with Barker's most trangressive, disturbing idea tho': that when pushed to a certain level, pleasure and pain become indivisible--as if pain and pleasure lie not at the opposite extremes of experience, but at the very same point on the edge of extremity. Maybe they have the same point of origin, and our worldly experience of either of them is a diluted version of the initial, primal, undivided feeling--a false dualism--and that the area the Cenobites inhabit is feeling at its purest. Worse, Hell is designed for those who want nothing more than to experience this primal feeling at the limit of the experiential. Would that the film had explored this frightening idea more and ignored its monster-in-the-attic plot, but oh well.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988): Roger Ebert was being accurate when he wrote in his negative review that the movie "has no plot in a conventional sense. It is simply a series of ugly and bloody episodes strung together one after another like a demo tape by a perverted special-effects man." This is not an accident (or if it was, the filmmakers were more willing to embrace it than fix it when they finally noticed); the movie is designed in the tradition of a horror ride at a carnival where you travel through a dark tunnel while plastic skeletons pop out at you and cobwebs hang on everything. For forty minutes the movie goes through the barest motions of plot, biding its time until hell opens. From there, it's scene after unconnected scene of pure spectacle as characters move between rooms, encountering horrifically imaginative sights, from a room full of female bodies sighing and writhing beneath white sheets, to a mock-up of a house whose pictures bleed, to hallways that burst open and suck people out of their skin, to a labyrinth with Leviathan at its centre (plus the infamous cenobite torture room).

The movie is an excuse to let someone's bloody imagination run wild. It's self aware enough to include a funhouse set complete with creepy carnival music and a scene at the end where the cenobite's pillar rises from a mattress and attached to it is a jerky plastic skeleton that emits canned mechanical laughter, exactly like you'd see in those carnival rides you took as a kid. The movie also more fully addresses what the original skimmed over: that for some people, hell is a pleasure room they seek willingly. Sex, pain, and death become horribly intertwined, with the lead human antagonist beginning a romantic relationship with a skinless woman (and building a kind of torture gallery for her!) before opening hell to experience its pleasures. He gets a little girl who's a savant at puzzles to open the lament configuration, causing the Cenobites to come. This provokes an interesting bit of dialogue from Pinhead, to wit that hands don't call them to earth, desire does--which would seem to contradict their treatment of Kirsty both here and in the original, but maybe they know something about her that she doesn't given that when she finds herself in their presence once again, they chide her for her excuses and say "Oh, Kirsty. So eagre to play, so unwilling to admit it." Perhaps this desire can exist in someone, some regular person, on a plane outside of their conscious awareness--after all, Kirsty does charge into hell pretty willingly whenever it opens up! Perhaps most disturbing of all, tho', is that the cenobites not only love what they have become, but have even become a bit wearied of it in a Dorian Gray manner, Pinhead admitting that existence holds no more surprises for him: hell truly is the ultimate in bodily experience for the pleasure seeker. Beyond it, there is nothing more to experience.

Hellbound lacks all the conventional elements we associate with a good movie (plot, coherence, characters that are more than functional), but nevertheless ascends (or descends, as your taste inclines) to an impressive visual grandeur, one that's continually imaginative. Unencumbered by the monster-in-the-attic plot and taking all of its imagery and ideas to the limit, this is a superior film to the original and the best of the series.


Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992): Pinhead's sudden popularity lead him to be the sole villain of this one, which is a mistake. Unconnected from hell and Barker's ideas, he becomes just another monster on the loose, except with a propensity to give endless boring monologues. Pinhead plain isn't frightening outside of what he represents. Nevertheless, here he leaves hell and starts to build his own cenobite army out of bits of technology merged with flesh, which could've been really disturbing on a level with the Tetsuo films, but just ends up being guys with CD players in their heads that eject discs and clunky video cameras for eyes and other ridiculous, inadvertently funny things. We're about a step away from literally having a walking toaster. Dull, silly movie.

Hellraiser: Bloodline (Joe Chappelle and Kevin Yagher, 1996): Hellraiser in space! And the 17th century...and 1996... This one explores the origin of the lament configuration and follows the descendants of the original creator down the years as they encounter hell over and over. The film is incoherent and rushed and never really explains anything, which I understand is the result of studio interference (there were recuts and reshoots done by a second director). Adam Scott(!) shows up as a guy who raises a demon solely so he can have sex with it while it wears some peasant girl's skin, which seems kind of a waste of having a demon servant but whatever. This movie has three separate plots, and at 85 minutes you can imagine how much time is spent on any of them. Oh, and Pinhead gets a pet dog. I was bored, except for the part where twin brothers have their flesh intertwined to make a conjoined twin cenobite. That was, admittedly, pretty imaginative.

[knives]

And those twins would later make some really bad movies.

[Mr Sausage]

And those twins would later make some really bad movies.

IMDB only has three credits for them, Bloodline, some movie before that, and a TV episode.

[knives]

I'm talking about the Polish brothers who play the twin Cenobites.

[Mr Sausage]

I'm talking about the Polish brothers who play the twin Cenobites.

Oh, I see. I thought the guys who played the twin security guards also played their cenobite incarnations, but I guess not. I rather liked their film Northfork, and I think Domino is a fan of them.

[knives]

The two I've seen (The Astronaut Farmer and Smell of Success) were bad enough to put me off of them.

[domino harvey]

Haven't seen those (they're in my unwatched cellar) but Twin Falls, Idaho and Northfork are fabulous and I think the Polish Brothers' whole career as indie filmmakers is really interesting and underdiscussed

[knives]

If anything that's another problem for me. Their career really deserves a book it is so interesting, but what they've put on the screen that I've seen isn't.

[domino harvey]

Your wish is my command

[colinr0380]

I'm glad that others feel that Hellbound is the best of the series! However I love the first Hellraiser film precisely for the creature in the attic and adulterous relationship stuff (I especially like the soft focus Danielle Steele, or Mills & Boon-esque flashback to Frank and Julia's first meeting!), with the problems in the first film being around the special effects climax as Kirsty somehow beats back the Cenobites after they renege on their promise to let her go if she brings them Frank.

Kirsty also doesn't really expose Frank (she is more calculating about being on a mission to do this in The Hellbound Heart), but is more going to save her father. This adds a whole host of interesting 'daddy issues' into the film which gets carried over as part of her motivation in the sequel and I think that intermingles with what you were saying here:

This provokes an interesting bit of dialogue from Pinhead, to wit that hands don't call them to earth, desire does--which would seem to contradict their treatment of Kirsty both here and in the original, but maybe they know something about her that she doesn't given that when she finds herself in their presence once again, they chide her for her excuses and say "Oh, Kirsty. So eagre to play, so unwilling to admit it." Perhaps this desire can exist in someone, some regular person, on a plane outside of their conscious awareness--after all, Kirsty does charge into hell pretty willingly whenever it opens up.

The one area of Hellbound that I have had issues with is that Kirsty ostensibly makes the journey into Hell to save her father. But her father wasn't taken to Hell at the end of the first film, Frank and Julia were. Her dad was killed and skinned earlier on for Frank's benefit and there is even that scene in the first film where the Cenobites reject the flayed body in the attic as not who they have come for, the identity confusion being something that drives Kirsty wild in thinking that they mean her father and sends her running straight into the arms of the human evildoers (as in Cabal/Nightbreed, the humans perpretrate the worst acts on the truly innocent and undeserving, such as Kirsty's father).

Yet Kirsty, after having seen all of this including Frank in her father's skin being dragged back to Hell, still at the beginning of the second film falls almost immediately for Frank's ploy of pretending to be her father and this quest to save him becomes her sole motivation for the first half of the film, until there are bigger issues to deal with in the form of the mad doctor, the evil stepmother and saving her mute friend (the saving of her friend itself is a wonderful final call back to this theme in the way that it takes the form of Kirsty donning her stepmother's skin and begging her friend to trust her). I used to think that Kirsty was poorly written at that point to be so silly as to not have thought things through properly, and maybe she still is, but I like your idea that maybe she is motivated by a sort of unconscious fascination with the world of the Cenobites, perhaps as much as Dr Channard is.

Speaking of Dr Channard, I hesitate to bring this up after the debate we had about Martyrs a while back, but I also think Dr Channard here is doing (more successfully!) the very same thing that the cabal in that film were trying to do: he is experimenting using proxies for his own desire without being willing to take that next step, and finally gets more than he bargained for when Julia takes control of his involvement for him. Even if on his Cenobitten reappearance he seems to not be unhappy about the result, instead glorying in his new experiences (adolescently and obscenely exuberant compared to the jaded, slightly bored with it all Pinhead and company)!

I quite like Hellraiser III, again for the main Pinhead plotline, though while I liked the plot I do agree that trying to redeem the Cenobites is kind of missing the larger metaphorical point of the series! It is getting away from the subject of pleasure and pain, and I also agree that it is here that the silly Cenobites with various Schwarzenegger-ian awful catchphrases start turning up, turning what should be hideously upsetting abominations into goofy single-theme monsters.

There were apparently a whole host of problems during the making of Hellraiser: Bloodline (though these days I like to think of it as the gory precursor to Cloud Atlas!) and a lot of the linking material was supposedly cut or chopped around in the editing. I seem to remember reading that a big chunk of the 17th century sequence was filmed and then cut out in order to get to the space sequences faster.

I'm talking about the Polish brothers who play the twin Cenobites.

Oh, I see. I thought the guys who played the twin security guards also played their cenobite incarnations, but I guess not. I rather liked their film Northfork, and I think Domino is a fan of them.

By the way Mark and Michael Polish also turn up in small roles in Neil Jordan's remake of Bob le flambeur, The Good Thief!

[knives]

Your wish is my command

But does it come with the potassium benzoate?

[Mr Sausage]

Speaking of Dr Channard, I hesitate to bring this up after the debate we had about Martyrs a while back, but I also think Dr Channard here is doing (more successfully!) the very same thing that the cabal in that film were trying to do: he is experimenting using proxies for his own desire without being willing to take that next step, finally gets more than he bargained for when Julia takes control of his involvement for him. Even if on his Cenobitten reappearance he seems to not be unhappy about the result, instead glorying in his new experiences (adolescently and obscenely exuberant compared to the jaded, slightly bored Pinhead and company)!

That's a really interesting point. He owns several lament configurations, and it can't be particularly hard to open them if Kirsty could do it by accident. He could've opened one himself at any time, but it seems like he's been psyching himself up for years, collecting every bit of information he can before taking the plunge, and then only to have someone else open the box for him. It takes Julia to finally lead him into what he'd always wanted. I think he's a coward, afraid to chase his own desires and needing constant pushing to finally take the plunge--only once it's finished to wonder aloud why he'd ever waited so long.

I was actually just thinking about the difference between the first two Hellraisers and the torture porn phenomenon, and what I think distinguishes them, even at their most plotless and most focussed on unconnected torture set-pieces, they maintain a sense of the fantastic and the carnivalesque about even their most horrific visuals. The composer had the good sense to score Frank's resurrection, for instance, with a carnivalesque theme. There's a knowing exaggeration. There's also an actual idea that the torture imagery is conveying, it is not just there for its own ends.

[Mr Sausage]

The next four Hellraisers form their own little grouping, one not owed to continuity but indifference, I guess: they're all straight-to-video and made from reworked spec scripts that initially had nothing to do with the series.

Hellraiser: Inferno (Scott Derrickson, 2000): The lead actor here also played Boone in Nightbreed, so there's sort of a Clive Barker association going on. He's a corrupt police officer here who finds the lament configuration at a crime scene in which the victim looked to've had the least fun BDSM session imaginable. After picking up a hooker, our gravelly throated, noir-ish antihero opens the box, summoning the cenobites...in the form of a bad dream. Or something. The rest of the plot involves our hero searching for a mysterious man named The Engineer (who's also hunting our hero) while experiencing various weird dreams and hallucinations. This is one of those 'reality-crumbles' movies where you're supposed to wonder what's real and what isn't, although it hardly seemed important if events fell to one side or the other. There's the occasional bit of inventive imagery, including a petting session where the caresses eventually slip straight under the man's skin (to his increasing pleasure!). Pinhead has two minutes of screen time. In this and the other sequels, hell is no longer the amoral place of Barker's original but a place of moral judgement like it's usually depicted. I don't understand why it's tormenting our hero, tho', as aside from doing coke once and using a hooker he doesn't do anything to merit the relentless torments of hell. In fact the plot is totally incoherent. I didn't understand the repeated allusions to his childhood or why he kept having visions of his childhood home.

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Rick Bota, 2001): This is the most goddamn repetitive movie. Here's the plot: our hero goes to work, has inexplicable conversation with coworker, hallucinates, gets called to the police station, has inexplicable conversation with the police, hallucinates, rides home on a bus, hallucinates, arrives home, has inexplicable conversation with a woman, hallucinates--repeat in the same order for 90 minutes. Not an exaggeration. Kirsty from the first two Hellraisers shows up briefly as our hero's dead wife. I won't spoil the movie, but her character does so many abominable things that it dwarfs her asshole husband's faults by a dozen magnitudes. So the fact that he's the one being tormented is a pretty funny black joke. If only the movie had been in on it.

Hellraiser: Deader (Rick Bota, 2003): It's a rule that if you have a straight-to-video genre film series, Kari Wuhrer has to be in it. She's a journalist who sees a video of the newest craze: killing yourself then being raised from the dead. Worth doing once, I guess. They call them deaders and it's a cult or something. So Wuhrer is off to Hungaria (or Romania, I forget) to learn everything. She opens the lament configuration fairly early (apparently the gateway to hell is easier to open than your average DVD packaging), summoning Pinhead who tries to recruit her for something while the cult also tries to recruit her for something. I didn't understand a single moment of this movie. It was also twice as boring as Hellseeker, and stuff actually happens in this one!

Hellraiser: Hellworld (Rick Bota, 2005): If there's one thing you'd expect attractive twenty-something's to do, it's obsessively play an online video-game based on an eighties horror film series so popular it hasn't seen a movie theatre screen in eleven years and has grossed less than every other horror film series from the same era. Just as you'd expect an exclusive party for the game's die-hard players to be populated by the kind of people who go clubbing and definitely never go home alone. Cue our five characters having hallucinations and getting punished for things that aren't well explained. A dull, silly movie that has a genuinely unexpected and interesting final reveal, a game performance from Lance Henriksen, and a baffling last 3 minutes.

[colinr0380]

I haven't seen any of those last four Hellraiser films but your descriptions of Inferno reminds me of Angel Heart, Hellseeker's incomprehensible investigation as similar to Feardotcom and Hellworld a little like Stay Alive!

She's a journalist who sees a video of the newest craze: killing yourself then being raised from the dead. Worth doing once, I guess. They call them deaders and it's a cult or something

As for Deader, that death cult sounds nowhere near as attractive as the one in Psychomania! (You even get to be buried sitting astride your motorbike in that gang!)

[Mr Sausage]

Hellworld is a bit like Halloween 8 (why have I seen these movies?), in which a bunch of kids sign on for a reality show ala ghosthunters where they spend a night in the old Myers house with cameras on their heads. The crew has a whole bunch of 'fake' Michael scares set up, only for the real Michael to show up and kill people who never seem to think he's the actual Michael Myers until they're holding their own innards. Hellworld's a bit like that, only minus the part where Busta Rhymes beats up Michael with kung fu moves he apparently learned from watching martial arts movies (actual plot point).

Anyway, if for some reason you're curious about the dregs of the Hellraiser series, here's my preference from least worst to worst:

Inferno
Hellworld
Hellseeker
Deader.

[Mr Sausage]

Hellraiser: Revelations (Victor Garcia, 2011): A movie so bad even Doug Bradley (Pinhead) refused to be in it. The movie, notoriously, was made in a few weeks solely to keep the Hellraiser rights from lapsing, and shows every ounce of the creative bankrupcy that gave birth to it. An ugly, idiotic, pointless movie, and that's saying something in this series. I'll put it this way: it made me wish I was watching Deader. I think I unfairly maligned Deader, actually. In retrospect, it made such good choices, like ensuring every scene wasn't just people screaming at each other, or using semi-decent cameras so everything didn't look flat, ugly, and over-lit, or not having spoiled-brats seriously refer to America as 'Generica' while terrorizing their mother with a shotgun in the family mansion ('cause suburbia is the real hell, maaaaan), or avoiding scenes where a brother and sister make-out or where an audible snap silences a baby's off-screen wails, and using Doug Bradley instead of this guy. Did I mention a baby is killed? This is the worst movie I have seen in some time.

[domino harvey]

I'm really glad M Sausage is getting into the spirit of this thread and is finally posting about awful movies he's seen post-list. I thought it'd be only me and Colin taking repeated rounds to the chest in here!