Munch: This is, I say regrettably, my favorite franchise. That being said, my version of my favorite franchise ends abruptly at the fourth installment.
Biscuits: This your boy??? This your man???
M: Yeah...I know.
B: This one took a while because...we had to watch the movies. I wish we hadn't. I wish I had not watched the movies. I will never forgive me for making me watch ALL OF THESE FUCKING MOVIES. Each one took years off my life span. I'd already seen the first four but...
M: They're bad. They're direct to video bad. They're 3 dollar bin at Walmart bad and I still want my money back.
B: They'd be walk out of the theatre movie bad but you can't because most of them weren't in theaters. They're turn it off and watch some porn bad.
M: That being said...I am a huge Hellraiser fan. I love the lore, I love the mythology. I own the comics, I own the movies, I love Doug Bradley so much. Pinhead is my absolute favorite boi. But alas....we must review this shit. So here we go. PART THE ONE. A woman discovers the newly resurrected, partially formed, body of her brother-in-law. She starts killing for him to revitalize his body so he can escape the demonic beings that are pursuing him after he escaped their sadistic underworld. That's a weird version of things IMDB.
B: Those are things that certifiably in the first movie, if you've never seen Hellraiser you're probably confused.
M: The first, arguably the best, our introduction to the cenobites, to Kirsty, to the entire mythology and the Lament Configuration ( the iconic box ). My only gripe is that like so many of the Hellraiser movies, not enough Pinhead. The special effects, for 1987 are off the fucking chain, and they still hold up, honestly. This movie still looks better than most of the shit we watched. S tier shit.
B: The fx are really impressive for the time it was made and the fact that they didn't have much of a budget. You know what I liked about this movie? Stuff happened in it. There was a plot. The cenobites, the Lament, it was part of the plot. It was significant to the story.
M: Well this one was actually made to be a Hellraiser story, unlike six others in this series. PART THE TWO. Kirsty is brought to an institution after the horrible events of Hellraiser (1987), where the occult-obsessive head doctor resurrects Julia and unleashes the Cenobites and their demonic underworld. This one is probably my favorite, ten times more crazy cenobite shit, way more Pinhead.
B: We get to see their weird liminal space hell and Leviathan, the giant rotating space diamond. It's weird and out there, and that's pretty cool. Clive Barker created such a unique impression and aesthetic of Hell. So weird and distinct.
M: It's amazeballs, some more really iconic lines from our boy Pinhead, and nobody but Doug Bradley could say that shit and make it sound cool. We know, we've heard other people try. It's bad. Also S tier.
B: Yup.
M: PART THE THREE. An investigative reporter must send the newly unbound Pinhead and his legions back to Hell. This starts the eternal trend of fucking detective/investigator/reporter nonsense in this series.
B: Like they couldn't think of ANY other plotlines. This movie is balls out, batshit insane. It's hard for me to delineate in words how bizarre this movie is. There's a guy who looks like Hulk Hogan who gets turned into a cenobite who kills people with his telescoping eyeball lens? There's Pinhead in a statue in a nightclub that just happens to be an art museum?? And Pinhead is just like, hey Nightclub guy you should just kill people.
M: It's fantastic. It's just utter chaos from the moment it starts. Pinhead spends half the movie trapped in a statue, he's so great. Sassy and unhinged Pinhead. The main character is some redhead named Joey who does stuff but we don't care because there's a fucking dude shooting cd's out of his cenobite mouth hole. I love this movie. Tons of Pinhead, tons of cenobites, some of the most iconic lines in the series here. S tier as well.
B: That's understandable. I'm willing to put it in A tier, but I like it an S tier amount. I will acknowledge it's not a great film, but it's fun as hell.
M: PART THE FOUR. In the 22nd century, a scientist attempts to right the wrong his ancestor created: the puzzle box that opens the gates of Hell and unleashes Pinhead and his Cenobite legions.
B: I can't lie...this kind of H.R. Giger shit that happened in the 90's...I fucking hate it. It's so fucking visually boring. Alien movies were good but ugh, I watched Event Horizon and it was BORING. This movie falls into that trap and I don't like it. Compared to the other movies in this franchise after this one, this movie is great. It's high cinema.
M: You're entitled to your wrong opinion about Giger and Event Horizon. I love this movie. It's so stupid. Hellraiser in space, c'mon. Most of the movie is about LeMarchand and we don't really care, but Pinhead has some of the BEST lines in the whole series.
B: " Do I look like someone who cares what God thinks?" I love how Pinhead is this like, very serious Hell priest but then at the same time is very sassy.
M: Sassy Pinhead is the best Pinhead. Unfortunately after this, everything went straight into ass tier. I'm not willing to S tier this. This is at best B tier. Compared to the rest, this is still like...the best movie.
B: B tier is fair.
M: PART THE FIVE. INFERNO. A shady police detective becomes embroiled in a strange world of murder, sadism and madness after being assigned a murder investigation against a madman known only as "The Engineer". This is the first one where they made an entirely different movie and then slapped Pinhead into it. No really, they did that for like four movies. It's also the second movie that centers around a fucking detective.
B: I feel a visceral hatred for this movie. It is a GRUELING experience. At the beginning, I was like, I'll give this a chance. It's not going so bad, it might be alright. But no, it just drags on. It's so, so fucking boring. You stop caring about this detective like a quarter of the way in. And this is the movie that begins the HORRIBLE, AWFUL, I FUCKING HATE IT trend of having fucked up shit happen and then have it be like OH IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. It was a hallucination or something. That's half the movie, stuff that isn't happening!
M: The original movies had a ton of fucked up shit happening, but it was ACTUALLY HAPPENING. That's part of why it was so insane. This movie is....painful. It is blindingly dull. They bring in the chatterer but he's just a torso. They throw in the wire twins and some like...slenderman motherfucker but it's just the detective.
B: They quit making new cenobites after this, they just recycled the same ones. They got rid of chatterer and butterball and female cenobite, kinda rude tbh. There's barely any cenobites in this.
M: Pinhead is here for like...literally two minutes.
B: It's a four course meal of just Saltines. Bland, dry, and unfufilling. Hell tier. Piss hell tier.
M: Whatever the worst, lowest part of hell is, this movie belongs there. PART THE SIX. A shady businessman attempts to piece together the details of the car crash that killed his wife, rendered him an amnesiac, and left him in possession of a sinister puzzle box that summons monsters.
B: At least this time, he's a shady businessman!
M: There are detectives tho. This movie brings back Kirsty, but like....she's a side character. The movie would have been way more interesting if it was about her. She manipulates her husband into the cenobites hands but WE DON'T GET TO SEE ANY OF THAT. It's all told from her stupid husband's point of view.
B: I remember him throwing up a lamprey but that was the only gross thing. If I wanted to watch a white guy lose his grip on reality I'd just go watch Hannibal. Or go look in the mirror.
M: SELF BURN. This movie is so boring. AND - it does the fucking this didn't really happen bullshit hallucination crap even more than inferno. It's slightly, and I'm measuring this is in millimeters, less boring than Inferno.
B: This one does have a lamprey coming out a man's mouth. It's still bad though. I have a hard time putting this is anything but shit tier as well. If I had to choose between this movie and staring at a blank wall for the same duration, i'd pick the wall, because then I could at least imagine a better Hellraiser movie. Still D tier.
M: I agree. It's awful. And now... PART THE SEVEN. Deader. A journalist uncovers an underground group who can bring back the dead and slowly becomes drawn into their world.
B: The cover for this one also looks like ass, look at that fucking photoshop glow around the cube, now just slap that girl's face on it. Who's more dead?
M: Yet another fucking journalist detective and we don't know what's really happening and what's not.
B: This one actually feels shorter than the other ones. The pacing isn't quite that slow but it's better than the other things. There's one or two visually interesting things. The guy on the train was kinda interesting. The scene where she has the knife in her back is compelling, the stark white of the bathroom and the blood. The scene with the dead girl in the bathroom also has tension. That's more than any of the other shit movies in here.
M: You're gonna give a rank up for not feeling eternal??? It's still awful. It is slightly less awful, the plot is really out there, there are holes you could drive a mack truck through. This one, like the past two though was also just another fucking movie that they threw Pinhead into and called it Hellraiser. Like...why does Lemarchand's ancestor have the ability to raise the dead?
B: It has a bit more merit as a piece of cinema than Inferno, which has nothing. It's like that gold star meme that says - not as bad as you could have been.
M: But can we rank it above hell piss tier? I mean really. We have like two rankings here...the first four, which we can't even compare these to, and then the rest against each other.
B: Compared to the originals, it's not good. It could be C tier, I guess.
M: I'm willing to go along with that, but it's still really really bad. PART THE EIGHT. HELLWORLD. Gamers playing a MMORPG based on the "Hellraiser" films find their lives endangered after being invited to a rave, the host of which intends to show them the truth behind the Cenobite mythos.
B: I'm almost willing to move Deader to C tier after remembering this one. This one is piss hell tier. Plot, that word doesn't apply to this movie.
M: The plot is....shaky...at best. This isn't remotely a Hellraiser movie. This is the WORST offender here.
B: The entire movie only has a Hellraiser themed party until the VERY END when Pinhead shows up for like a cameo and cuts a guy to pieces. It has nothing to do with hellraiser. The plot is a dude who's mad at his dead kid's friends because his son killed himself and he's seeking revenge.
M: It's more like a Saw movie tbh. Henry Cavill is here tho. There's a lot of banging and even more of the fucking this didn't really happen trope and also Pinhead is wearing a neck brace.
B: And at the end it's implied that a ghost used a phone to save his friends? There's nothing at all to do with Hellraiser. You could remove all the hellraiser iconography and it would still be the same movie. You could remove Pinhead and it would be the same movie.
M: Piss hell garbage tier. It's irredeemable.
B: These movies feel like being tortured by the cenobites in real life.
M: PART THE FUCKING NINE REVELATIONS JESUS CHRIST. Imdb won't load the synopsis. We already reviewed this one.
B: Jerma cries a lot, the movie.
M: I hate that I have to elevate this absolute piece of shit in the rankings, but it's at least a Hellraiser movie??? It's at least about Hell???
B: This one at least has some moments that are funny bad and not just bad bad. The unnecessary baby murder.
M: That's funny??
B: It's so hamfisted, it's so edgy, it just becomes comical.
M: This movie was made entirely so that they didn't lose the rights to hellraiser. Clive Barker said - and I quote - "I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin' thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker,it's a lie. It's not even from my butt-hole"
B: The makeup is so bad. He looks tacky, like if I reached out and touched him, he would be sticky. I don't like sticky airbrushed Pinhead.
M: They also messed up his eyes, it's just weird. This movie is laughably atrocious, but at least it's laughable. You can't even laugh at Inferno. You're too busy pulling your hair out. Regrettably, C tier.
B: It's poopy garbage and I don't like it, but compared to the other fecal matter I've had to review, it's slightly better.
M: PART THE FUCKING TEN OH MY GOD. JUDGEMENT. Detectives Sean and David Carter are on the case to find a gruesome serial killer terrorizing the city. Joining forces with Detective Christine Egerton, they dig deeper into a spiraling maze of horror that may not be of this world. Hey guess what? Fucking detectives.
B: This movie is really gross but it just feels way overdone. It loses it's shock value when you're being nasty 24-7. and I would know. A lot of these movies I was like - not nasty enough! This one...maybe build up a little.
M: This is a different kind of nasty tho, like there's barfing. A lot of barfing. And playing in barf. And drooling, and splashing blood on naked chicks and it honestly feels a WEE BIT FETISHY to me.
B: You're talking about Hellraiser, it's always been kinda fetishy.
M: I don't feel like it was Hellraiser fetishy, I feel like it was director fetishy.
B: They blew their load way too early. You can't just come out of the gate swinging like that. It's not as bad as some of the other ones. There's some Hell stuff in it at least.
M: I kinda like the Auditor.
B: I liked the weird butcher guy. The auditor guy is kinda cool but you can tell he can't hardly talk with that makeup on because he can't move his upper lip. I hate all the detective shit. There's no explanation of why this one detective guy went bonkers. I don't like the angel chick, she feel really out of place.
M: The Pinhead is at least better, though I wish they'd never showed the actor without the makeup. He also looks way overdone, like they hit him with some flocking.
B: Way too airbrushed. His lips are kinda blue. Blue lips, pale face, I hate the entire human race.
M: Still...in the grand scheme of things...not the worst. I still can't even go to B tier. I could go C tier.
B: B tier has four, we're not going there. It's still bad and I wouldn't advise that you watch it, but comparatively....it's better.
M: And the bar is SO LOW. Like we got excited that Deader didn't feel six hours long. That's how low the bar is. I will never forgive these people for what they did to my boy, MY BOY! But thank you Doug and Clive for giving me the first four. We are tentatively very excited about the new Hulu version.
B: "Look how they massacred my boy!" - The Godfather, 1972.
deader may not be a good movie but there's a scene where the protag is trying so desperately to pull a knife from her own back as the bathroom is getting bloodier and bloodier and you're just supposed to sit with that .
Screencaps of the current 10 Hellraiser movies. 30k+ or so on average / movie.
Hellraiser
Hellraiser II: Hellbound
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
Hellriaser IV: Bloodline
Hellriaser V: Inferno
Hellriaser VI: Hellseeker
Hellraiser VII: Deader
Hellraiser VIII: Hellworld
Hellriaser IX: Revelations
Hellraiser X: Judgment
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