Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
Maybe it’s a good thing my first DVD of Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth was too badly damaged to play. If it had functioned properly, I don’t think I would've continued with the series. This film is badly acted, poorly written, plagued with bad special effects and filled with questionable creature designs. It also makes the enormous mistake of giving us a complete origin for Pinhead. Worst of all, it's boring.
Rich and spoiled club owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt) stumbles upon a curious artifact - an intricately carved stone pillar covered with tormented faces. When blood is spilled onto its surface (in a head-scratching scene that involves a hand-sized hole trap you'd expect to find in an Indiana Jones movie and a phony-looking rat) Pinhead (Doug Bradley) will emerge once again. With the Cenobite aiming to bring Hell to Earth, an ambitious young television reporter named Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) is humanity’s only hope.
I’m seriously considering giving this movie a big fat zero. It's hard to name anything good, or even creative about Hellraiser 3. Right away, it sets itself up for failure by having some bad actors front and center. The worst offender has to be Joey’s cameraman Doc (Ken Carpenter). From there, it just keeps getting worse. I understand that if you’re making a sequel to a film franchise that didn’t lend itself to multiple chapters, you’ve got to dig for ideas, but giving an origin story to your movie monster does not help make them more frightening or interesting. When Cenobites turn out to be a bunch of humans who got warped by mysterious powers, the spook scale goes down a notch, but they can still be compelling. When you give Pinhead a name and you spend the time to know everything about him, he becomes a tragic figure (at best), not one that fills you with dread.
If you could somehow muster enough enthusiasm to care about the characters in this film (a legendary feat) you'll still struggle to stay awake. This plot is as generic as it gets. What does Pinhead want? To bring Hell to Earth. How? By destroying the Lament Configuration and escaping his prison. Once he gets out, what is his plan? Kill a bunch of people and assemble an army of the worst-looking Cenobites ever conceived. Meanwhile, Joey talks to the ghost of Pinhead’s former self to figure out a way to keep the box out of the demon's hands. I'll come up with a better story outline right now. How about the story of a devout Christian who loses hope in humanity when he realizes the best way to convince the world that God is real... is to give them a glimpse of Hell? Hearing stories and testimonies of people from the mental ward in which he volunteers in, the man has to commit a series of ever-escalating crimes to obtain the object and equipment necessary to accomplish what he perceives as a noble goal. He tells himself that all of these actions are justified and will be forgiven once he goes to confession. As his heart gets blacker and blacker, he begins losing track of why he was doing this in the first place and Pinhead’s evil starts leaking into his life while he begins slowly figuring out how to open up the puzzle. There!
I have to dedicate a segment of this review to the new Cenobites introduced. The worst monsters ever brought to the screen. The biggest eye-sore has to be one that butchers human with killer CDs. An anthropomorphic CD player with a leather fetish. Easily the worst of the bunch, but a special mention goes to killer camera lens guy, who looks like he was designed by a 12-year old who once saw a still from Hellraiser. “Breathing stoma” Cenobite and “Piston Head” Cenobite are nearly as awful. The special effects that bring these creatures to life are reasonable, but there is no shortage of bad special effects. Pinhead in that pillar is no Han Solo in Carbonite.
Despite my best efforts, I failed to watch all of the Hellraiser franchise in chronological order, but I saw a fair amount. I say this saga is on the same level as the Leprechaun series. At least the Irish menace's misdeeds never put me to sleep and remained consistent. Hellraiser and its sequels wasted their potential through cheap cash grabs to keep the characters in the public eye. I despised Hell on Earth. I urge you to stay away from the series overall. Check out the first film, there’s some good stuff there. Horror classics, these are not. I hope someday we get a remake, with great special effects and a tight story. Until then, I’d like to send the series back to where it came from. (On DVD, July 12, 2015)