“There is no good, there is no evil. There is only flesh.”

Drake’s rating: Yes, this is the one with the CD Cenobite

Drake’s review: The end of Hellbound: Hellraiser II left the Cenobites utterly defeated and seemingly dead at the hands of Dr. Channard, which left the second sequel in dire need of resurrecting the threat of Pinhead. Fortunately, the second film had also ended with a mysterious spinning pillar, which indicated that resurrection was a likelihood in the event that the movies continued on. And four years later the series did continue, with Pinhead entering the ‘90s under a new director and homed at a new studio.

The change in scenery certainly gave Pinhead some pep. A somewhat laconic threat in the first two films, in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth Pinhead becomes positively loquacious, chewing the scenery a bit while he chortles with menace and takes obvious delight in terrorizing his victims. This is a Pinhead who’s seen one or two Freddy Kruger movies and thought to himself, “I really should be having more fun at my job.”

And it’s not like Pinhead chases after desperate teenagers while cackling in glee, but you can tell that if that opportunity was presented, he just might indulge himself.

As it is, this Pinhead must spend the first part of the film freeing himself from the pillar, which is now in the hands of one J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt). Monroe is an unpleasant sort who quickly learns that the pillar is much more than it appears, and is really OK with that. In fact, he’s quite willing to feed the pillar unwilling victims to free Pinhead, while the Cenobite promises Monroe great power in return.

It should be noted that Monroe is really not too bright, and the notion of being tricked by a literal emissary of Hell probably never crosses his teeny little mind.

But Monroe isn’t the only one who’s wise to Pinhead. Joey (Terry Farrell, everyone’s favorite Trill from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is a reporter who stumbles upon a victim of Pinhead’s pillar. Seeing his gruesome chain-related demise sends her looking for answers, which lead her to a young woman named Terri (Paula Marshall, Warlock: The Armageddon). Soon enough she’s also in possession of a Lament Configuration, the mysterious puzzle box which summons the Cenobites, and in sporadic contact with one Captain Elliot Spencer (Douglas Bradley, The Prophecy: Uprising), the World War I veteran who became Pinhead decades ago.

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is a markedly different film than the first two. Director Anthony Hickox, who had completed both Waxwork films and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat before taking the reins here, came at the franchise from an entirely different angle than his predecessors. Hickox’s work is less brooding and rarely dour. He engages a brighter color palette and snappier dialogue, increasing both the action quotient and the gore. He also ups the musical tempo, adding hard rock bands like Motörhead and Armored Saint to the score to keep things popping.

It’s an interesting direction to take the franchise, to be sure, albeit one that has some risk of alienating the franchise’s fan base. Because the first two Hellraiser movies were a very different type of horror film for the time. They were dark and moody, and relied on a cosmology that had a very different take on good and evil and the nature of Hell. Pinhead and his cohorts weren’t slasher villains; they were otherworldly beings who came only because they were called. They didn’t stalk and slash, they waited patiently and then spirited their victims away for an eternity of torment.

Then Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth turns Pinhead into a much more mundane sort of character who engages in mass slaughter just because he can. It’s a jarring departure for the character, and a fairly unwelcome one. That shift in tonality, for the character and the movie as a whole compared to the first two, makes this third flick just stand out like a sore thumb.

It’s hard to blame the director for this, though, since the film he made is very much an Anthony Hickox film. His movies often have that “dumb fun” appeal, and this one is no different. He was never going to make a flick that tapped into that Clive Barker vein on anything other than a superficial level, so the end result of Hellraiser III is hardly unexpected. And to be fair, the horror movie landscape was changing in the early ‘90s, and the studios themselves weren’t certain what the next big thing was going to be.

But let’s just say, it wasn’t going to be Pinhead.

Again, I don’t blame Anthony Hickox for making a very Anthony Hickox movie. Unfortunately, his strengths played directly against the merits of the Hellraiser mythos and so the end result feels clunky and ill-fitting, like a 12-year-old wearing his dad’s tuxedo. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is not the worst sequel you’ll ever see,* and taken apart from the first two films it’s honestly kind of fun on its own, but it does underscore the misunderstandings about the Hellraiser mythos that are going to plague this franchise for decades to come.

*Or even the worst sequel in the Hellraiser series.

Intermission!

• We get a change in location this time around as well, as the pillar ends up in New York City. Or rather, Greensboro, North Carolina substituting in for NYC. It is not a seamless transition.
• Although listed as executive producer, Clive Barker had very little to do with this movie. After New World went bankrupt the movie rights to Hellraiser ended up in dispute, which is one of the reasons that it took four years for a third film to arrive.
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II director Tony Randel is a screenwriter on Hellraiser III and was slated to direct, but his vision of the film was very different from what the studio had in mind.
• OK, OK, let’s talk about the new Cenobites. They’re awful. Just dreadful designs that evoke bad Halloween costumes rather than terrifying hellspawn. The CD Cenobite practically screams, “It’s the ‘90s!” but the others are just as bad. One has a malformed head with a camera for an eye. Oooh, spooky! Another inexplicably has a piston head. Now that’s just weird. And one has a cigarette. Oh, the horror! Look, the original designs are fairly iconic, but these are just lazy. We wanted the real Cenobites, not the Legion of Cenobite Rejects.