“But I can smell the exquisite stench of what you really are!”

Drake’s rating: I tried to build a puzzle box out of my Mutant Cubicle but the only thing it summoned was the wrath of Justin when it collapsed into a heap.

Drake’s review: There’s nothing quite like settling in and watching the credits for a horror movie unfold. There’s a certain anticipation and the hope that you are going to both be entertained and maybe just a bit spooked. Or at least startled a few times. And then you see Clive Barker’s name, and you’re definitely hoping for something off the beaten path. And the actors’ names roll by and it takes a bit, but you finally spot a familiar one: Adam Scott. Huh. OK, not a name you were expecting, but that’s fine. He had to have been up to something before Piranha 3D, right?

And then you see the director credit and your heart sinks and your stomach churns and you realize that you’ve made a terrible mistake. Because the name you see is that of Alan Smithee.

Oh. Oh no…

The problem here is that Alan Smithee is not a real person, but an industry-wide pseudonym used when a director wants to disassociate themselves from the final film. It often means the studio got involved, major changes were made, and the movie that you’re now watching is not the movie that the director made.

Which is exactly what happened to Hellraiser: Bloodline. Kevin Yagher, a special effects and makeup artist who had worked on everything from Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, sat in the director’s chair for the fourth entry into the Hellraiser series and delivered a 110-minute film that the executives at Miramax started chopping with an axe. Twenty-five minutes were cut, scenes were re-shot and replaced under another director, and the end result is a flick that has some potential peeking out here and there, but is overall just an indication of the road that the Clive Barker series is about to wander down.

And it’s a bumpy one.

Ostensibly the story about the origins of the Lamentation Configuration, that strange little puzzle box that can summon demons, Hellraiser: Bloodline is bookended by segments taking place in outer space, because for some reason movie studios just wanted their horror movie villains to take a trip into the final frontier. Leprechaun did it, so why not Pinhead?

More importantly, though, we find out that in 1796 a toymaker named Phillip LeMarchand is hired to build the cube from a very specific design that he was supplied with. His benefactor uses the cube to open a portal to Hell which calls forth a demon that takes on the skin of the sacrificial victim that was used as a lure. LeMarchand witnesses this and tries to steal the box back, but he is killed by the demon, now calling herself Angelique, and his line is cursed because demons just love doing stuff like that.

Two-hundred years later, one of those cursed descendants, John Merchant, has designed a building that gets Angelique’s attention as it looks like a Lament Configuration. Angelique goes to the building and opens a gateway to Hell, which seems like an odd decision since she’s been avoiding the place for the last two centuries. Pinhead shows up and there’s an interesting subplot between his newer interpretations of Hell’s imperatives and her more traditional outlook which in a better movie would have become the central plot. Here, though, it’s glossed over and Pinhead soon turns his frenemy into a Cenobite herself before he is once again sent back to Hell.

Which is no doubt just a miserable place, since the CD Cenobite from the third movie just won’t stop playing Ace of Base and Creed.

That brings us back to outer space again, where yet another cursed descendant has made a space station that can fold up like a Lament Configuration because the LeMarchand/Merchant family line has one thing going for them, and they’re just going to run with it no matter how many innocent people get killed. That’s just the price they’re willing to pay to make gigantic puzzle boxes.

Hellraiser: Bloodline might have been a good movie before the suits at Miramax* got hold of it and altered it into such a state that it became an Alan Smithee flick. We’ll probably never know for sure, and unfortunately all we ended up with is this rather truncated film that has a promising premise but poor execution. All three of the storylines could use some fleshing out and the characters are a fairly one-dimensional lot, lacking much beyond a very basic motivation. The practical effects are generally very good, which is unsurprising given Yagher’s background, but the CGI is so bad that you’re wondering while watching if they were lifted from a first generation PlayStation game.

This is also the move that severed Clive Barker’s relationship with any Hellraiser films for the next 25 years. That bumpy road I mentioned earlier is about to veer right off of a cliff.

*Ick.

Intermission!

• Sure, remotely control your robot to configure the puzzle box. You wouldn’t catch Mike making Tom Servo do that.
• So Adam Scott made a deal with the devil himself, right? Because he pretty much looks the same here as he does in Krampus.
• Even in the movie, it’s been 200 years but he still looks the same as he did in 1796.
• Oops. Looks like he won’t see 1997, though.
• Those security guys should be wearing red shirts.
• Pinhead turns the twin guards into Cenobites. I really want to refer to them as a Twinobite.
• Those are some long-barreled space rifles for what should be short to medium range confrontations. I mean, you’re either firing inside a structure, where you want to control your shot, or you’re firing out in space and the bullet will just keep going anyway.
• I dunno about these huge Lamentation Configurations. I really prefer the smaller, portable version myself. Especially during the holidays, because they’re so much easier to wrap.