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Okay...so I am sure that Hellraiser: Hellworld seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean, truthfully, the Hellraiser mythos was BEGGING for a good 'ole "internet site gone wrong" script! Right? ...right? Well, okay then...let me rethink a few things and get back to you then. Okay...so upon further review it appears clear that Hellraiser: Hellworld was a really bad idea from the start. Apparently, it was doomed to join films such as Fear Dot Com in the "Graveyard Of Ridiculous Premises". If you are looking to visit the grave, simply enter the premises and follow "Horrible Handling Lane" and make a left at "Unnecessary Humor Way". The plot is there on the left; you can recognize it by the throngs of disappointed visitors, clothed in the black of mourning, remembering back to an hour and a half of life they lost when they first encountered the deceased.
Seriously though, this was simply a train wreck waiting to happen. The Hellraiser mythos began as something FAR beyond the simple stalk and slash fare of its day, utilizing involved characters and villains with an epic amount of back story and mystery. The tale was one of humanity and the pathetic attempts of said species to transcend this world...ending each time in an agonizing end of pain and suffering. Pinhead, who is, of course now a marketable icon began as something so much more...the representation of the ugliness and evil inside each one of us; a physical manifestation of the agony we cause to others through our constant scrambling for self benefit. Hellraiser was a morality tale disguised as a horror flick, and was based in a literary work of immense importance to the genre and a stroke of brilliance in its own right
Somewhere along the way though, the series took a turn to something else...but no matter how good/bad these installments were, it seems they simply scratched the surface of what was to be. And now, with this eighth entry into the lineup things have hit an all time low and we are introduced to just what Hellraiser was doomed to become.
This film takes place outside the Hellraiser mythos, in the real world, where Hellraiser is a work of fiction and has devoted fans just like you and I (although their faith would be questioned if they had seen this movie); most of which spend their time playing an online computer game called Hellworld. Now it isn't explained just what kind of game this is, but the horribly put together sequences of the game we do see makes it look like some awful version of a Doom-like first person shooter...which apparently you can reach the end of within a few moments. Huh.
Well, our group of young players each solve the game in turn and receive an invitation to a Hellworld party, which they are very excited to go to...even though they are all still reeling from the suicide of one of their Hellworld-playing friends; a suicide they all feel responsible for and which was a direct cause of this online game's influence over his life. Oh well! Party time!
Arriving at this Hellworld party, the group soon finds that this house was built by a familiar name, Phillip LeMarchand, the architect of the infamous puzzle box...the Lament Configuration. It is here in this giant mansion named Leviathan House (oh wow, so they popped in a couple tapes of the earlier films to scrounge up the name for this place) that this group begins to learn the truth...Hellraiser is more than a film and game series, and very well may be based in fact. But of course all that has to wait...there is a large amount of teen horror staple material to get out of the way first.
In perhaps the most annoying factor of this entire film, the script writers have realized what they created and refer to the tragedy throughout the course of the film using the characters dialog as a sort of "in joke" between filmmaker and viewer. When there is a pointless nudity shot one character says to the other, "whoa, gratuitous tit shot" to which the other replies, "necessary tit shot". And he is right...without shots and scenes such as these, the movie would lose half the audience right there; but it still is frustrating to hear about it.
Poor Lance Henriksen, one of my all time favorites since the then widely misunderstood, yet now widely copied, television program "Millennium", is also subjected to this poorly written director to audience chatter spewing lines such as "like a bad horror movie, isn't it", when it is in fact IS a bad horror movie. In fact, most of his dialog was obviously written specifically for him (or at least altered to fit) in that it plays upon every stereotype of what Lance is know for, without ever taking into consideration the fact that his style would come through any character he plays. What we get is instead a weird hybrid of Lance and Lance acting like Lance. What a cluster...
Now, we have yet to get to the real tragedy of this movie, which is its treatment of the Cenobite characters, as the Hellworld party soon turns into a one by one massacre of the main characters. Trouble is, the Cenobites have always stood for the fulfillment of man's own pursuits, with the premise that you sometimes get exactly what you asked for. This ideal has been held through many a shoddy Hellraiser film and many a good one...however here it is thrown out entirely as we must bear witness to Pinhead chopping off heads and his minions slaughtering others by impaling them upon meat hooks; never to return with their souls to a place of suffering, and in the process becoming just "movie monsters" instead of complicated effigies. This "hands on" action by the Cenobites cheapens their scare immeasurably and must have true Hellraiser fans rolling over in their graves.
The rest of our film is spent in some dire attempt at twists and turns, which are thrown in simply to hide the fact that the film lacks direction. The twist ending? There simply as an apology and attempt to make amends for the way our beloved series and characters have been handled. We won't even get into the fact that characters scars don't match the wounds which created them, that the most dramatic moment in the whole film was a characters pursuit of his asthma inhaler, that a character tries to pick up a girl by saying "I'd love to see your puzzle box", or that the actress who plays Chelsea is the worst screamer I've ever heard in my life.
After the recent release of Hellraiser: Deader, which I found surprisingly good, I was not prepared for this film shortly after...especially seeing as how they were filmed back to back on location in Romania by the same director. But the premise of internet gaming and some sort of secret party for the gamers is just SO ridiculous that it should have been obvious all along. Besides a few sparse moments of decent effects makeup, which were overshadowed by horrible computer aided botch jobs, there really is not much here to sell this on except maybe the following quote...
"Hellraiser: Hellworld. Your collection will be one short without it. "
You can quote me on that.
-aaron-
Directed by:
Rick Bota Written By:
Joel Soisson
Based On Characters By:
Clive Barker
Cast:
Doug Bradley
Katheryn Winnick
Henry Cavill
Lance Henriksen
Christopher Jacot
Victor McGuire
Khary Payton
Michael Regan
Anna Tolputt
Dave Robinson
Gary Tunnicliffe DVD Features:
Widescreen Presentation
5.1 Dolby Surround Sound
French & Spanish Subtitles
Audio Commentary With
Director Rick Bota, Writer Joel Soisson, Special Makeup Effects
Designer Gary Tunnicliffe & Executive Producer Nick Phillips
"Ticket To Hellworld" Behind
The Scenes Look
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