Bad Day
Yeah, it's been one of them days. Have you ever woken up and felt like crap? Well that's how I feel right now, like utter crap. I dunno, I'm just tired of everything and everyone. If I could go to sleep and just never wake up, I'd be so happy. I don't care who will miss me [believe me, it's not many], just as long as I'm at peace with myself. But that's not gonna happen, so yeah life is gonna keep on kicking me in the ass. Whoo.
College sucked today [computer class...fuckin' hate it]. TV sucked today [Yankees lost, Cubs lost the Division, Angel was blah (sorry Romeo, just wasn't into it until Spike at the end with Fred), Smallville was the only plus (Jesse Metcalfe ruled)]. People on the street were giving me dirty looks for some reason [ask them cuz I dunno]. No motivation to continue with Dtv at this point [keep wondering if I'm just wasting my time]. Everything in general just sucked and it still does. My mood has been turning off some people...GOOD. That's what I want. I only care about myself at this point. That may be hard for some people to understand, but I'm being selfish for once in my life. So if you guys wanna talk to me, I'll give ya the signal to once I feel better. But for the time being, stay out of my way.
New layout for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake starring Jessica Biel, which comes out on Friday. Heard good things about it and plan to see it this weekend. You'll get a review on it, as well as the four original TCM movies sometime this weekend.
Here are the reviews for the first 3 Hellraiser movies. I've only seen the first 3 of 6, which is why I won't review the other ones, but maybe when I finally sit down and watch 4-6, I'll write reviews for them. But for now, take what you can get.
Directed by: Clive Barker
Starring: Andrew Robinson/Larry
Clare Higgins/Julia
Ashley Laurence/Kristy
Sean Chapman/Frank
Year: 1987
PLOT SUMMARY:
A man finds he is given more than he bargains for when he solves the puzzle of the Lamont Configuration - a doorway to hell. But his ex-lover has found a way of bringing him back, and his niece, Kirsty Lawrence, finds herself bargaining with the Cenobites, angels to some, demons to others, whose greatest pleasure is the greatest pain.
MY TWO-CENTS:
The famous Hellraiser movie. I saw it when I was younger, and didn't care for it. I decided to check it out again recently, more mature. You definitely need to be more mature to understand this movie and it's story. There's things only miserable adults can understand.
Hellraiser isn't the best, as people say. It's still very good, but it's not the scariest film, it's not corner to corner perfection. There are some lame special effects, and a couple of the actors are weak. One doesn't matter as he's a supporting character (Kirsty's love interest...even Passions wouldn't hire this guy yeesh!), but the other is the crucial role of Frank Cotton, played blandly by Sean Chapman. The story falls heavily on the Frank character, and Chapman seems to not understand anything that's in the script, he acts as if he doesn't know what he's doing or where he's at. He seems like he's lobotomized. Oliver Smith, as the monster Frank, hams it up, which I don't think is appropriate either. Maybe with just one good actor as human and monster Frank, everything would have been fine.
Clare Higgins is brilliant as Julia. An effective, real performance. She takes you along Julia's descent into madness, and makes you believe. How she starts as a regular woman, growing increasingly bored with her marriage, and how she plummets into an insanity in her attempt to bring back her lover, Frank (who happens to be her husband's brother). The depths she goes to bring him back, she turns into just as much of a monster as Frank, or the monsters chasing him.
Andrew Robinson is often overlooked for his performance as the husband, Joseph Cotton. He brings a sadness to the role. You feel bad for this guy in a way. He does the best he can for Julia, only to not be loved in return. Robinson's also effective in the end of the film, when Joseph is not quite himself...And credit is due for Robinson on his improvised line of "Jesus wept," which I believe to be the creepiest moment in the whole film. That line just tops that whole climatic scene.
And Ashley Laurence [girlfriend of the Gecko in those Geico commercials] isn't given the credit she deserves. People rip her apart, and while I think it shows in this movie she's a bit inexperienced, she still does a good job. And she's quite easy on the eyes. Her acting improves in the subsequent Hellraiser films she's in.
Doug Bradley's at his best as the lead Cenobite. It's a shame that Grace Kirby didn't play the female one with the tracheotomy in the following movie. She should actually be as recurring as Pinhead. She's very terrifying, very good.
Clive Barker's novel that Hellraiser was adapted from was titled "The Hellbound Heart". The movie is actually better than the book, makes changes for the best. The title sums it up. It's all motivations of the heart. The two with the tainted hearts get what they deserve. Kirsty, with the pure heart, looking out for the best interest of others, is who wins.
A twisted love story and great psychological thriller, I recommend Hellraiser. My biggest complaint is the rather lame hell-creatures that Kirsty encounters, and the obvious setup of a sequel. It can be overlooked, the performances of Higgins, Robinson, and Laurence, outshines them.
*** outta ****
Directed by: Tony Randal
Starring: Ashley Laurence/ Kirsty
Imogen Boorman/Tiffany
Kenneth Cranham/Channard
Doug Bradley/Pinhead
Year: 1988
PLOT SUMMARY:
After having her father and perverse stepmother killed by the cenobites, Kirsty Cotton is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Even after trying to convince the authorities of what really happened with her family, nobody believes in her version of the history and they decide to place her in the institute, so that she rests and relaxes a little bit. The hospital is commanded by a brilliant and strange psychiatrist, Dr. Channard, who has been looking for the key for another dimension for a long time. The only person who believes in Kirsty is a young and kind assistant of Dr. Channard, called Kyle MacRae. Following Kirsty's version of the story, Channard put his hands on the bloodstained mattress where her stepmother Júlia died, Channard decides to resurrect her, killing his patients and offering them as food for Júlia. She returns without skin, and she decides to help Channard to bring the forces of the evil, but the plans of the two will be disturbed by Kirsty, who wants to end at once with the cenobites, and for Kyle, who doesn't want to see Kirsty being hurt...
MY TWO-CENTS:
Indeed, I felt Hellbound exceeded the original in every way a sequel can. Even though the creativity of Barker's original is gone, Hellbound makes up for the loss by expanding the Hellraiser world. Now Hell no longer comes to us, now, friends, we venture into hell, itself.
Largely the same cast as the first film, introducing new characters as needed; the main cast give varying performances, but most are on the better side of any horror film I've seen. The lesser the character, the lesser the performance but hey, this is horror, and for horror it's not bad. Laurence, Bradley, Boorman, Cranham, and Higgins do very well. My biggest gripes are some of the character reactions--which were the fault of the script writers, not the actors themselves necessarily. But guess what? Most of the reactions in Hellraiser was either silly or stupid.
The trademark gore returns, perhaps a little toned down from the first; I never cared for excessive gore in horror films, but Hellraiser 1 and 2 does not make the blood its plot much like it never makes the cenobytes the plot. The plots in these two films revolve around dark characters bound for hell, their sins, deceptions, power struggles, and the puzzle box. The cenobytes, the puzzle box, it's all just the result of the plot. So the people who whine because the new Hellraisers don't show much of pinhead; well, actually sit down and watch the originals, he's not here very often either.
This sequel does something unique in horror history--it actually manages to pull off an explanation of its predecessor successfully. Most horror sequels falter not because they don't have a plot; rather because they have too much. Ex. Most sequels will dig into the mythology of the first to develop the new installment, until they dig so deep that you're getting to the source of the killings being because Joe's brother's mother's distant cousin's grandfather had a enchanged item given to him by a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew some man from Cleveland, well now he's back and pissed.
How 'bout a specific example? Halloween 6 [to be reviewed later] built an entire plot line for a 90 (or so) minute movie based on a handful of snippets of dialogue from Halloween 1 & 2 [reviewed later]. There was a reason why it was just snippets in Halloween 1 & 2, if they could've made a plot of it they would have. Back to this sequel, Hellraiser 2 brings up minimum detail from Hellraiser 1, gives just enough to push start Hellraiser 2's and goes no further. It combines enough of Hellraiser 1, while walking into new territory.
In the end, sequels are about combining old with new; different fans demand different mixtures, but for this fan . . . Hellraiser 2 is the only sequel in this franchise that's gotten the formula right.
*** outta ****
Directed by: Anthony Hickox
Starring: Doug Bradley/Pinhead-Elliott
Terry Farrell/Joey
Paula Marshall/Terri
Kevin Bernhardt/JP
Year: 1992
PLOT SUMMARY:
Hell is about to be unleashed again. Reporter Joey Summerskill slowly begins to learn about the mysterious puzzle box, the pain opening the box can bring, and the Cenobite Pinhead after viewing a young teenage club-goer get ripped apart by the box's chains in an ER room. Tracking the box and a young woman named Terri to a famous club called the Boiler Room, owned by the slightly insane J.P., who feeds Pinhead blood from club members so he can escape from his prison. As time runs out, Joey must think of a plan to bring Pinhead and his newly-created Cenobites back to the realm of Pinhead's human self or else experience an eternity of pain and suffering...
MY TWO-CENTS:
Although the first 2 were under budget and the SFX were very bad, they followed the original story. Hellraiser and Hellbound were not about nail-biting edge of your seat gags and one-liners, it was about presenting a concept most people are exposed to but do not think of. We are taught that Heaven is where we all want to go to, and Hell is bad, but what if it were switched and hell is what we strived for. In Hellraiser, only those that make an attempt will be blessed with "an experience beyond limits... pain and pleasure, indivisible." It isn't about mass distruction and death, it is about people comming to terms with what awaits us after this world.
Even on a tight budget the "real" hellraisers were successful, so a big company, Paramount, thought "Why can't we make $$ off of this thing". So this 3rd attempt had a larger budget and threw a bunch of special effects in, found some witty one-line writers, used Doug Bradley and the box, but never bothered to read anything Clive Barker did. Just because Doug Bradley is Pinhead doesn't mean they know what they are doing. They took a good story and made it into a generic slasher movie. The cenobites didn't even have the corpse like blue skin signifying lack of blood.
It started out OK, but in the middle they made some idiotic decisions: Random people become cenobites (you have to strive to become a cenobite, Frank and Julia never were), these cenobites have CDs and cameras in their heads??!?! WHAT THE HELL??!?!
If you like Nightmare on Elm Street and have no clue what the real Hellraiser stories (as in before the movies were even thought of, like in the comic books) this might be good for you, as it wasn't lacking in Hollywood fluff, but for anyone that knows who Grizlard was, this was a disapointing derailment of a good concept.
Bad acting, bad concept, bad movie. Not gonna waste my time reviewing this junk. Thumbs down.
*1/2* outta ****
That's all for this entry. See you next time.
College sucked today [computer class...fuckin' hate it]. TV sucked today [Yankees lost, Cubs lost the Division, Angel was blah (sorry Romeo, just wasn't into it until Spike at the end with Fred), Smallville was the only plus (Jesse Metcalfe ruled)]. People on the street were giving me dirty looks for some reason [ask them cuz I dunno]. No motivation to continue with Dtv at this point [keep wondering if I'm just wasting my time]. Everything in general just sucked and it still does. My mood has been turning off some people...GOOD. That's what I want. I only care about myself at this point. That may be hard for some people to understand, but I'm being selfish for once in my life. So if you guys wanna talk to me, I'll give ya the signal to once I feel better. But for the time being, stay out of my way.
New layout for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake starring Jessica Biel, which comes out on Friday. Heard good things about it and plan to see it this weekend. You'll get a review on it, as well as the four original TCM movies sometime this weekend.
Here are the reviews for the first 3 Hellraiser movies. I've only seen the first 3 of 6, which is why I won't review the other ones, but maybe when I finally sit down and watch 4-6, I'll write reviews for them. But for now, take what you can get.
Directed by: Clive Barker
Starring: Andrew Robinson/Larry
Clare Higgins/Julia
Ashley Laurence/Kristy
Sean Chapman/Frank
Year: 1987
PLOT SUMMARY:
A man finds he is given more than he bargains for when he solves the puzzle of the Lamont Configuration - a doorway to hell. But his ex-lover has found a way of bringing him back, and his niece, Kirsty Lawrence, finds herself bargaining with the Cenobites, angels to some, demons to others, whose greatest pleasure is the greatest pain.
MY TWO-CENTS:
The famous Hellraiser movie. I saw it when I was younger, and didn't care for it. I decided to check it out again recently, more mature. You definitely need to be more mature to understand this movie and it's story. There's things only miserable adults can understand.
Hellraiser isn't the best, as people say. It's still very good, but it's not the scariest film, it's not corner to corner perfection. There are some lame special effects, and a couple of the actors are weak. One doesn't matter as he's a supporting character (Kirsty's love interest...even Passions wouldn't hire this guy yeesh!), but the other is the crucial role of Frank Cotton, played blandly by Sean Chapman. The story falls heavily on the Frank character, and Chapman seems to not understand anything that's in the script, he acts as if he doesn't know what he's doing or where he's at. He seems like he's lobotomized. Oliver Smith, as the monster Frank, hams it up, which I don't think is appropriate either. Maybe with just one good actor as human and monster Frank, everything would have been fine.
Clare Higgins is brilliant as Julia. An effective, real performance. She takes you along Julia's descent into madness, and makes you believe. How she starts as a regular woman, growing increasingly bored with her marriage, and how she plummets into an insanity in her attempt to bring back her lover, Frank (who happens to be her husband's brother). The depths she goes to bring him back, she turns into just as much of a monster as Frank, or the monsters chasing him.
Andrew Robinson is often overlooked for his performance as the husband, Joseph Cotton. He brings a sadness to the role. You feel bad for this guy in a way. He does the best he can for Julia, only to not be loved in return. Robinson's also effective in the end of the film, when Joseph is not quite himself...And credit is due for Robinson on his improvised line of "Jesus wept," which I believe to be the creepiest moment in the whole film. That line just tops that whole climatic scene.
And Ashley Laurence [girlfriend of the Gecko in those Geico commercials] isn't given the credit she deserves. People rip her apart, and while I think it shows in this movie she's a bit inexperienced, she still does a good job. And she's quite easy on the eyes. Her acting improves in the subsequent Hellraiser films she's in.
Doug Bradley's at his best as the lead Cenobite. It's a shame that Grace Kirby didn't play the female one with the tracheotomy in the following movie. She should actually be as recurring as Pinhead. She's very terrifying, very good.
Clive Barker's novel that Hellraiser was adapted from was titled "The Hellbound Heart". The movie is actually better than the book, makes changes for the best. The title sums it up. It's all motivations of the heart. The two with the tainted hearts get what they deserve. Kirsty, with the pure heart, looking out for the best interest of others, is who wins.
A twisted love story and great psychological thriller, I recommend Hellraiser. My biggest complaint is the rather lame hell-creatures that Kirsty encounters, and the obvious setup of a sequel. It can be overlooked, the performances of Higgins, Robinson, and Laurence, outshines them.
*** outta ****
Directed by: Tony Randal
Starring: Ashley Laurence/ Kirsty
Imogen Boorman/Tiffany
Kenneth Cranham/Channard
Doug Bradley/Pinhead
Year: 1988
PLOT SUMMARY:
After having her father and perverse stepmother killed by the cenobites, Kirsty Cotton is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Even after trying to convince the authorities of what really happened with her family, nobody believes in her version of the history and they decide to place her in the institute, so that she rests and relaxes a little bit. The hospital is commanded by a brilliant and strange psychiatrist, Dr. Channard, who has been looking for the key for another dimension for a long time. The only person who believes in Kirsty is a young and kind assistant of Dr. Channard, called Kyle MacRae. Following Kirsty's version of the story, Channard put his hands on the bloodstained mattress where her stepmother Júlia died, Channard decides to resurrect her, killing his patients and offering them as food for Júlia. She returns without skin, and she decides to help Channard to bring the forces of the evil, but the plans of the two will be disturbed by Kirsty, who wants to end at once with the cenobites, and for Kyle, who doesn't want to see Kirsty being hurt...
MY TWO-CENTS:
Indeed, I felt Hellbound exceeded the original in every way a sequel can. Even though the creativity of Barker's original is gone, Hellbound makes up for the loss by expanding the Hellraiser world. Now Hell no longer comes to us, now, friends, we venture into hell, itself.
Largely the same cast as the first film, introducing new characters as needed; the main cast give varying performances, but most are on the better side of any horror film I've seen. The lesser the character, the lesser the performance but hey, this is horror, and for horror it's not bad. Laurence, Bradley, Boorman, Cranham, and Higgins do very well. My biggest gripes are some of the character reactions--which were the fault of the script writers, not the actors themselves necessarily. But guess what? Most of the reactions in Hellraiser was either silly or stupid.
The trademark gore returns, perhaps a little toned down from the first; I never cared for excessive gore in horror films, but Hellraiser 1 and 2 does not make the blood its plot much like it never makes the cenobytes the plot. The plots in these two films revolve around dark characters bound for hell, their sins, deceptions, power struggles, and the puzzle box. The cenobytes, the puzzle box, it's all just the result of the plot. So the people who whine because the new Hellraisers don't show much of pinhead; well, actually sit down and watch the originals, he's not here very often either.
This sequel does something unique in horror history--it actually manages to pull off an explanation of its predecessor successfully. Most horror sequels falter not because they don't have a plot; rather because they have too much. Ex. Most sequels will dig into the mythology of the first to develop the new installment, until they dig so deep that you're getting to the source of the killings being because Joe's brother's mother's distant cousin's grandfather had a enchanged item given to him by a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew some man from Cleveland, well now he's back and pissed.
How 'bout a specific example? Halloween 6 [to be reviewed later] built an entire plot line for a 90 (or so) minute movie based on a handful of snippets of dialogue from Halloween 1 & 2 [reviewed later]. There was a reason why it was just snippets in Halloween 1 & 2, if they could've made a plot of it they would have. Back to this sequel, Hellraiser 2 brings up minimum detail from Hellraiser 1, gives just enough to push start Hellraiser 2's and goes no further. It combines enough of Hellraiser 1, while walking into new territory.
In the end, sequels are about combining old with new; different fans demand different mixtures, but for this fan . . . Hellraiser 2 is the only sequel in this franchise that's gotten the formula right.
*** outta ****
Directed by: Anthony Hickox
Starring: Doug Bradley/Pinhead-Elliott
Terry Farrell/Joey
Paula Marshall/Terri
Kevin Bernhardt/JP
Year: 1992
PLOT SUMMARY:
Hell is about to be unleashed again. Reporter Joey Summerskill slowly begins to learn about the mysterious puzzle box, the pain opening the box can bring, and the Cenobite Pinhead after viewing a young teenage club-goer get ripped apart by the box's chains in an ER room. Tracking the box and a young woman named Terri to a famous club called the Boiler Room, owned by the slightly insane J.P., who feeds Pinhead blood from club members so he can escape from his prison. As time runs out, Joey must think of a plan to bring Pinhead and his newly-created Cenobites back to the realm of Pinhead's human self or else experience an eternity of pain and suffering...
MY TWO-CENTS:
Although the first 2 were under budget and the SFX were very bad, they followed the original story. Hellraiser and Hellbound were not about nail-biting edge of your seat gags and one-liners, it was about presenting a concept most people are exposed to but do not think of. We are taught that Heaven is where we all want to go to, and Hell is bad, but what if it were switched and hell is what we strived for. In Hellraiser, only those that make an attempt will be blessed with "an experience beyond limits... pain and pleasure, indivisible." It isn't about mass distruction and death, it is about people comming to terms with what awaits us after this world.
Even on a tight budget the "real" hellraisers were successful, so a big company, Paramount, thought "Why can't we make $$ off of this thing". So this 3rd attempt had a larger budget and threw a bunch of special effects in, found some witty one-line writers, used Doug Bradley and the box, but never bothered to read anything Clive Barker did. Just because Doug Bradley is Pinhead doesn't mean they know what they are doing. They took a good story and made it into a generic slasher movie. The cenobites didn't even have the corpse like blue skin signifying lack of blood.
It started out OK, but in the middle they made some idiotic decisions: Random people become cenobites (you have to strive to become a cenobite, Frank and Julia never were), these cenobites have CDs and cameras in their heads??!?! WHAT THE HELL??!?!
If you like Nightmare on Elm Street and have no clue what the real Hellraiser stories (as in before the movies were even thought of, like in the comic books) this might be good for you, as it wasn't lacking in Hollywood fluff, but for anyone that knows who Grizlard was, this was a disapointing derailment of a good concept.
Bad acting, bad concept, bad movie. Not gonna waste my time reviewing this junk. Thumbs down.
*1/2* outta ****
That's all for this entry. See you next time.