Hellraiser Series Review
*Rating system is based on Hellraiser films only as a series from best (5 stars) to worst (1 star).
The basic summary of all Hellraiser movies is that there is a puzzle box that unleashes a portal to Hell where Pinhead and a few other demons trap the soul of whoever opens the box and tortures them for all eternity.
The guise of passing off the puzzle box is that it is the key to “intense pleasure and pain.” Throughout the course of these movies I’ve determined that the “pleasure” part of this rouse is just a lie to get people to take the box, because honestly, it’s a present nobody would ever want. Unless someone’s idea of intense pleasure involves being sucked into hell and tortured for all eternity, there’s nothing pleasurable about it. However, some of the films take this “intense pleasure” ploy a little bit too literally. It’s obviously a lie. I don’t think a single person who opened the puzzle box experience any pleasure the entire time. Anyway, reviews for each movie below…
Hellraiser ****
Larry and Julia move into Larry’s brother Frank’s house after he goes missing. Julia once had an intense affair with Frank and still holds a torch for him. Larry’s daughter Kristy shows up sporadically to move the story along. Frank, who opened the box, escapes from Pinhead but is a weird skinless creature living in the attic. Julia, still enamored with Frank, agrees to help him become fully human again by luring men to Frank. With each kill, Frank becomes more whole. Julia’s character transitions through the whole experience starting out as being unsure and afraid of the situation to starting to take sadistic pleasure in the killing. Kristy finds out what’s going on and works to stop it.
I didn’t know anything about Hellraiser when I saw this movie but the story is pretty interesting and original. I’d never seen anything like it previously and didn’t know what to expect or where it was going. Pinhead was merely a side character in a much larger story. Each character goes through personal development and changes through the story arc that work with the audience. There’s inner torment and emotions at stake that you follow along with. That said it’s a creepy weird movie with a lot of gore. But creepy in a good way since you don’t know where it’s going and the unpredictable surprises pay off.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II *****
Picking up where the last movie left off, Kristy wakes up in a mental hospital. The head doctor has secretly been trying to open the puzzle box apparently knowing full well the power it holds. He manages to bring Julia back in pre-skin form and helps her become whole again. Kristy, determined to help her father who she believes is trapped in the box’s hellworld goes to the doctor’s house to stop them. Everyone is sucked into hell, literally and they all fight to escape.
This movie is actually better than the original in my opinion. I love how the hellworld is constructed. You run into past characters that are each in their own version of hell and you can see how they’ve been tortured for endless time. We learn a little more about Pinhead’s back story and that all the demons were once human beings that got turned into demons and slowly forgot their identities as they were consumed by hell. The scenery in the hellworld is trippy and interesting. It’s a labyrinth of the imagination.
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth ***
A television reporter named Joey investigates a supernatural death that she witnesses in the hospital while covering a story. The investigation leads her to a rich night club owner named JP who happened to purchase a statue that holds Pinhead captive. Pinhead convinces JP to help him escape the statue by luring him souls. Meanwhile Joey has acquired the Puzzle Box and the ghost of Pinhead before he was evil aides her in defeating him through a convoluted story plot.
This sequel was merely okay. It was tolerable to watch (which is actually saying a lot in comparison to the rest of the sequels) but nothing captivating or interesting really happens. Pinhead creates more demons for his “Hell on Earth” that are utterly ridiculous like, CD Man, Camera Man, and Margarita Mixer Man. This movie starts the dreamy delusions that annoyingly carry over to every sequel made thereafter. A good portion of the movie is dedicated to her dream sequences that add nothing original or scary to the current plot.
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline **
In the future someone trying to destroy the box from outer space tells the story of how the box was constructed and followed his family bloodline throughout the ages. A toymaker creates the box for a buyer. The buyer summons a demon from hell with it and kills the toymaker but his wife survives. Years later in modern day, the toymaker’s descendant is an architect who makes puzzle box like architecture. The demon tracks him down, unleashes Pinhead and people run around screaming pointlessly until they die. Back in space Pinhead is unleashed but everyone escapes the space station before it detonates with Pinhead aboard.
Does that synopsis sound stupid to you? The movie opens in space so you already know it’s going to be bad but on top of that, everything is told through a flashback. This is where the Hellraiser series gets ridiculously bad. A toymaker creates the puzzle box for a buyer? I always just assumed the box came from hell itself. Honestly how could it be a doorway to hell if it’s just a manmade toy? Its link to hell is never actually explained. The only thing you need to know is that a toymaker made it with normal wood. Now we’re getting utterly stupid with this series. Then we have his descendants in modern day and then the future. So we have past, present and future generations of the bloodline being haunted by the demon (not even Pinhead, it’s a different female demon who looks totally normal and not scary) in a story arc that has no pay off and characters of little interest or development. It’s just a boring movie. It’s a movie so bad even the director wanted his name removed from it. And it’s all downhill from here. I gave this movie two stars because the rest of the sequels are even worse than this one.
Hellraiser V: Inferno *
A corrupt police detective finds the puzzle box and goes on a completely boring and irrelevant series of hallucinations that have nothing to do with Hellraiser, though Pinhead does make an appearance at the end of the movie. And maybe one other one in the middle.
This is probably the worst Hellraiser movie in the series. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Hellraiser at all. When the asshole detective who you immediately hate because he’s a douchebag is introduced you just want him to die the whole time for being a creep. So there’s never an investment in the character established at all. Why keep watching this asshole be an asshole? He goes around “investigating” between puke green hallucinations full of mindless jump scares until the end where they try to tie him into the other movies by claiming he’s a descendant of the toymaker (they really took that toymaker thing seriously?) This movie is so boring I literally forwarded through most of it. After the first 30 minutes it became unbearable and I just needed it to end. Pinhead appears at the end to torture him for being a shitty human being. It’s honestly like this was a totally different movie and they just cut in two scenes with Pinhead to link it to the series to sell it. But seriously nothing happens in this movie, I just forwarded to the end because it was so unbearably bad.
Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker *
A husband crashes his car into a river and wakes up in a hospital to find out that his wife died but her body was never found. Then he has an hour and a half’s worth of hallucinations for the rest of the movie and the plot as well as Pinhead is introduced at the very end.
This was another horrible movie where nothing’s actually happening. Everything is a hallucination so everything that happens is boring and uninteresting. Again, it feels like a totally different movie with Pinhead tacked on the end to try and sell it. They got the original actress to play Kristy back. So they brought that character back for no real reason. What a waste of a character from the original. It turns out that her husband was cheating on her with every female actress in the film and he also tried to kill her by giving her the puzzle box apparently knowing about her past. She makes another deal with Pinhead (as she did in the previous films) and trades her husband as well as all his mistresses souls for her own. So I guess she became a psychotic murderer married to an asshole since the last movies. Way to ruin a character. The most annoying part of this movie is that nothing is actually happening the entire time. Every single scene is a hallucination. It got old and tired after the last two movies. Nothing new and nothing worth watching here.
Hellraiser VII: Deader *
A reporter follows a lead to a cult that claim they can bring the dead back to life. After a series of hallucinations, nothing happens and everybody dies.
Did that synopsis seem short to you? Yeah, there’s no plot in this movie. A reporter is looking for the Deaders to see if they really can bring the dead back to life. She finds the puzzle box and then starts… wait for it… HALLUCINATING (because every Hellraiser movie is about hallucinations apparently). To find the Deaders she goes on some kind of cult orgy subway train (it is as dumb as it sounds) to find their whereabouts. Between hallucinations she finds them. The main Deader is actually a descendant of the toymaker (because somehow it all needs to tie in) and Pinhead shows up at the end and kills everybody. It’s another one of those sequels that feels like a totally different movie with Pinhead just tacked on at the end and a reference to the toymaker to tie it all in. I’m not sure why this series always wants to focus its attention on the worst movie in the original four to try and tie everything together but it’s really stupid. Deader, that summarizes the whole plot.
Hellraiser: Hellworld **
A group of teenagers go to a Hellraiser themed party where they all start hallucinating and dying from plot contrivances.
This sequel introduces Hellraiser as an online video game but that ends up being inconsequential. They really just wanted to have a bunch of teenagers having sex at a party while they hallucinate about being killed by Lance Henriksen. This movie is very convoluted. There are so many hallucinations that in order to explain the plot the filmmaker just said “Screw it, let’s make the whole movie a hallucination.” Everything that happens in this movie is utterly ridiculous. A great example is that they’re all given cell phones when they enter the party that have their names programmed into the caller ID (as if anyone could even hear their phones in a dance club anyway). Then there’s a scene where people are wearing masks, but only when it’s convenient to the plot. When they go more than 15 minutes without nudity, they throw in a completely random sex scene. And the characters run around the mansion finding themselves trapped in empty rooms all over the house. What is real? What is reality? Is everything in this movie a hallucination? Yes, it is. Again, Pinhead shows up at the very end to kill someone but other than that and the vague reference to Hellraiser now being the theme at the party this movie has nothing to do with Hellraiser. I gave it two stars because it is tolerable to watch so long as you don’t expect it to have anything to do with Hellraiser.
Hellraiser: Revelations *
Two spoiled rich teenage boys embark on a trip to Mexico where they disappear. During their parents’ dinner party one of them re-appears and through a series of flashbacks we see what happened to them while in Mexico, but we don’t see what it has to do with Hellraiser.
This movie was barely feature length and you can see in every scene how they were struggling to make it so. There are shot reverse shot talking head scenes that seem to go on for agonizingly painful lengths of time. The conversations go nowhere, they just go on and on. Everything about this movie showed how hard of a stretch it was to hit that hour mark. If someone re-edited it to only show the plot moving forward with relevant scenes, this movie would be 15 minutes long. So we start with two douchebag teenagers that are going to Mexico in a “We’re going to get drunk and laid” type of way. Then we cut to their parents watching video tapes of them seemingly being tortured before they have their dinner party. The slutty sister plays with the box and her brother appears but he’s an asshole. Some random homeless dude shows up for no reason and gets shot. Then the brother takes everyone hostage. All the while there are flashbacks to the two boys killing people. One of the boys accidentally kills a hooker while having sex with her in the bathroom. This death is completely unrelated to the plot in every way and thus pointless. It really was a bizarre accident. Then they meet a weirdo who gives them the box. One of the guys decides to be more of an asshole than he already was and opens the box, gets tortured and left without skin so he convinces the other guy to lure in hookers for him to kill and skin so he can be whole again. The other guy agrees to this and kills a bunch of hookers, after having sex with them, so he’s a total asshole too. There’s nothing to like about these two despicable characters. It’s like having two of the asshole jocks in any horror movie be the actual protagonists of the film. It does not work. They were trying to be reminiscent of the first film with all the skinning but fail in every way possible. And then a really weird looking Pinhead (clearly not the same actor or even one who resembles him) shows up at the end and kills everyone. This movie is a boring waste of time. If you can actually stand sitting through the expository dialogue to the ending you will be filled with disappointment and contempt.
I can honestly say that the Hellraiser series is by far the worst horror franchise I have seen to date. Only the first two are worth your time. Most of the sequels have absolutely nothing to do with Hellraiser. I’m convinced most of them were just stand alone movies that had Pinhead tacked onto the end to try and sell it off as part of the franchise.
The basic summary of all Hellraiser movies is that there is a puzzle box that unleashes a portal to Hell where Pinhead and a few other demons trap the soul of whoever opens the box and tortures them for all eternity.
The guise of passing off the puzzle box is that it is the key to “intense pleasure and pain.” Throughout the course of these movies I’ve determined that the “pleasure” part of this rouse is just a lie to get people to take the box, because honestly, it’s a present nobody would ever want. Unless someone’s idea of intense pleasure involves being sucked into hell and tortured for all eternity, there’s nothing pleasurable about it. However, some of the films take this “intense pleasure” ploy a little bit too literally. It’s obviously a lie. I don’t think a single person who opened the puzzle box experience any pleasure the entire time. Anyway, reviews for each movie below…
Hellraiser ****
Larry and Julia move into Larry’s brother Frank’s house after he goes missing. Julia once had an intense affair with Frank and still holds a torch for him. Larry’s daughter Kristy shows up sporadically to move the story along. Frank, who opened the box, escapes from Pinhead but is a weird skinless creature living in the attic. Julia, still enamored with Frank, agrees to help him become fully human again by luring men to Frank. With each kill, Frank becomes more whole. Julia’s character transitions through the whole experience starting out as being unsure and afraid of the situation to starting to take sadistic pleasure in the killing. Kristy finds out what’s going on and works to stop it.
I didn’t know anything about Hellraiser when I saw this movie but the story is pretty interesting and original. I’d never seen anything like it previously and didn’t know what to expect or where it was going. Pinhead was merely a side character in a much larger story. Each character goes through personal development and changes through the story arc that work with the audience. There’s inner torment and emotions at stake that you follow along with. That said it’s a creepy weird movie with a lot of gore. But creepy in a good way since you don’t know where it’s going and the unpredictable surprises pay off.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II *****
Picking up where the last movie left off, Kristy wakes up in a mental hospital. The head doctor has secretly been trying to open the puzzle box apparently knowing full well the power it holds. He manages to bring Julia back in pre-skin form and helps her become whole again. Kristy, determined to help her father who she believes is trapped in the box’s hellworld goes to the doctor’s house to stop them. Everyone is sucked into hell, literally and they all fight to escape.
This movie is actually better than the original in my opinion. I love how the hellworld is constructed. You run into past characters that are each in their own version of hell and you can see how they’ve been tortured for endless time. We learn a little more about Pinhead’s back story and that all the demons were once human beings that got turned into demons and slowly forgot their identities as they were consumed by hell. The scenery in the hellworld is trippy and interesting. It’s a labyrinth of the imagination.
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth ***
A television reporter named Joey investigates a supernatural death that she witnesses in the hospital while covering a story. The investigation leads her to a rich night club owner named JP who happened to purchase a statue that holds Pinhead captive. Pinhead convinces JP to help him escape the statue by luring him souls. Meanwhile Joey has acquired the Puzzle Box and the ghost of Pinhead before he was evil aides her in defeating him through a convoluted story plot.
This sequel was merely okay. It was tolerable to watch (which is actually saying a lot in comparison to the rest of the sequels) but nothing captivating or interesting really happens. Pinhead creates more demons for his “Hell on Earth” that are utterly ridiculous like, CD Man, Camera Man, and Margarita Mixer Man. This movie starts the dreamy delusions that annoyingly carry over to every sequel made thereafter. A good portion of the movie is dedicated to her dream sequences that add nothing original or scary to the current plot.
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline **
In the future someone trying to destroy the box from outer space tells the story of how the box was constructed and followed his family bloodline throughout the ages. A toymaker creates the box for a buyer. The buyer summons a demon from hell with it and kills the toymaker but his wife survives. Years later in modern day, the toymaker’s descendant is an architect who makes puzzle box like architecture. The demon tracks him down, unleashes Pinhead and people run around screaming pointlessly until they die. Back in space Pinhead is unleashed but everyone escapes the space station before it detonates with Pinhead aboard.
Does that synopsis sound stupid to you? The movie opens in space so you already know it’s going to be bad but on top of that, everything is told through a flashback. This is where the Hellraiser series gets ridiculously bad. A toymaker creates the puzzle box for a buyer? I always just assumed the box came from hell itself. Honestly how could it be a doorway to hell if it’s just a manmade toy? Its link to hell is never actually explained. The only thing you need to know is that a toymaker made it with normal wood. Now we’re getting utterly stupid with this series. Then we have his descendants in modern day and then the future. So we have past, present and future generations of the bloodline being haunted by the demon (not even Pinhead, it’s a different female demon who looks totally normal and not scary) in a story arc that has no pay off and characters of little interest or development. It’s just a boring movie. It’s a movie so bad even the director wanted his name removed from it. And it’s all downhill from here. I gave this movie two stars because the rest of the sequels are even worse than this one.
Hellraiser V: Inferno *
A corrupt police detective finds the puzzle box and goes on a completely boring and irrelevant series of hallucinations that have nothing to do with Hellraiser, though Pinhead does make an appearance at the end of the movie. And maybe one other one in the middle.
This is probably the worst Hellraiser movie in the series. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Hellraiser at all. When the asshole detective who you immediately hate because he’s a douchebag is introduced you just want him to die the whole time for being a creep. So there’s never an investment in the character established at all. Why keep watching this asshole be an asshole? He goes around “investigating” between puke green hallucinations full of mindless jump scares until the end where they try to tie him into the other movies by claiming he’s a descendant of the toymaker (they really took that toymaker thing seriously?) This movie is so boring I literally forwarded through most of it. After the first 30 minutes it became unbearable and I just needed it to end. Pinhead appears at the end to torture him for being a shitty human being. It’s honestly like this was a totally different movie and they just cut in two scenes with Pinhead to link it to the series to sell it. But seriously nothing happens in this movie, I just forwarded to the end because it was so unbearably bad.
Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker *
A husband crashes his car into a river and wakes up in a hospital to find out that his wife died but her body was never found. Then he has an hour and a half’s worth of hallucinations for the rest of the movie and the plot as well as Pinhead is introduced at the very end.
This was another horrible movie where nothing’s actually happening. Everything is a hallucination so everything that happens is boring and uninteresting. Again, it feels like a totally different movie with Pinhead tacked on the end to try and sell it. They got the original actress to play Kristy back. So they brought that character back for no real reason. What a waste of a character from the original. It turns out that her husband was cheating on her with every female actress in the film and he also tried to kill her by giving her the puzzle box apparently knowing about her past. She makes another deal with Pinhead (as she did in the previous films) and trades her husband as well as all his mistresses souls for her own. So I guess she became a psychotic murderer married to an asshole since the last movies. Way to ruin a character. The most annoying part of this movie is that nothing is actually happening the entire time. Every single scene is a hallucination. It got old and tired after the last two movies. Nothing new and nothing worth watching here.
Hellraiser VII: Deader *
A reporter follows a lead to a cult that claim they can bring the dead back to life. After a series of hallucinations, nothing happens and everybody dies.
Did that synopsis seem short to you? Yeah, there’s no plot in this movie. A reporter is looking for the Deaders to see if they really can bring the dead back to life. She finds the puzzle box and then starts… wait for it… HALLUCINATING (because every Hellraiser movie is about hallucinations apparently). To find the Deaders she goes on some kind of cult orgy subway train (it is as dumb as it sounds) to find their whereabouts. Between hallucinations she finds them. The main Deader is actually a descendant of the toymaker (because somehow it all needs to tie in) and Pinhead shows up at the end and kills everybody. It’s another one of those sequels that feels like a totally different movie with Pinhead just tacked on at the end and a reference to the toymaker to tie it all in. I’m not sure why this series always wants to focus its attention on the worst movie in the original four to try and tie everything together but it’s really stupid. Deader, that summarizes the whole plot.
Hellraiser: Hellworld **
A group of teenagers go to a Hellraiser themed party where they all start hallucinating and dying from plot contrivances.
This sequel introduces Hellraiser as an online video game but that ends up being inconsequential. They really just wanted to have a bunch of teenagers having sex at a party while they hallucinate about being killed by Lance Henriksen. This movie is very convoluted. There are so many hallucinations that in order to explain the plot the filmmaker just said “Screw it, let’s make the whole movie a hallucination.” Everything that happens in this movie is utterly ridiculous. A great example is that they’re all given cell phones when they enter the party that have their names programmed into the caller ID (as if anyone could even hear their phones in a dance club anyway). Then there’s a scene where people are wearing masks, but only when it’s convenient to the plot. When they go more than 15 minutes without nudity, they throw in a completely random sex scene. And the characters run around the mansion finding themselves trapped in empty rooms all over the house. What is real? What is reality? Is everything in this movie a hallucination? Yes, it is. Again, Pinhead shows up at the very end to kill someone but other than that and the vague reference to Hellraiser now being the theme at the party this movie has nothing to do with Hellraiser. I gave it two stars because it is tolerable to watch so long as you don’t expect it to have anything to do with Hellraiser.
Hellraiser: Revelations *
Two spoiled rich teenage boys embark on a trip to Mexico where they disappear. During their parents’ dinner party one of them re-appears and through a series of flashbacks we see what happened to them while in Mexico, but we don’t see what it has to do with Hellraiser.
This movie was barely feature length and you can see in every scene how they were struggling to make it so. There are shot reverse shot talking head scenes that seem to go on for agonizingly painful lengths of time. The conversations go nowhere, they just go on and on. Everything about this movie showed how hard of a stretch it was to hit that hour mark. If someone re-edited it to only show the plot moving forward with relevant scenes, this movie would be 15 minutes long. So we start with two douchebag teenagers that are going to Mexico in a “We’re going to get drunk and laid” type of way. Then we cut to their parents watching video tapes of them seemingly being tortured before they have their dinner party. The slutty sister plays with the box and her brother appears but he’s an asshole. Some random homeless dude shows up for no reason and gets shot. Then the brother takes everyone hostage. All the while there are flashbacks to the two boys killing people. One of the boys accidentally kills a hooker while having sex with her in the bathroom. This death is completely unrelated to the plot in every way and thus pointless. It really was a bizarre accident. Then they meet a weirdo who gives them the box. One of the guys decides to be more of an asshole than he already was and opens the box, gets tortured and left without skin so he convinces the other guy to lure in hookers for him to kill and skin so he can be whole again. The other guy agrees to this and kills a bunch of hookers, after having sex with them, so he’s a total asshole too. There’s nothing to like about these two despicable characters. It’s like having two of the asshole jocks in any horror movie be the actual protagonists of the film. It does not work. They were trying to be reminiscent of the first film with all the skinning but fail in every way possible. And then a really weird looking Pinhead (clearly not the same actor or even one who resembles him) shows up at the end and kills everyone. This movie is a boring waste of time. If you can actually stand sitting through the expository dialogue to the ending you will be filled with disappointment and contempt.
I can honestly say that the Hellraiser series is by far the worst horror franchise I have seen to date. Only the first two are worth your time. Most of the sequels have absolutely nothing to do with Hellraiser. I’m convinced most of them were just stand alone movies that had Pinhead tacked onto the end to try and sell it off as part of the franchise.