Review #97: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #14- Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

What can I say about this movie? It was... better than the previous one, in fact there were some parts of it that I really liked. But then, the rest of it was just... so, so bad. I honestly have no clue what direction this series is going in because each entry is nothing like the one before it, and neither of the two sequels I've watched so far seem to understand what was good about the first one. I was hoping that maybe #2 was going to be that weird fluke entry that shows up in a horror franchise (like Nightmare on Elm Street part 2, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, etc.) but while this movie was totally different than its predecessor, it still made a lot of the same mistakes.

In the first movie, the cenobites were TERRIFYING. They did so little, but what they did was mysterious and oppressive and you didn't even know if they were on the same time scale as humanity. Then in the last movie we found out they all used to be humans (like, within the last fifty years?) and they got killed by a bigger, badder cenobite that the movie needed apparently.

Then this one comes around... I liked the idea of Pinhead being trapped in a statue (which seemed like it was meant to be owned by the bum from the first film) and he was regenerating whenever someone was sacrificed to him. That's a neat idea, I suppose. But then he gets free and basically just becomes an angry moustache-twirling maniac? I don't want to see Pinhead walking around a nightclub and yelling. He didn't have any of the enigmatic menace of the first film- he just killed everyone. Did he care about torturing them first? Wasn't that his whole thing, to force pain and pleasure upon others? In the first film he said that some people considered him a demon, and others considered him an angel. In this one he's just a straight-up demon, killing people and then turning them into ironic cyborg demons after they're dead.

Like, the creature design was... interesting, I guess. The guy who got a video camera grafted into his head was a neat idea. But the part of the movie where all the creatures come into play had basically become a mindless action movie, with the protagonist running around while things explode, and by that point all of the nuance and dread was gone from the film. I wasn't really interested in the villain's motivations (that was made plain, he wanted to kill people and not go back to hell), I wasn't scared for what fate-worse-than-death was awaiting the heroine (Pinhead felt like an impotent villain after yelling and threatening her in the nightclub) and it felt like it had become a parody of another, worse movie.

And it really sucks, because the first half of the movie actually really interested me. I liked the two female leads, I felt they had a good friendship and I cared about what was going to happen to them, and I even was interested in the club owner's descent into villainy. But then he just gets killed off, Terry disappeared for basically the rest of the movie, and then Pinhead comes out and it's just explosions and gore effects for the rest of the runtime.

There were some nice twists- I really liked the chapel scene (even if it kind of ruined the mythos by showing that yes, Pinhead is basically just a Judeo-Christian demon) and the twist with the main character's father leading to the climax took me by surprise. I also thought the final image of the film (the building that is clearly fashioned after the puzzle box) was a terrifying concept, but if the past three movies show any sort of a pattern then I'm pretty sure it's not going to turn out to be anything interesting.

This movie had a lot going for it but it really dropped the ball by making the villain boring and non-scary.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Night Clubs That Inexplicably Have Fine Restaurants Attached

Total Number of Star Trek DS9 Actors With Leading Roles In Hellraiser Movies So Far: 2