Review #98: Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #15- Hellraiser: Bloodline

I'll say right out: This movie gave me a lot of hope for this series. Even if it wasn't great (still living in the pale shadow of #1) it was a marked improvement in tone and quality over #2 and #3. Similar to the last one this movie really had me interested for like the first half, then it kind of became a wet stain for the second half, with a neat ending that almost made up for the previous 45 minutes.

I will admit, I was ready to write this film off entirely when the first scene starts and I saw that it took place in the future, on a space station. I know that a few franchises did space-themed movies around this time- Jason X was a few years after this, and Leprechaun 4 was around here too- so it didn't really surprise me. (The REALLY bad CGI thirty seconds in didn't do it any favors either.) But then, the movie got into the plot pretty quickly, and to be perfectly honest, the plot of this movie is actually really interesting!

So, this movie deals with the bloodline of the man who created the first puzzle box (more on that concept in a little bit). After creating it and realizing he'd crafted a doorway for demons to enter the world, he swore to craft its antithesis- another device that would serve as a weapon to defeat demons. He met an untimely end, however, and so that responsibility and that destiny was passed on through to his descendants, who over the following four centuries would unknowingly be driven to craft this device to eventually destroy the demons their ancestor had allowed into the world.

That, by itself, is a cool concept in my opinion. Some of the logistics were a little uh... nonsensical (like, how was his responsibility carried through his bloodline, when none of this happened until AFTER his son was conceived? I mean, I know this is all made-up magic anyway, but if it just magically attaches itself to a descendant that was already in existence when the whole thing started, why was it tied to his bloodline at all? Couldn't anyone become a surrogate "bloodline" carrier of this destiny?) but I thought it was a really interesting driving force for the movie.

But there's a lot of bad in this film. The middle portion dragged really bad, and while the jumps back and forth in time fit the story well enough (with the original creator in the 1700s, to a descendant in the 1990s, and then back to the guy on the space station in the 2100s) the way they were structured made this feel less like a 90-minute movie and more like three not-quite-meaty-enough 30-minute stories spread out across the film. The cenobites were still just moustache-twirling villains (though they actually felt intimidating, unlike in #3 where Pinhead just ran around yelling and making CD cyborgs), and a lot of Pinhead's threats were clearly just written to sound spooky and not actually be accurate to the series. (He kept saying things like, "I am eternal" and "two minutes or two centuries, they go by in the blink of an eye" but it's like... dude, you were a human who lived in the 1940s, you only existed as a cenobite for like 50 years before being trapped in a box until the current day.) It really felt like the movie itself wanted to forget that the last two movies happened.

They definitely are keeping with the trend of making the series' mythos less mysterious and less interesting with each entry. Like, oh, you thought the puzzle box was some ancient, possibly divine, one-of-a-kind artifact? No, it was made by a french toymaker in the 1700s. Whoopsie! And then they throw in a detail that despite that toymaker's skill being the only one possible to create such an artifact, one of the demons apparently just went and... made more...? Because they already established that there's at least a dozen of these things in existence. Whoopsie! We're only four movies in and this is already becoming a continuity snarl.

I was delighted that they actually did pay off that "building that looks like a puzzle box" that the previous movie set up. I'll own up to that, since I did not at all expect it to ever come up again, or be interesting if it did (and it was!).

All in all I thought this movie was good, but not great. I sincerely hope the series continues on this new trajectory.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Self-Destructing Space Stations

Two Celebrities I Recognized: "Celebrities" may be a strong word, but Adam Scott was in this, as was Courtland Mead, who was the kid in the TV miniseries of Stephen King's The Shining around this same time!