Review #104: Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #21- Hellraiser: Judgment

Well, this movie has one big plus going for it: It's not as bad as the last one!

That being said, it's still terrible. When the movie began and it took TEN WHOLE MINUTES to get to the title screen, and instead we watched a cold open that was basically just gore and bad lighting and boobs, I had begun to wonder if that's all this movie was going to be. Mercifully that was not the case- we were eventually introduced to some characters, a pair of cops (that I didn't realize were brothers until the very end) following some serial killer with a hilariously generic name (that obviously ends up being a clue later on when someone finds a tenuously loose connection to that name).

And then, for like fifty minutes of the film, there is nothing resembling the Hellraiser series on the screen. Every now and then they cut to a shot of pinhead (the same shot several times, of course, and obviously it's not Doug Bradley, but another person doing a bad Doug Bradley impression) and the serial murders have some sort of a lazy connection to the ten commandments (because lazy writers think a movie about Cenobites needs to have some connection to the Bible for some reason). Then there's an utterly mind-boggling sequence where the Cenobites are apparently working in a parallel hierarchy with angels? Like, they are about to torture/kill someone and an angel calls a meeting and tells them to let him go, and they make mentions of a nebulous "Him" that I can only assume is meant to be the Judeo-Christian god. So whatever happened to that "Demons to some, angels to others" bit? Why would anyone ever think a Cenobite is an angel when there are literal angels down the hall?

I know this is a tired point to keep bringing up but the way it gets disregarded is the easy litmus test for whether someone understands what makes Cenobites cool. It's not just that they're creepy S&M leatherdaddies with chain powers, it's that they exist only to facilitate and exploit the fine line between pain and pleasure. When a movie equates them wholly with literal demons it is the least interesting, least compelling way they could possibly be used. If you want to watch a movie with demons as villains there's hundreds of them out there, and most of them are probably better than this schlock. And what makes the whole demons-meeting-with-angels-but-ultimately-answering-to-God thing even more absurd is the ending to this film. The entire sequence is just so stupid and makes not a single lick of sense. Here's how it goes (spoilers, not that you should be watching this film):

The Cenobites have captured the serial killer. The angel shows up to tell Pinhead to let this serial killer go free, and they have this long conversation about it while the serial killer just hangs out. So Pinhead lets him go free, at which point he is immediately killed by a cop who had been playing dead five feet away for like the last fifteen minutes (and nobody, even this literal angel or a pair of literal demons) noticed. Then Pinhead kills the angel (who insists there will be repercussions- if he was able to kill her I wonder why he didn't ever do it in the past) and then those repercussions immediately take place: Pinhead is made human. Except he was already human, like twenty years ago, so this shouldn't be a huge deal. (Though to be fair, if we're bringing the canon timeline into this, he should already be trapped in a puzzle box for the next hundred years during this so.....)

Also, can I make another complaint? The Cenobites in this film SUCK. Like, seriously. Even if you missed the point of the Cenobites in the first film and you really do think it's cool for them to just be S&M leatherdaddy demons with chain powers, THE ONES IN THIS FILM STILL SUCK. One of them is just a normal dude who eats paper, and the other is just a normal dude with scars on his face. Then three of them are just naked chicks with their faces torn off. WTF happened to the amazing creature design from the earlier films? Butterball and Pistonhead were leagues ahead of the Normal Dude That Eats Paper. I can't help but feel like the fact that this entry exists in the same series as the rest makes them all worse by association.

This movie clearly had more thought put into it than Revelations, and it doesn't look like it was made overnight for $200 and a steak dinner, but it's still terrible.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Dogs In Stomachs

Surprise Cameo Nobody Asked For Or Recognized: Apparently Heather Langenkamp (from the Nightmare on Elm Street series, which I'll be covering in a few days) had like two lines as a landlady in this film?