Time passed by, the 1980s receded into the mists of history, and lo there was no third Hellraiser. A latecomer in the great 80s horror franchisathon, Hellraiser had passed beyond the window of greatest opportunity, of sequel proliferation, into the arid wasteland of the 1990s. It when then, in a dearth of both horror sequel production and interest in them, that the rights to Hellraiser were bought away from the UK New World Pictures, picked up by the Americans at Dimension Films, the genre division of Miramax. Hellraiser would be a proper Hollywood product at last, at which point the franchise would wholly lose its battle with cliché.
Though Hellbound’s screenwriter Peter Atkins remains on board, he is the only returning production member. This accounts for the largely different tonal quality of Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. Taking technical duties of wrangling a small herd of special effects artists (and also directing) is Anthony Hickox, mastermind of stunning efforts such as Waxwork II: Lost in Time, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat and Warlock: The Armageddon – boy, the man sure loves colons! He also loves Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Naomi Campbell, which is better than anyone else can claim, except for that Fez guy from “That ‘70s Show.”
Also, Matt Maiellaro, the first assistant director of the second unit, co-created “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
Among the cast, the one returner is Doug Bradley – Pinhead himself! This truly marks what Hellraiser has become, a villain-centric horror series, as close to a body count travesty as this series can muster. And Pinhead, once such a collected rule-abider, is now one more creative killer in the Freddy Kreuger mold, only with something of a “Hell” theme going on, and with a whole lot more speechifying. He even self-identifies now as pure evil, in a distinctly traditional, Judeo-Christian sorta way – this is something they outright avoided in prior entries.
But one Hellraiser standard remains forever in place: it takes Hell on Earth for-freaking-ever to get going, making this another entry you could skip the first 45 minutes of.
I can’t though…
In spite of the series’ new tonal direction, they make a good faith effort to follow up as logically as possible on Hellbound’s illogical conclusion. This means Pinhead is now bound within a pillar of writhing torment, the Pillar of Souls. Presumably, the filmmakers sought Clive Barker’s input before proceeding to demolish his brainchild, receiving two suggestions (connect the puzzle box back to ancient Egypt, or slap Pinhead in some church’s relic). This somewhat reflects that latter notion, in the broad strokes, though rather than do something interesting like place Pinhead immobilized in a monastery, they simply allow some New York yuppie philistine get his entitled hands on him.
This dilettante, J.P. Morgan (Kevin Bernhardt, of very little else), is America’s weak sauce effort to replicate the misogyny and fornication of the late Frank Cotton. J.P. sucks. Partly it’s the fault of the actor, for no one – save Doug Bradley, naturally – gives a good performance in this. Hellraiser III is the definition of special effects filmmaking, done by a director more concerned with his cheapjack visuals than in telling a story. This mentality extends to J.P.’s lamozoid ritzy heavy metal club, the Boiler Room (ooh, blatant Nightmare on Elm Street referencing, just what we needed!), the setting they replaced a church with for the chance to wedge in whatever flash-in-the-pan metal band the producers were pushing (Armored Saint).
Enough of our watered-down Frank. Who’s our watered-down Kirsty? Oh yes, even Kirsty can be watered down! It is Joey Summerskill (“Deep Space Nine’s” Terry Farrell, who is therefore above this), local reporter and…that’s it. Like any good Final Girl, for that’s where we are now, Joey’s name is indeed androgynous, and she is the lone chaste person in sight. It is this chastity which is keeping her from rising in the news world, because she prefers “tight stories, not tight skirts.” She’ll never get on Fox News that way.
Joey’s latest professional failure is a report from the hospital’s emergency room, on a night when strangely there are no patients. Well…until the camera guy Doc leaves. Then some poor wretch is wheeled in, dozens of infernal chains hooked in his body. This being a Hellraiser movie, those chains soon tear him in every direction – ho hum, this is getting tiresome…Also, his head explodes.
Terry (Paula Marshall), the skank who brought ol’ hook head in, confesses she found him at the Boiler Room. This sends Joey deep into the pits of New York’s nightlife, going all the way to ask J.P. more info about this girl Terry. For Joey is determined to get to the bottom of this hooking, this “story,” because that’s why they let reporters play lead roles – they force themselves into any genre! J.P. is too busy with his latest bevy of whores, so nothing comes of this.
Suddenly – we’re in the Vietnam War! Er?! It’s not every formulaic spook show on a miniscule budget which depicts the horrors of war. This is pretty ambit- Oh wait, this is just Joey’s dream, isn’t it? Yeah. Drat!, they really have gone the Nightmare on Elm Street route! So this is merely a way to wedge in a little back story, concerning the death of Joey’s soldier father, then let her actually wake up in bed screaming. Oh boy.
As Joey rouses, she gets a phone call from skanky Terry, seeking a place to crash, because Joey is seemingly the only person she knows. This is a chance for a lengthy, lengthy character scene – where’s Pinhead?! – but all I shall focus on is the final exposition. That dead guy, he got caught tugging on J.P.’s pillar (that don’t sound right), and what he yanked out did the chain game on him. Luckily, Terry still has that thing – a puzzle box. As with any archaic, mystical gateway to another realm, Joey sets it carelessly atop her TV.
The Pinhead pillar is now the centerpiece of J.P.’s flat, cozily adjacent to his sordid thrasher club. They’ve mostly dropped the fun skinless revenant thing, but not the tedious need for slow, steady victims those revenant plots engendered. Only this time it is Pinhead who won’t be coming about until an extremely precise series of x, y, z takes place. Okay, first up, he needs some blood (let’s ignore the whole opening kill thing except as a genre-dictated standard) – How does one accidentally bleed all over an out-of-the-way sex statue?! Don’t answer that! In this case, J.P. finds a rat inside the statue’s fresh hole (?), and the little bugger bites his hand. Very well, that’s enough arterial spray to get a few lightning effects. It’s not enough to animate Pinhead, oh no – guess we’re just stuck with J.P. and Joey for a while still.
Killing time rather than people, the movie accompanies Joey and Terry to the Pyramid Gallery, where J.P. obtained the statue. This place proves defunct, and possibly hellish in that nebulous sort of way. At the very least Joey discovers a receipt proving that the pillar came from the Channard Institute, which is “up state somewhere.” So…there goes my theory that the first two Hellraisers took place in England! And Joey goes about “investigating” the Cenobite mythos, by obtaining taped documents of Kirsty. Ah, horror sequels, where your new protagonists cannot learn about the evil themselves, they just use what others left behind. Never mind the audience is treated like newbies, so we can’t just resume where we left off. This way stagnation lies!
But eventually that danged, immobile statue’s gonna hafta eat, so things can happen. It’s another night, and J.P. needs another disposable bimbo for his bed notch. Convenient when said notch is ten paces from a nightclub full of inebriated hipsters. Tonight’s conquest shall be Sandy (Aimée Leigh), the precise sort of ditzy bleached-blonde indigenous to the early 90s. They schtupp, affording some pure cheesecake T&A formula horror is known for. And afterwards J.P. berates Sandy for being, in essence, a female – Where’s Pinhead?!
Okay, so Sandy steps just a little too close to the Pillar of Souls, which is apparently enough. Chains shoot forth, rip her skin off, then eat her. That’s the closest we come to skinlessness in this flick, Sandy having already showed as much skin as possible. And the Pinhead, er, head comes to life, though dagnabit he’s still stuck in that fekaktah statue! DRAT! Even so, Pinhead remains a most eloquent sophist, tempting J.P. with dominion most powerful, a world with J.P.’s pretentious outsider art made flesh…
Joey is busy getting her own supernatural visitation too, ‘cause you gotta keep your “main character” active until the Third Act needs her. While reviewing the institute tapes, which substitute for anything like personal action, Joey glimpses brief shots of Captain Eliot Spencer – you know, the British imperial who was transformed into Pinhead?
Hold onto that, because things are finally in motion towards some sort of finale. (The write-up is brief, the content scant, but the film as long as any.) Terry accepts a phone call from J.P., and returns to the Boiler Room to patch up their “relationship,” suddenly upset with Joey over the sort of idiotic contrivance only a substance-free screenplay can manage. Little does she know that she’s J.P.’s intended sacrifice to the pillar. And look at the silly method J.P.’s devised to lure people into his trap!
Come ‘ere, girl! Atta girl, come ‘ere! Good girl! She’s not a dog, J.P.! And when at last the intellectual approach fails him, J.P. instead attempts simply dragging Terry. What a maroon, all this earns him is temporary unconsciousness by means of Terry’s brass knuckles. And she’s all set to leave when –
Pinhead speaks, effortlessly tempting her too with promises of the “key to dreams, to black miracles.” Well, who could resist?! Not Terry, because the film has tried gamely but utterly fruitlessly to convince us of her frail state. So she unceremoniously boots J.P.’s hulk over to the statue, where he is summarily gobbled up – and gets a piston through the skull. Where’d that come from?! And Pinhead looms, fully formed…
So…he only needed one more soul?! Why didn’t he just yank J.P. right on over to him instantly, as opposed to this roundabout booty/soul call? (‘Cause it kills up screen time.) No matter, with but a half hour remaining our Pinhead can get on with busin-
No, wait, first it’s back to Joey. Give those gears a little lubricant, guys, they’re grinding smoke! It seems the ghost of Eliot Spencer has decided now is the time to provide a big block of new exposition to explain what all’s going on. Meeting in the No Man’s Land of WWI (one block down from the Vietnam flashbacks), Spencer explains they are actually in Limbo, the place between Heaven and Hell – yeah, we are unequivocally in a standard religious universe now. Apparently, in the fallout of Hellbound’s Great Whatever, the Good and Evil sides of Pinhead were separated, Spencer being the Good. The Evil, Pinhead himself – who didn’t even exist until Hell created him, mind you – is now an agent of pure, Joker-lite chaos, unbound by Hell’s laws or British notions of unique horror storytelling. That is, this is the justification for why Pinhead’s gone Freddy (which we’ll see fully in a minute).
Joey’s only chance to stop Pinhead is to get him through a gateway back to the afterlife, where Spencer can better him. “Where is it?” “Your apartment.” [Spit take.] Ha ha! What?!...Oh, apparently it’s the puzzle box he’s referring to, not Joey’s closet door or something. Maaaaybe. The metaphysics is becoming muddled…more so. At any rate, Joey must lure Pinhead back to her apartment block with the box as bait – Pinhead’s aim shall be to get it from her, through persuasion.
“Shall we begin?”
In penance for his extended absence, Pinhead goes on a bit of a murder bender in the Boiler Room. Recall in the past, when one earned the torments of Hell by opening the puzzle box? Well, all you have to do now is show up in a skeezy nightclub on the wrong night. Damn well everyone in attendance falls to Pinhead’s chains, which now have the power to do whatever gore effect they want. Pinhead even gets a few unique kills. I tried in this short span to account for them:
- Someone’s vodka tonic freezes into Pin’s head, then becomes a dagger to stab the boozer right in the mouth.
- CDs render the DJ DOA.
Actually, I think that’s about it. Sorry about that.
Soon Joey arrives in the demilitarized zone which is J.P.’s neighborhood (and this is a pre-Pinhead condition), leading herself on a tour of the Boiler Room’s mayhem. Pinhead appears in his corpse-strewn congregation, with wordy and overwrought speeches about agony and suffering and kittens and whatnot. He promises a swift end for Joey should she gift him the box. She relents, and the chase is on!
The streets erupt into a context-free maelstrom of explosions, burst water mains, and general kookiness. Joey is beset by her former associates, now molded by Pinhead to be his new Cenobite army on Earth. Now here’s where Hell on Earth could have really set itself apart, with some unique new Cenobite designs to torture our imaginations. Rather, this squad comes across like knock-off Borgs (rather than vice versa), something Joey (Jadzia Dax, remember) should be well equipped to resist.
Our first Ceno-lite is Camerahead. Oh dear. It is Doc, Joey’s former cameraman, with – yes – a camera through his head. Oy! This camera fires explosions. And Camerahead gets a serious multitude of lame camera-based puns and quips, a veritable source of envy for Mr. Freeze himself! But again – explosions. That’s it?
CD Cenobite’s weapon is – Do I have to explain this? Oh god, you just lacerated my face with a Michael Bolton single!
Barbie Cenobite, name notwithstanding, is the Boiler Room’s bartender, now armed with…deadly cocktails. Which explode. I think they’re stuck on a theme here.
Joey bypasses scant police officers, damning them to lame explosion-based deaths, as she seeks sanctuary in a matte painting of a church (you mean no real church would accept Hellraiser III?!). But in comes Pinhead, in a scene literal-minded surely must’ve desired ever since the first Hellraiser – Pinhead’s demented, blasphemous satire of the Holy Communion. Truth be told, this is Hell on Earth’s highlight, for it employs a dementia which sheer gore effects cannot rival. “This is MY body … Happy are they who come to MY supper.”
Leaving a priest now to suffer a rather more interesting demise (force-fed Pinhead’s flesh), Joey flees to a construction site of all places, where yet more uninspired Semi-bites await her…
Pistonhead is the result of J.P. having received a piston in the head. He seemingly has no powers.
Meanwhile, the Terry Cenobite – Oh right, we sorta left her dangling with Pinhead – exists mostly as an argument tool to sway Joey’s sympathies. She also enjoys a taste cigarette in her fresh tracheotomy hole – She’s a chain smoker! Get it?
Pinhead again looms – suspense goes “bye bye” when we’re assured he cannot harm Joey – and gives false promises for the box. Joey actually calls him a “pinhead,” that name really being the fans’ unofficial nickname (which doesn’t exactly class up the joint). Solving her box on the run with an ease unparalleled in this series, all the non-Pinhead Cenobites are suctioned up as though by the Ghostbusters.
Leading us straight to Vietnam why not. Joey’s father explains all is well, gimme the box, yadda yadda, don’t do it Joey he’s Pinhead! Of course she does, and of course he is. And Pinhead readies an actual attack, here in this sun-bathed field, when –
Spencer redirects them to his chamber, explaining the “gateway” he spoke of was actually the “gateway to Joey’s dreams.” Ah, metaphysical semantics, is there any ass-pull you cannot justify? These two contradictions do battle, finally descending into a cesspool of early 90s morphing effects – Pinhead is sent back to Hell! Development hell.
Sequel hook? The eventual building at that construction site uses puzzle box details in its interior design. Oh…kay…then.
One cannot say, even now, that the series wholly lacks for ambition, even as it struggles to simultaneously wedge itself into a horror format which, frankly, was no longer profitable in 1992. But the ambition is drying up, as the conceptual underpinnings are mostly eviscerated. That leaves just elaborate set pieces, something which Hellbound was already bound to. But there simply just isn’t as much of it in Hell on Earth, as we have to wade through “The J.P. and Joey Hour” first. The only inspiration here is to fashion Pinhead into a traditional boogeyman – a figure of fun and Hell puns. His character’s underpin(head)ings do not allow for that, not entirely, so we’re left with an odd little duck, a flavorless sludge. That is, it’s a horror movie from 1992.
Related posts:
• No. 1 Hellraiser (1987)
• No. 2 Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
• No. 4 Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)
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