HELLRAISER: INFERNO Could've been a lot worse Well, I'll give the makers of this movie this. They tried. They knew this series had spiraled down into turdsville, and they tried to do something a little different, something a little more thoughtful. I think Clive Barker selling off his interest in these films might have prompted them to (wisely) consider the option of no longer bothering to cater to the fans of the series. Hellraiser: Inferno is not really a movie for fans of the Hellraiser series ("Phew!" said the Tyrannorabbit; the only entry in this series I've ever really liked is the one everybody else hates, part 3). It's not actually a good movie, but I have to tip my hat to the guys for trying. Boasting the most boring box art yet, Hellraiser: Inferno starts like a hybrid of Hellraiser and Seven, and ends like a ridiculous morality play, trying to teach us a fairly obvious moral lesson. But at least it has a little fun on the way there, even if it's frequently too cringe-inducing to be much of a beer-n-popcorn horror flick. Craig Scheffer stars as a very corrupt (and not very competently corrupt) cop who finds The Box (and a child's finger) at the hooks-tore-the-poor-bastard-apart death scene of an old high school acquaintance. Later that night, when he ducks out on his wife and daughter in order to shack up in a motel with a hooker (man, just once I want to see a homicide cop with a GOOD marriage), he plays around with the box a little (this box no longer feels like much of a puzzle). He gets a screams-and-sobs phone call the next day from said hooker, and when he goes back to the hotel room, she's (surprise) dead, and there's another child's finger next to her. Finding out who this missing child is and freeing him becomes his obsession, even as he delves into the increasingly messed-up supernaturally-tinged mysteries about The Engineer, who's doing all this nasty stuff. It was only a matter of time until somebody tied this series in with body-piercing fetishists, since the pain/pleasure thing which was supposedly the crux of these movies is rather obviously reflected there. Come to think of it, the pain/pleasure thing is maybe a little better represented here than in the other films, which give us pain, and pleasure, but never try mixing them. This one has a sick little scene where two female cenobites give Scheffer a loving chest-rub...under his skin. Then a crawling torso shows up and ruins the fun. I too know the pain of having a potential threesome ruined by a crawling torso. Well, if you replace "potential" with "extremely unlikely" and "crawling torso" with "reality". If you're looking for Pinhead (Doug Bradley), you came to the wrong place. He shows up for about a blink of an eye at the beginning, and then two scenes at the end, where he gets one line and one speech respectively. You know what I say to that? GOOD. Pinhead's a fun guy, but he was turning into Freddy Krueger. He seems like a pretty silly choice to deliver the film's moralizing at the end, but at least there are no one-liners. The killings aren't very violent (onscreen), but are quite gory and are often heard offscreen with some of the most disgusting sound effects since Candyman. The weapon of choice: a cat-o-nine-tails with hooks. If more people used these in their S&M games, we'd probably have fewer S&M enthusiansts. On the downside, the music from an unknown culprit usually has too deliberate a tempo, making Scott Derrickson's rock-video-ish direction (no, wait, I mean that in a good way, really...no Michael Bay-style quick-cuts here) make this feel even more like a rock video. Everybody's performances are pretty bad, particularly Scheffer who turns in his most wooden job yet, and isn't exactly a credible threat when he blackmails his partner (Nicholas Turturro) by leaving a couple of his things at a murder scene they were the first officers to get to. I also have to wonder; wasn't the Engineer the chattery-teeth guy in previous Hellraiser movies? He sure looks like him here (without the chattery teeth), but turns out to be someone else. And surely, the most bizarre twist in this plot has to be the inclusion of an old-west saloon and a couple of kung-fu cowboy chicks who beat the living crap out of Scheffer. Allow me to be the first to say, What the hell? Hellraiser: Inferno isn't a good movie, but it's not really a bad one. It's moody, it's gruesome, has some great effects, and is way better than the last entry in this series, even though it probably wouldn't have amounted to a good movie even if it didn't fall apart into time travel (!) and incoherent Judeo-Christian moralizing at the end (placing the desires of the flesh as being in direct opposition to the growth of the spirit; you should know by now whether or not you find this to be a ridiculous concept). (Yikes, Hollywood Jesus actually liked this movie!) This might be saying very little, but at least it isn't saying that this completely sucks. BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE