Hellbound: Hellraiser II

BigSugar — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:07:27 +0000

There are very few moments in which I can be accused, rightly so, of horror movie heresy. This flick is one of them.

Here's the deal; picking up a few hours after the events of the first flick, Kirstie is back on the trail of her father while while a completely bugfuck headshrinker, Channard, gets all horny to fuck Kirstie's stepmom and find out what the Cenobites are up to. Psychosexual mayhem ensues.

Clive Barker's original Hellraiser was the late-Eighties benchmark for horror when the genre was well on its way to hybernation. Slasher flicks and Stephen King disasters had all but run horror movies into the ground. Then along came Clive and nothing would be the same. Saying all of that to say that I love the first film, but this one's the bees knees to me. We get a backstory for Pinhead, some gore that was cut from the first film, the ever fuckable Ashley Laurence and, though I hate admitting it, my first boner for a M.I.L.F. in Clare Higgins. Like all good horror films, the flick starts off in shit-bat overdrive and lets up a little only when it has to. There's a little bit of a sag in the midsection, but it's made up for by having EZ's and my nightmare vision of Hell; a room in which naked chicks cavort under a sheet of silk, only to disappear right when you're ready to get down to business time. That's Hell, baby. We also get some "rules" for the cenobites as well as the made-from-Scratch birth to death of the Channard cenobite, and Pinhead gets a ton more screen time. Did I mention Ashley Laurence?

And for those reasons, this flick is better to me than the first. Anybody that's got a problem with that, I'd love to debate it. I don't think that it's a better film technically, but, not unlike The Empire Strikes Back, the mythology is deepened and the characters are given a layer of complexity past what they got in the first film. Also, it's got more blood. And Christopher Young's masterpiece of a score. It's one of those movies that takes the ball and runs hard down the field with it.

Now Clive himself calls the film "uneven." I don't know what the fuck that means, so I can niether support or deny this claim, but he seems to say it in a derrogatory way, so, take that for what it is. So, here's where the heresy part comes in; if you're gonna do remakes and I can't stop you, well then remake this one. It's probably even more relevant now that it was two decades ago, and having that many years in advancements in technology will give those few shoddy visuals a chance to be redone with a digital spin. Leviathan would be a hard-on inducing sight done well, and we all know it.

Get it and love it.

Save Yourselves,

'Nuff Sugar

Doug Bradley

Hellbound: Hellraiser II