Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Director: Tony Randel

This was just not a very good movie.

About two years ago, I decided to go back and watch the original Hellraiser, and I found it to be a film with a few clear strengths and a few painfully obvious weaknesses. Its sequel, Hellbound, released a mere 15 months later, shows a tentative grip on the original's merits, but has even more warts than its predecessor.

The original movie told the tale of the young woman Kirsty, whose stepmother Julia and Julia's former lover Hank had killed her father in order to resurrect Hank and rescue him from a literal hell in which he had trapped himself. It was a grisly tale that ended with Kirsty barely surviving with her life, though she managed to doom Hank and Julia back into the sadomasochistic netherworld from which Hank came. Hellbound continues to follow Kirsty, shortly after the events relayed in Hellraiser, who has been placed in a psychiatric hospital. We soon learn that the hospital is under the care of Doctor Phillip Channard, a psychopath obsessed with the puzzle boxes which Hank had used to open a door to hell. Dr. Channard uses the patients in the hospital to experiment with the boxes, eventually learning how to open one of them and releasing Julia, who is stripped of her skin in the same way that Hank was upon his initial return. Channard allows himself to be taken into Hell by Pinhead and the other horrific Cenobites, with Kristy and another patient, Tiffany, following in order to stop whatever grand plan Channard has. We see the landscape of Hell, learn that Pinhead and the other Cenobites were once themselves humans, and watch Dr. Channard become a new, even more powerful form of Cenobite. Channard kills the other Cenobites in a bid to take over their realm, and even bring its nightmare tortures to our world. Channard is foiled, though, when Kirsty and Tiffany use the puzzle box to destroy Channard's power source, and him with it.

This sequel was pretty bad. The few strengths it showed were really just lifted from the previous film, and the weaknesses of Hellraiser were mostly here again, a few of them in worse form. As grotesque as the visuals are in the Hellraiser films, one has to admit that creator Clive Barker's concepts and mythology around the Cenobites and Hell are unique and morbidly fascinating. And the neo-goth, sadomasochistic fetish aesthetic was a novel visualization of the entire frightening notion. Combined with the gut-wrenching body horror elements depicted, an iconic horror world was created. These things are the main draw in Hellbound, but they were already created and shown in the previous movie. Hellbound's greatest contribution to Barker's world is the deepening of the mythology. We learn some key pieces to Pinhead's origins, and we see what their realm actually looks like, and these were fairly compelling. The effects and visuals in the sequel are of the same quality, which is to say quite good, but again this was nothing new. It did seem, though, that the actual cinematography and any set designs not part of the horror sequences were rather drab and cheap.

Here's Channard, undoubtedly trying out one of his awful
one-liners. It's like the writers asked, "What if we mix Pinhead
with Henny Youngman? That's be pretty scary, right?"

Nearly every other aspect of the movie I find weak. Like its predecessor, the acting is spotty at best, and sometimes downright bad. This isn't helped by a rather lame script that never really offers good answers to any of the more interesting questions that might come up. I mean, you have a ton of material just sitting there regarding human psychology around pain and arousal, and it is never explored with any sort of depth. The really painful parts, though, are how the film turns its main villain - Dr. Channard - into a lame, Freddy Kruger wannabe. Yes, Pinhead cracked off one or two iconic lines in Hellraiser: "We have such sights to show you," and "Time to play" are all-timers. Well, I guess the filmmakers took that bait and ran with it, because in Hellbound, you have the transformed Channard Cenobite flying around, shredding people left and right, and spouting lame, hokey one-liners in every scene. It's pretty cringe-worthy for a story that has the potential to be truly horrifying in more of a Lovecraftian way, rather than a campy way.

So my Hellraiser itch is now fully scratched. It may come as a surprise to you that there are ten - that's right, ten - movies in this series so far (I think I knew of four or five of them). After watching the second one, though, I feel absolutely no need to go any further. For fans of dark horror, it's well worth checking out the original. But don't give in to the temptation to watch more. If my experience with Hellbound and the overall reception of the subsequent movies are anything to on, it's best to just leave well enough alone.