Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) *

 

--Spoiler Alert --

This contains spoilers for the first film in the Hellraiser series. The film will also spoil your dinner.

Based on the novella “The Hellbound Heart,” by Clive Barker, who also screen-wrote and directed, 1987's “Hellraiser” was visually interesting, but narratively under-cooked. It plays today like a soft-filtered piece of 80's camp, with bad acting and an intriguing premise that deteriorates into a hot mess of an ending. Whatever else you can say about the film, it at least offered something original.

The story involves a magic puzzle box. A world traveler and hedonist named Frank Cotton has been told that the box is the key to otherworldly pleasures, but solving it unleashes demons called Cenobites, who rip Frank apart and drag his soul into another dimension. Some time later, Frank is accidentally partly-resurrected. His former lover, Julia, who is still obsessed with him, helps with his revival by sacrificing a series of men to him, ultimately including her husband, Larry, who is Frank's brother. Larry's daughter, Kirsty, finds Frank's puzzle box and solves it, summoning the Cenobites, whom Kirsty convinces to take the escaped Frank's soul instead of her own.

“Hellbound: Hellraiser II” picks up where the first film left off. Kirsty finds herself in a mental hospital where the head psychiatrist, coincidentally, is a student of the occult. He has his own collection of puzzle boxes and esoteric literature regarding the Cenobites. Hearing Kirsty's story, he sets out to resurrect Julia. Driven more by an insatiable curiosity than carnal desires, he then seeks to summon the Cenobites.

As I said, the first film wasn't great, but it at least offered concepts and visuals that were unique. “Hellraiser II” attempts to further the story of the Cenobites a little bit, but it does not take us very far. Basically it just recycles everything from the first film, and with the novelty gone, we are just left with non-stop gore. The movie is, ultimately, a combination of body horror and cosmic horror, but it's rather thin gruel. The film relies on a numbing barrage of nightmarish images of the sort that a disturbed middle-schooler with unsupervised internet access might draw in their notebooks.

The “Hellraiser” movies remind me a bit of the “Phantasm” franchise. Both involve a unique vision, a hand-sized MacGuffin, and terrible writing, and neither, at the end of the day, is really worth your time.

1 star out of 5