The 8th installment of Clive Barker's Hellraiser franchise is about as enjoyable as shitting a live Rotweiler. It is a prime example of a studio so determined to suck every last drop from one of it's cash cows teats that the teat ends up looking like a lifeless pink twizzler ran through the rinse cycle one too many times. As it goes, "one too many times" is what best characterized this tired and overall impotent entry in the series. It is also the Friday the 13th part 5 of the series.. A shade of it's former self that leaves you wondering "just where is all the hell raisin in dis here Hellraiser" (note that I am wearing a Dale Jr. shirt as I say this... You know... To sell the drama of it..shucks and tarnation and for some reason all these girls with what my father used to call flowerpot tits just can't stand to leave their shirts on.. All due to the heavy thrum of an engine blasting its way through rural Kentucky!)? You know what would really make for a great Hellraiser if this were National Sarcasm Day? How bout one with virtually no Cenobites that manages to literally ass blast the mythology of the series right down the toilet. So maybe "ass blast" is what best characterizes this movie... Sure.. It does roll off the tongue and I see the ewwwww face you're making at that powerful piece of wordsmithing...
Hellworld starts off with an extremely uninteresting group of teenagers (and I know what you're thinking, "teenagers is such a novel way to try to reinvigorate the franchise and capture a new younger market...yawn.") and unfortunately tries to push the story forward with them... There's the beautiful and highly intelligent yet jaded and despondent girl, the horn dog pretty boy, some other girl (just insert stereotype here and let's be done with it), the token black guy AND the troubled, and psychologically shaken hero grappling with his past...sadly even the tired descriptions are more interesting than their celluloid counterparts. The teens, connected by the death of a mutual friend are all enthusiasts of Hellworld, a Hellraiser themed game that looks so utterly behind the times that at one point all of the characters completely abandon it for the drawing power of Trouble... Yes, with the pop-o-magic bubble.. Well no... But it was definitely warranted. Upon completing this steaming little pile of pixels each "person" is given an invitation to a Hellworld party hosted by the android Bishop from Aliens... Sorry.... "synthetic person"... Who now how has an earring which ,in case you didn't know the score, makes any man over 60 cool enough to host some lame ass rave in their house where young women walk around in leather vests with their boobowahs hang in out (I have my ears pierced and the closest I got was seein a couple of wrinkly old bean bags at a Kiss concert that coughed up a cloud of dust during the second verse of Strutter). during the course of the night our protagonists get faced with their own fears (yeah, Why not say to hell with Cenobites and that cube that has generated the studio a bazillion dollars and and just rewrite the rules..sure...) and several die..or do they? Sigh... Turns out that Bishop Is connected to the death that in turn connects our teens or young adults or desperate thirty something actors or whatever together and has orchestrated all of the events in the film to exact his revenge for the death of his son... Who apparently kicked it do to excessive shoveling because all we see the sweaty chap do in flashbacks is hurl dirt over his shoulder while apparently having some kind of heat stroke. So Bishop enlists the help of a drug that apparently does WHATEVER THE FUCK you want it to including mass hallucinations and illicit LOTS of oral sex (ok... I would definitely take the drug...well it's probably a gateway drug... But not to a gateway to Hell because we've already established that this just ain't that kind of Hellraiser movie)? we get dashes of Cenobites here and there before the gang drives the mystery machine right through the script letting us know that this has been nothing more than "events inspired by Hellraiser" and the bulk of the movie has been in the minds of the drugged..err.. Teens. Yeah... Thanks for takin us on the ferry to shit town Mr. Bishop!!! Avoid.
Hellraiser: Hellworld is currently available on Netflix streaming.
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