44. "Hellraiser: Hellworld" (2005, Bota)
By Eivind Langdal
4th February 2010

To be fair, Hellraiser: Hellworld is a lot better than its tag line (“Evil goes online”) would suggest, but that would be like saying it’s better to lose one arm instead of two. Yes, sure, it is better to lose one arm instead of losing two, and but when we start talking about getting the lesser of two evils, thankful is the last thing we should be. “Thankful” is not the appropriate adjective. In fact, as far as appropriate adjectives goes, the most fitting ones for this film are all of a distinctively negative nature. As I reviewer, I am supposed to list those adjectives, but frankly, I can’t be bothered. I mean, if there is anyone out there who thinks that watching this film is a good idea, they need help of a more professional nature than what I can give them. If that made me sound like I was insulting those people, I feel I must correct you, because I was insulting this film.

Hellraiser: Hellworld is the 8th and supposedly final film in the saga about Pinhead and his Cenobites. It’s been a long ride. The first film was directed by horror maestro Clive Barker, who based it on his own critically acclaimed novel The Hellbound Heart. That was one of the finest horror films I have had the displeasure of seeing. Barker never directed another film in the series, which may go a long way to help us understand why no other film in the series was any good. Barker might not have been the “future of horror” that Stephen King thought he was, but he could have done a lot worse. He could have made Hellraiser: Hellworld, for example.

The film sees a group of teenagers get an invitation for a Hellraiser-style party. Yes, that’s right, a horror film that knows about horror films. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is a film that knows about horror films but does not understand them. Director Rick Bota (who also made the last two films in the series), uses all the standard tricks of the genre, but he’s like a person who has just discovered cooking and thinks that putting every ingredient in the blender will make him a gourmet chef. I can’t wait for him to discover restaurants. The film has the scary house, the cheap shocks, a plot that gets more confused the more you try to make sense of it, the stupid characters and the final scare. It does not, however, have any shred of originality, and there is hardly a single thing in it that should make anyone want to watch it. Well, save for Pinhead, perhaps, who in this film probably makes his briefest appearance so far in the series. I wonder how the film would have been if someone removed him. Save for the awkward pauses where his lines would be, I don’t think the final product would have been all that different, actually. True, he was always a side character in the series, and his primary objective was almost always to clean up whenever the human characters made a mess instead of making the mess himself, but in this film, it actually feels like he doesn’t belong.

I believe I was describing the plot. How far did I get? Oh yes, I said that a group of teenagers had gotten an invitation to a Hellraiser-style party. Now, I’d give you their names and characteristics, but truth is, I’ve forgotten their names (even though I finished the film ten minutes ago) and I’m not actually sure they possessed any characteristics (apart from their appearances). If that sounds I’m taking the piss, you clearly haven’t seen the film yet. Anyway, the teenagers are trying to get over the death of one of their friends, who got killed because he got addicted to the “game”, which is not some form of narcotics, but… you know, I don’t really know what it is (during the entire movie, you get the feel someone cut away a whole of back-story, as the characters keep referring to events that the audience has not seen and therefore can’t make much sense of).

But never mind that. The story is more present tense than past tense anyway. It’s all about the here and the now. At the party, the teenagers get a tour of the back room by the host (played by Lance Henriksen), where he shows them props from the films. Unsurprisingly, The Hellbound Heart is nowhere to be found in his shelves, and there is not a single video or DVD of the other Hellraiser films. He calls his collection the best in the world, but while watching the film, I wondered how it could be that without the very things he would have had to possess to begin collecting all this stuff to begin with. Anyway, before you get the chance to snooze off, the film starts making several attempts at being scary. It fails miserably.

I usually enjoy writing reviews of bad films, because it is so much easier to be funny (or to try to be, at least). With Hellraiser: Hellworld, I’m not enjoying typing a single word. It is a film so horrendously uninteresting it makes my head hurt when I think about the fact that someone wrote its script and managed to sell it to someone who would finance it, who in turn found someone would actually direct it, who in turn found someone who was desperate enough to star in it, who now probably are so ashamed of themselves they wished they could have taken that job offer of being “obnoxious guy in the background” or “drunk girl” in some other stupid horror film. I know that’s the choice I would have made.

Tell me, what choice would you have made? What is your pleasure?