Way back in around 2011 I decided I was going to watch through all the currently available Hellraiser films. For one reason or another I only made it to the fourth entry, Hellraiser: Bloodlines, before I stopped, despite having brought a whole bunch of them. With a screener link for the film I had intended to watch for review today not working, and with a new Hellraiser film recently released I decided it was high time I got back in. Hellraiser: Inferno is the fifth entry and one I had seen before a long time ago. I remembered quite enjoying it, but would time be kind to this installment?
Joseph (Craig Sheffer - American Horror Story TV series, Nightbreed) is a corrupt detective who is a fan of puzzles. At the scene of a brutal murder he discovers a small puzzle box, and decides to take it for himself. One late night, he decides to try and solve the box, a bad thing as this is actually the 'lament configuration', a device that acts as a portal between our world and Hell. Having solved it, Joseph begins to experience wild hallucinations of demonic creatures, something which he is sure is linked to a mysterious figure known in the criminal underworld only as 'The Engineer'. It seems this figure has kidnapped a child, leaving a severed finger of theirs at the scene of every murder they commit. Joseph finds himself in a race against time to find and save the child, but this race has a heavy cost, as those around him all begin to become victims of this dangerous foe.
Watching Hellraiser: Inferno, I was taken with how little of the Hellraiser mythos it really includes. There are cenobites, yet these don't really factor in to the story too much, at least to begin with. Of course, Doug Bradley reprises his iconic role as Pinhead, but this character doesn't really appear until the end of the film's second act. This had a film-noir feel, with Joseph narrating the story at set points, while the majority of the film takes place during night. I read someone else commenting that this felt more like a Silent Hill or Jacob's Ladder type experience than a Hellraiser film, and I can certainly see that. The whole quest the detective finds himself on seems designed personally for him. The victims are all people who have some link to him (such as a childhood schoolmate, his main informant, as well as others closer to home), so it seems in a Saw or Se7en type way he is being punished for the way he has chosen to live his life.
For a film that released in 2000 that uses CG I expected it would look terrible. Surprisingly it wasn't bad, it could have been a whole lot worse. Sure, there are sequences that do look dated, such as when a character morphs into a different one, but the effects seemed understated. One nice part had Joseph hallucinating that a man had a moving cenobite tattoo on his back which looked kind of cool. Elsewhere he keeps glimpsing a cenobite with no facial features outside of a mouth. There are four or five cenobites featured, Pinhead taking a back seat to two female twin cenobites, and a chattering one that consists of only an upper body, two arms and a head. They are not in the film much however, it is more a mystery of the kidnapped child that propels the story forward. By the movie's conclusion there have been some cool looking practical effects, including some chains through a face which felt very Hellraiser in style.
With a story that was more psychological than scary, and a paranoid world of darkness and crime, Hellraiser: Inferno may have not really felt properly part of the series, but it made for an interesting horror, one that holds up well.
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