Summer of Blood: I want to play a game
Hellraiser: Hellworld was made during the second half of the same production block as Hellraiser: Deader, during the final weeks of 2002; the two shoots shared virtually an entirely identical production crew, working in both cases underneath director Rick Bota (the one significant change is that Deader cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile was replaced on Hellworld by Gabriel Kosuth. Later in the pipeline, Henning Lohner composed the score for the first project, while Lars Anderson did those duties for our current subject, which I imagine was because they were in post-production at the same time. And yet, they were both edited by Anthony Adler, so maybe I'm wrong). It makes very little sense, given that, how little the two movies resemble each other; other than that they're both in the bottom 2 Hellraiser films up to the end of the 2000s, they have nothing in common. They don't even fuck up being Hellraiser sequels in the same way.
But just to clarify: Hellraiser: Hellworld unabashedly fucks up being a Hellraiser sequel. Indeed, it is the least-Hellraiserey of the eight movies released in the series up to that point, by whatever moth-eaten standards still remained by that point for adjudging what "a Hellraiser movie" could possibly consist of. Just like Deader, and possibly also Hellraiser: Inferno and/or Hellraiser: Hellseeker, Hellworld started life as an unrelated spec script, before getting a quickie facelift by the screenwriter (Carl V. Dupré, in this case), basically for the solitary purpose of plugging in a few appearances of the demonic Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the evil puzzle box, the Lament Configuration. Even by the standards of "we revised a spec script", though, Hellworld has put in so close to the minimum necessary effort to rework itself for this brand, I'm not actually sure it succeeds. Until the last three minutes, there's not a single thing in here that feels remotely contiguous with the other seven films.
That's hardly surprising, given that Hellworld doesn't really manage to seem contiguous even within its own 91 minutes. The story that it is at the start doesn't feel very much at all like the story it is at the end, and the stories that it becomes in the middle feels very unrelated to either of the above. There's a "reason" for this, and it's a pretty shabby reason, and if I went into it in any kind of detail at all, I would be guilty of spoiling the film's twists. This raises the philosophical question of whether Hellraiser: Hellworld might not deserve to be spoiled all up, down, and sideways, to reduce the likelihood of anybody watching it. But I digress. The film has very sneakily arranged an escape hatch for itself, so everything that feels most obnoxious and unlikable about it, both as a movie and as a Hellraiser, can be explained away as "not real". This is intensely annoying, because it means that, as a critic of intellectual honesty, I cannot really claim that Hellworld's sometimes gargantuan swerves away from halfway comprehensible, linear storytelling are "wrong". Not only are they explained; they are foreshadowed. But they're still pretty miserable to experience in real time. And once the twist has spiraled itself out, the reaction one has is not "oh, I have had my expectations deliciously up-ended, I do say good show, Mssrs. Bota and Dupré", but "well, fuck that."
Anyway, the movie. Hellworld takes place in a reality where Hellraiser itself exists, and the film series has been used as the basis for an online video game called "Hellworld". The filmmakers smartly (not an adverb we'll need to use very often here, so no reason to be stingy with it now) refrain from letting us see too much of "Hellworld", so that we're never in a position to call it out as ludicrous bullshit, as I'm sure would be the case if we did see it. It appears to be some manner of horror-themed MMORPG, a genre that would have barely hit mainstream awareness by the time this was produced (World of Warcraft came out in 2004), and certainly wouldn't have become a moral panic, but I'd otherwise accuse Hellworld of being... MMORPGsploitation, if you'll forgive the word. The story starts off with the funeral of Adam (Stelian Urian), who was apparently a "Hellworld" addict, so much so that he killed himself when he became convinced that the game was in some sense dangerous and evil. This event has, naturally, thoroughly rattled his core group of friends, all of them also "Hellworld" players: some while after the funeral, Chelsea (Katheryn Winnick) has gone so far as to renounce the game. But Derrick (Khary Payton), Mike (Henry Cavill), and Allison (Anna Tolputt) haven't, and so they get invitations to a vague "Hellworld Party" hosted at an old mansion outside of town, only for very elite players who solve some kind of puzzle that doesn't take very long to solve. The fifth friend, Jake (Christopher Jacot), is even more distressed by all of this than Chelsea, and would have skipped altogether, but a sexy lady "Hellworld" player has invited him personally.
That doesn't get us all that far into the movie, so it's not too damaging that virtually none of the above has shit to do with shit. Once the characters arrive at the party, it turns out to be basically just a routine goth rave, of the sort popular in 2000s horror movies; the connection to a video game is almost entirely lost, while the connection to Hellraiser, by virtue of being loosely glued onto a different movie, basically just shows up in some of the party theming. And I will give everyone involved in making Hellworld some real credit: at one point, a deck of tarot cards is pulled out, and the artwork is Pinhead-themed, and it's honestly cool. Cool enough that they give it some nice close-ups. But anyway, just a basic horror movie rave in a rambling mansion, the better to separate the five characters and have them die one at a time, all under the possibly murderous oversight of the party's nameless host, a welcoming but undeniably threatening gentleman played by the welcoming but undeniably threatening Lance Henriksen.
This middle stretch of Hellworld is, to be blunt about it, a dreadful mish-mash. The best I can say about it is that the filmmakers had impeccable timing: they made this before Saw came out, so it's pure serendipity that they had a Saw knock-off ready to go. And indeed, the first big death sequence is extremely much in that spirit, involving a circular saw chair that doesn't seem that it should be so hard to break out of, but it looks terribly painful, at least. So that, plus the good fortune to get out in front of Warcraft, just about compensate for how awfully unfortunate it was that this went from being an uninspired rifling on the "what's really real, anyway?" trend that was everywhere post-The Matrix, to an unbearably dated attempt to capture some Matrix energy all the way in 2005 (albeit with an exceptionally stupid variant on a virtually reality world - but here I am, brushing up against spoilers again).
And the fact that all of three of these things are involved in a single movie, and that movie a Hellraiser no less, tells us exactly what it sounds like about how erratic Hellworld's plotting is. I said "death sequence" in the last paragraph, not "death scene" (or just "death"), because they feel like mini-movies from multiple different genres all crammed into a single rather boring, stilted rave movie, one that seems to hate raves, but in a passive sense, so it's not even making a fun moral panic out of it. At the end of each of these mini-movies, Bradley shows up as Pinhead to menacingly shout things like "do you believe Adam now?" and "now you'll see what Adam saw" or whatever. He keeps mentioning Adam. We have never been further from the original conception of Pinhead as a purveyor of the finest in extreme sensual experiences; we're pretty far from anything that fits any kind of narrative function at all. It's pretty clear, I think, that in the original, non-Hellraiser version of Hellworld, there was no figure showing up to talk about Adam when characters die; that's just the best Dupré could come up with for shoving Pinhead into this. It's horrible, and for the very first time, Bradley seems at a loss for what to do with the character; he does get one last scene right at the end that actually feels like it came from a Hellraiser movie, but this is otherwise a dispirting, depressing conclusion to his eight-film tenure as one of the most iconic of all horror movie villains.
The only patch of brightness in all of this is Henriksen, one of the most reliable workhorses in genre film history; I think it is almost certainly the case that more of his films are "very bad" than "good at all", but I have never once seen Henriksen himself be less than 100% committed to anything he ever did. And that includes this strange, underdeveloped-on-purpose role as a mysterious, ominous figure who never does anything but purr discomfiting things. "Like a bad horror movie, isn't it?" he quips at one point, and that's a terribly ill-advised line for Hellraiser: Hellworld to include, since you're basically just asking critics to use it at that point, but Henriksen, God bless him, puts such a wry, lightly cruel spin on that line, without actually forcing it to be a "joke", that he almost makes it not-painful.
And begad, "not-painful" is useful wherever it shows up here. This is a dire film, confusingly lurching through its incoherent spread of random and somewhat arbitrary scenes in the middle, and getting absolutely nothing from any of its young cast, despite all three of Winnick, Cavill, and Payton having actual honest-to-God careers in movies and TV that people care about in the years after this. Nor does Bota seem to have any energy left in him to provide any sort of interesting atmosphere or other kind of horror energy; he seems to have run out of gas right after getting as far as "so raves, that means we'd be justified in having a lady show her boobs right?" - not even filming the boobs (the film's sex scenes - yes, plural - are completely perfunctory, with a camera staged in one place like homemade pornography), just confirming that he could put them in his movie. I would have no hesitation in calling the result my very least-favorite Hellraiser film up to that point; not merely because it is badly written and mangles everything decent about the series, but because it is exhausted, the most going-through-the-motions exercise that one could possibly imagine.
Body Count: An uncharacteristically straightforward answer for this series: 4, not including Adam, nor including one violent death that we see happen onscreen but later turns out not to have been real.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
But just to clarify: Hellraiser: Hellworld unabashedly fucks up being a Hellraiser sequel. Indeed, it is the least-Hellraiserey of the eight movies released in the series up to that point, by whatever moth-eaten standards still remained by that point for adjudging what "a Hellraiser movie" could possibly consist of. Just like Deader, and possibly also Hellraiser: Inferno and/or Hellraiser: Hellseeker, Hellworld started life as an unrelated spec script, before getting a quickie facelift by the screenwriter (Carl V. Dupré, in this case), basically for the solitary purpose of plugging in a few appearances of the demonic Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the evil puzzle box, the Lament Configuration. Even by the standards of "we revised a spec script", though, Hellworld has put in so close to the minimum necessary effort to rework itself for this brand, I'm not actually sure it succeeds. Until the last three minutes, there's not a single thing in here that feels remotely contiguous with the other seven films.
That's hardly surprising, given that Hellworld doesn't really manage to seem contiguous even within its own 91 minutes. The story that it is at the start doesn't feel very much at all like the story it is at the end, and the stories that it becomes in the middle feels very unrelated to either of the above. There's a "reason" for this, and it's a pretty shabby reason, and if I went into it in any kind of detail at all, I would be guilty of spoiling the film's twists. This raises the philosophical question of whether Hellraiser: Hellworld might not deserve to be spoiled all up, down, and sideways, to reduce the likelihood of anybody watching it. But I digress. The film has very sneakily arranged an escape hatch for itself, so everything that feels most obnoxious and unlikable about it, both as a movie and as a Hellraiser, can be explained away as "not real". This is intensely annoying, because it means that, as a critic of intellectual honesty, I cannot really claim that Hellworld's sometimes gargantuan swerves away from halfway comprehensible, linear storytelling are "wrong". Not only are they explained; they are foreshadowed. But they're still pretty miserable to experience in real time. And once the twist has spiraled itself out, the reaction one has is not "oh, I have had my expectations deliciously up-ended, I do say good show, Mssrs. Bota and Dupré", but "well, fuck that."
Anyway, the movie. Hellworld takes place in a reality where Hellraiser itself exists, and the film series has been used as the basis for an online video game called "Hellworld". The filmmakers smartly (not an adverb we'll need to use very often here, so no reason to be stingy with it now) refrain from letting us see too much of "Hellworld", so that we're never in a position to call it out as ludicrous bullshit, as I'm sure would be the case if we did see it. It appears to be some manner of horror-themed MMORPG, a genre that would have barely hit mainstream awareness by the time this was produced (World of Warcraft came out in 2004), and certainly wouldn't have become a moral panic, but I'd otherwise accuse Hellworld of being... MMORPGsploitation, if you'll forgive the word. The story starts off with the funeral of Adam (Stelian Urian), who was apparently a "Hellworld" addict, so much so that he killed himself when he became convinced that the game was in some sense dangerous and evil. This event has, naturally, thoroughly rattled his core group of friends, all of them also "Hellworld" players: some while after the funeral, Chelsea (Katheryn Winnick) has gone so far as to renounce the game. But Derrick (Khary Payton), Mike (Henry Cavill), and Allison (Anna Tolputt) haven't, and so they get invitations to a vague "Hellworld Party" hosted at an old mansion outside of town, only for very elite players who solve some kind of puzzle that doesn't take very long to solve. The fifth friend, Jake (Christopher Jacot), is even more distressed by all of this than Chelsea, and would have skipped altogether, but a sexy lady "Hellworld" player has invited him personally.
That doesn't get us all that far into the movie, so it's not too damaging that virtually none of the above has shit to do with shit. Once the characters arrive at the party, it turns out to be basically just a routine goth rave, of the sort popular in 2000s horror movies; the connection to a video game is almost entirely lost, while the connection to Hellraiser, by virtue of being loosely glued onto a different movie, basically just shows up in some of the party theming. And I will give everyone involved in making Hellworld some real credit: at one point, a deck of tarot cards is pulled out, and the artwork is Pinhead-themed, and it's honestly cool. Cool enough that they give it some nice close-ups. But anyway, just a basic horror movie rave in a rambling mansion, the better to separate the five characters and have them die one at a time, all under the possibly murderous oversight of the party's nameless host, a welcoming but undeniably threatening gentleman played by the welcoming but undeniably threatening Lance Henriksen.
This middle stretch of Hellworld is, to be blunt about it, a dreadful mish-mash. The best I can say about it is that the filmmakers had impeccable timing: they made this before Saw came out, so it's pure serendipity that they had a Saw knock-off ready to go. And indeed, the first big death sequence is extremely much in that spirit, involving a circular saw chair that doesn't seem that it should be so hard to break out of, but it looks terribly painful, at least. So that, plus the good fortune to get out in front of Warcraft, just about compensate for how awfully unfortunate it was that this went from being an uninspired rifling on the "what's really real, anyway?" trend that was everywhere post-The Matrix, to an unbearably dated attempt to capture some Matrix energy all the way in 2005 (albeit with an exceptionally stupid variant on a virtually reality world - but here I am, brushing up against spoilers again).
And the fact that all of three of these things are involved in a single movie, and that movie a Hellraiser no less, tells us exactly what it sounds like about how erratic Hellworld's plotting is. I said "death sequence" in the last paragraph, not "death scene" (or just "death"), because they feel like mini-movies from multiple different genres all crammed into a single rather boring, stilted rave movie, one that seems to hate raves, but in a passive sense, so it's not even making a fun moral panic out of it. At the end of each of these mini-movies, Bradley shows up as Pinhead to menacingly shout things like "do you believe Adam now?" and "now you'll see what Adam saw" or whatever. He keeps mentioning Adam. We have never been further from the original conception of Pinhead as a purveyor of the finest in extreme sensual experiences; we're pretty far from anything that fits any kind of narrative function at all. It's pretty clear, I think, that in the original, non-Hellraiser version of Hellworld, there was no figure showing up to talk about Adam when characters die; that's just the best Dupré could come up with for shoving Pinhead into this. It's horrible, and for the very first time, Bradley seems at a loss for what to do with the character; he does get one last scene right at the end that actually feels like it came from a Hellraiser movie, but this is otherwise a dispirting, depressing conclusion to his eight-film tenure as one of the most iconic of all horror movie villains.
The only patch of brightness in all of this is Henriksen, one of the most reliable workhorses in genre film history; I think it is almost certainly the case that more of his films are "very bad" than "good at all", but I have never once seen Henriksen himself be less than 100% committed to anything he ever did. And that includes this strange, underdeveloped-on-purpose role as a mysterious, ominous figure who never does anything but purr discomfiting things. "Like a bad horror movie, isn't it?" he quips at one point, and that's a terribly ill-advised line for Hellraiser: Hellworld to include, since you're basically just asking critics to use it at that point, but Henriksen, God bless him, puts such a wry, lightly cruel spin on that line, without actually forcing it to be a "joke", that he almost makes it not-painful.
And begad, "not-painful" is useful wherever it shows up here. This is a dire film, confusingly lurching through its incoherent spread of random and somewhat arbitrary scenes in the middle, and getting absolutely nothing from any of its young cast, despite all three of Winnick, Cavill, and Payton having actual honest-to-God careers in movies and TV that people care about in the years after this. Nor does Bota seem to have any energy left in him to provide any sort of interesting atmosphere or other kind of horror energy; he seems to have run out of gas right after getting as far as "so raves, that means we'd be justified in having a lady show her boobs right?" - not even filming the boobs (the film's sex scenes - yes, plural - are completely perfunctory, with a camera staged in one place like homemade pornography), just confirming that he could put them in his movie. I would have no hesitation in calling the result my very least-favorite Hellraiser film up to that point; not merely because it is badly written and mangles everything decent about the series, but because it is exhausted, the most going-through-the-motions exercise that one could possibly imagine.
Body Count: An uncharacteristically straightforward answer for this series: 4, not including Adam, nor including one violent death that we see happen onscreen but later turns out not to have been real.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
