Summer of Blood: Mankind have become a vacuum without morality
To have come so close to losing the rights to the Hellraiser brand that one must quickly rush out a sequel for contractual reasons is sloppiness. To have done this twice begins to feel like deliberate sabotage. And yet, seven years after Hellraiser: Revelations was (barely) released in 2011, Dimension Films once again had to hustle out a new film. The result, a certain Hellraiser: Judgment, is at least better than its direct predecessor, which is at least in part because unlike Revelations, it wasn't thrown together quite so recklessly. Gary J. Tunnicliffe, the make-up effects designer on most of the films in the series going back to 1996's Hellraiser: Bloodline, also sometimes dabbled in directing and screenwriting (he'd gotten saddled with the unwinnable task of writing Revelations), and he'd been thinking about ideas for Hellraiser sequels as far back as the 1990s. After Revelations, he pitched the idea of a Hellraiser sequel involving bureaucratic factions in Hell, which Dimension turned down; he then shopped it around for years, under the title of just plain Judgment, never getting a nibble. When the time came that Dimension needed a project ready to go (and with a longtime member of the franchise's creative team attached, no less), Hellraiser: Judgment was reborn.
The two important takeaways: this film was definitely made by a writer-director who believed in it and had kept the idea close to his heart for a very long time; and this is a scenario that nobody wanted to make for several years, until the time came that it was, quite literally, better than nothing. Tunnicliffe directs this with a ton of quite unmistakable enthusiasm; especially early on, it's a bit of a nihilistic sugar rush, really, full of moments that are just downright giddy in the way they slam into us at a million miles an hour. And these aren't, like, "big" moments. These are just "the detective is glancing at some paperwork" type moments. But man alive, the camera shoves it way in and Michael Griffin's editing chops everything into little propulsive beats that rat-a-tat-ta right into our eyeballs. There are dissolves; there are moments where voiceover floats past the imagery but doesn't comment on it or intersect. It feels not at all unlike a version of Se7en directed by Baz Luhrmann. Tunnicliffe just seems so excited to get to use all kind of gaudy filmmaking tricks to create a spellbinding "the world is hell, and also maybe literally Hell" mood. It's earnestly pretentious, not a word I had expected to pull out as a descriptor for any Hellraiser sequel, but there's some charmingly overwrought "film student trying to show off" stuff going on here. Maybe not a great fit for a sordid horror movie - maybe, in fact, it's actively terrible - but given the lows of some of the early direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels, I'd rather have a director with too much energy than not enough.
But this returns to the central point, which is that Tunnicliffe's palpable excitement to be making Hellraiser: Judgment is not exactly manifest in Hellraiser: Judgment itself, and it would probably have benefited the film to have somebody with less enthusiasm for the idea on hand at all times to help shape the thing into... not this. "Se7en directed by Baz Luhrmann", I said, and while the Luhrmann part is subjective, the Se7en part absolutely isn't. In all the years of Se7en knock-offs I've encountered, I'm quite confident I've never seen one so shameless about it. The story is about a pair of detectives investigating the hideous crimes of a serial killer who butchers his victims in the most violent ways, using each one of them to illustrat.e what happens when you violate one of the Ten Commandments. That's, like, literally the least amount you could possibly need to change to avoid charges of outright plagiarism. Most Jaws clones were more graceful in their theft than that.
It's a pretty dreary and flat Se7en rip-off, for that matter, though at least it starts out promising. The 12-minute prologue before the opening credits is, I would go so far as to say, the most exciting stretch of any Hellraiser film going aaaall the way back to 1988, and Hellbound: Hellraiser II. As has been true throughout the DTV era of the series, it's very hard to square it with anything that happened in the first two (and still easily the best two) movies, and it takes "Hell" considerably more literally than I think Clive Barker ever did, but at least it's a more nutso, baroque Christian cosmology that this film wants to draw from. Tunnicliffe's vision takes it that there are different sects in Hell, and they're all sort of doing different things. We've met the Cenobites, who pursue extreme hedonism and are all too willing to offer the same to humans who aren't maybe quite ready for how "extreme" extreme can be (Judgment makes it very clear that they view themselves as punishing the wicked, which I just never did get from Barker's original). And here we meet the Stygian Inquisition, though I admit that I never heard that phrase spoken aloud in the movie, who are apparently a roving band of judge, jury, and executioner, trapping the especially wicked and lingering over the act of punishing them. So, in the beginning, we see a pedophile and child murderer, Watkins (Jeff Fenter), find himself at a rundown old house where he encounters the Auditor (Tunnicliffe, who has directed himself to the best performance in the whole movie, and I cannot call that a strong endorsement of his directorial skills), a hairless man with slashes all over his face and thick dark goggle-like sunglasses that make him appear somewhat like a character from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro film. He subjects Watkins to a series of intrusive questions which he types down, and hands to the Assessor (John Gulager), a loping, corpulent man with a moronic grin who eats the paper and then vomits and otherwise extrudes the digested form of the paper over to three topless women with the skin peeled off of their faces, the Jury (Andi Powers, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Valerie Sharp), who declare him "guilty". And then comes the really horrifying part.
Its gaudy and frankly immature, but I can't deny that this sequence got to me. It's the most that any Hellraiser film has tried to present strikingly horrible imagery that nevertheless feels bound by a kind of logic and inhuman ethics since the 1980s, and while the imagery is secondhand ("The City of Lost Children meets Saw" gets us most of the way there), it's deployed with great aplomb, especially since this is where Tunnicliffe is still pulling out all the stops in providing an over-the-top explosion of too much style. It promised a version of Hellraiser: Judgment that I was ready to declare the best film in the series the second one, and maybe even the third film in the series that was "good" as such, and that is a promise that gets immediately broken once we meet brothers Det. Sean Carter (Damon Carney) and Det. David Carter (Randy Wayne), who have been hunting the serial killer known as the "Preceptor", with very little success; they're investigating the scene of the crime based on the first commandment "I am a jealous God; you shall have no other gods before me", which is the seventh death, so the Preceptor is apparently just winging it. This befell a woman named Crystal Lanning (Grace Montie) who uploaded a video herself cheerfully saying "I worship my dog" to the internet, which suggests the Preceptor is also a tedious literalist. At any rate, the Brothers Carter are now joined by Det. Christine Egerton (Alexandra Harris), and together they scuffle through this film's version of a filth-covered urban hellscape, indistinguishable from all the others in movies, including some in this very franchise.
The crime investigation element of Hellraiser: Judgment is really just not even a little worth paying attention to. After all is said and done, it's blatantly obvious that the middle of the film was basically just meant to keep the first scene and last scene separated by a feature's worth of content (and even then, this only comes in at 81 minutes, with credits; they are at least 81 reasonably fast minutes), and when the heroes figure out what the hell is going on with the Preceptor, it's built atop a lattice of contrivance, coincidence, and remarkably shitty detective work. For example, a major plot point hinges on David only just right now learning what "Preceptor" means, as opposed to, I don't know, googling that literally within three minutes of being assigned the case. Christine was added by executive request, and while Tunnicliffe obliged with the same evident cheer he did everything else, he never seems to have realised that she need a function in the script, rather than just being "David v2, with boobs". The only thing of any real interest is that Sean finds the Lament Configuration and starts hallucinting, and even that's only, like two scenes. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of filler, some of it so damn dumb I felt like I was hallucinating: "What an incredible smell you've discovered" deadpans Christine at one point, and I'm pretty confident, based on how she says it, that Tunnicliffe never told Harris that her character was quoting Star Wars. Which is just as well, because that only opens the door to why a seasoned police detective, entering a potentially dangerous space that might be home to a murderer alongside two other seasoned detectives, decides that she should take this opportunity to quote Star Wars.
That all being said, Judgment is at least authentically unsettling: there are scenes scattered across the film that have a kind of horrific charge, including one sequence where the detectives find, in the middle of broad daylight in a public space, a shrine made of disembodied hands clenched into fists. Beethoven's "Für Elise", sounding like it's playing from an out-of-tune music box, is used as a motif for the Auditor (who keeps popping in to remind us that there's a more interesting version of this story that could be happening), and it's suitably distressing and uncomfortably dreamy. There's atmosphere here, good and thick, it's just attached to an excessively boring story being executed by three pedestrian leads.
And then along comes that final scene, bringing with it the first extended appearance of our new Pinhead (Paul T. Taylor), who appeared as a sliver of light in the opening scene where he and the Auditor commiserate about how much mortal humankind sucks nowadays. Taylor's fine - he's playing a parallel version of Doug Bradley's take on the character, but not directly copying him, and he actually has a threatening presence, so it's leaps and bounds above Revelations. But the story embarks at this point on a deadly combination of nonsensical twists (which are of the "you couldn't predict this because it's too stupid to be plausible" variety, only the film foreshadows it so hard that you in fact could predict it) and belaboring the politics of Hell and Heaven, the latter of which gets its own avatar in the form of the bossy archangel Jophiel (Helena Grace Donald), envisioned here as a sexy businesswoman. Which isn't a terrible way to envision an archangel, really. It feels very much like a child, having gotten overstimulated during playtime, just racing into a series of "okay this and then THIS" improvisations, just trying to resolve all of the loose ends to get all the toys put away before Mom has to ask for a third time. And some of this works: the very last twist before the credits (there's a post-credits scene, though it's not really a twist) is even kind of clever, and appropriate for what turned out to be the last Hellraiser made by Dimension and the last one in the original line of continuity, however tattered and inconsistent it became over ten mostly unrelated films. But ending on a fun grace note hardly makes up for the complete mess the film makes of itself in the 15 preceding minutes, and that after an hour of almost unwatchably clichéd serial killer movie boilerplate. The Hellraiser series had been so much worse than this, and more boring too, but there's something about Judgment that feels uniquely petty in its badness, coming as it does with so many beats that, in and of themselves, actually do feel like they belong in this series.
Body Count: 3 dead, 2 exiled to an eternity of suffering, the owners of several pairs of disembodied hands, and an open question of whether it "counts" to kill an immortal being who's apparently just annoyed by it if the death of their physical incorporation is perhaps the goriest scene in the movie.
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 (Garcia, 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!
The two important takeaways: this film was definitely made by a writer-director who believed in it and had kept the idea close to his heart for a very long time; and this is a scenario that nobody wanted to make for several years, until the time came that it was, quite literally, better than nothing. Tunnicliffe directs this with a ton of quite unmistakable enthusiasm; especially early on, it's a bit of a nihilistic sugar rush, really, full of moments that are just downright giddy in the way they slam into us at a million miles an hour. And these aren't, like, "big" moments. These are just "the detective is glancing at some paperwork" type moments. But man alive, the camera shoves it way in and Michael Griffin's editing chops everything into little propulsive beats that rat-a-tat-ta right into our eyeballs. There are dissolves; there are moments where voiceover floats past the imagery but doesn't comment on it or intersect. It feels not at all unlike a version of Se7en directed by Baz Luhrmann. Tunnicliffe just seems so excited to get to use all kind of gaudy filmmaking tricks to create a spellbinding "the world is hell, and also maybe literally Hell" mood. It's earnestly pretentious, not a word I had expected to pull out as a descriptor for any Hellraiser sequel, but there's some charmingly overwrought "film student trying to show off" stuff going on here. Maybe not a great fit for a sordid horror movie - maybe, in fact, it's actively terrible - but given the lows of some of the early direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels, I'd rather have a director with too much energy than not enough.
But this returns to the central point, which is that Tunnicliffe's palpable excitement to be making Hellraiser: Judgment is not exactly manifest in Hellraiser: Judgment itself, and it would probably have benefited the film to have somebody with less enthusiasm for the idea on hand at all times to help shape the thing into... not this. "Se7en directed by Baz Luhrmann", I said, and while the Luhrmann part is subjective, the Se7en part absolutely isn't. In all the years of Se7en knock-offs I've encountered, I'm quite confident I've never seen one so shameless about it. The story is about a pair of detectives investigating the hideous crimes of a serial killer who butchers his victims in the most violent ways, using each one of them to illustrat.e what happens when you violate one of the Ten Commandments. That's, like, literally the least amount you could possibly need to change to avoid charges of outright plagiarism. Most Jaws clones were more graceful in their theft than that.
It's a pretty dreary and flat Se7en rip-off, for that matter, though at least it starts out promising. The 12-minute prologue before the opening credits is, I would go so far as to say, the most exciting stretch of any Hellraiser film going aaaall the way back to 1988, and Hellbound: Hellraiser II. As has been true throughout the DTV era of the series, it's very hard to square it with anything that happened in the first two (and still easily the best two) movies, and it takes "Hell" considerably more literally than I think Clive Barker ever did, but at least it's a more nutso, baroque Christian cosmology that this film wants to draw from. Tunnicliffe's vision takes it that there are different sects in Hell, and they're all sort of doing different things. We've met the Cenobites, who pursue extreme hedonism and are all too willing to offer the same to humans who aren't maybe quite ready for how "extreme" extreme can be (Judgment makes it very clear that they view themselves as punishing the wicked, which I just never did get from Barker's original). And here we meet the Stygian Inquisition, though I admit that I never heard that phrase spoken aloud in the movie, who are apparently a roving band of judge, jury, and executioner, trapping the especially wicked and lingering over the act of punishing them. So, in the beginning, we see a pedophile and child murderer, Watkins (Jeff Fenter), find himself at a rundown old house where he encounters the Auditor (Tunnicliffe, who has directed himself to the best performance in the whole movie, and I cannot call that a strong endorsement of his directorial skills), a hairless man with slashes all over his face and thick dark goggle-like sunglasses that make him appear somewhat like a character from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro film. He subjects Watkins to a series of intrusive questions which he types down, and hands to the Assessor (John Gulager), a loping, corpulent man with a moronic grin who eats the paper and then vomits and otherwise extrudes the digested form of the paper over to three topless women with the skin peeled off of their faces, the Jury (Andi Powers, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Valerie Sharp), who declare him "guilty". And then comes the really horrifying part.
Its gaudy and frankly immature, but I can't deny that this sequence got to me. It's the most that any Hellraiser film has tried to present strikingly horrible imagery that nevertheless feels bound by a kind of logic and inhuman ethics since the 1980s, and while the imagery is secondhand ("The City of Lost Children meets Saw" gets us most of the way there), it's deployed with great aplomb, especially since this is where Tunnicliffe is still pulling out all the stops in providing an over-the-top explosion of too much style. It promised a version of Hellraiser: Judgment that I was ready to declare the best film in the series the second one, and maybe even the third film in the series that was "good" as such, and that is a promise that gets immediately broken once we meet brothers Det. Sean Carter (Damon Carney) and Det. David Carter (Randy Wayne), who have been hunting the serial killer known as the "Preceptor", with very little success; they're investigating the scene of the crime based on the first commandment "I am a jealous God; you shall have no other gods before me", which is the seventh death, so the Preceptor is apparently just winging it. This befell a woman named Crystal Lanning (Grace Montie) who uploaded a video herself cheerfully saying "I worship my dog" to the internet, which suggests the Preceptor is also a tedious literalist. At any rate, the Brothers Carter are now joined by Det. Christine Egerton (Alexandra Harris), and together they scuffle through this film's version of a filth-covered urban hellscape, indistinguishable from all the others in movies, including some in this very franchise.
The crime investigation element of Hellraiser: Judgment is really just not even a little worth paying attention to. After all is said and done, it's blatantly obvious that the middle of the film was basically just meant to keep the first scene and last scene separated by a feature's worth of content (and even then, this only comes in at 81 minutes, with credits; they are at least 81 reasonably fast minutes), and when the heroes figure out what the hell is going on with the Preceptor, it's built atop a lattice of contrivance, coincidence, and remarkably shitty detective work. For example, a major plot point hinges on David only just right now learning what "Preceptor" means, as opposed to, I don't know, googling that literally within three minutes of being assigned the case. Christine was added by executive request, and while Tunnicliffe obliged with the same evident cheer he did everything else, he never seems to have realised that she need a function in the script, rather than just being "David v2, with boobs". The only thing of any real interest is that Sean finds the Lament Configuration and starts hallucinting, and even that's only, like two scenes. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of filler, some of it so damn dumb I felt like I was hallucinating: "What an incredible smell you've discovered" deadpans Christine at one point, and I'm pretty confident, based on how she says it, that Tunnicliffe never told Harris that her character was quoting Star Wars. Which is just as well, because that only opens the door to why a seasoned police detective, entering a potentially dangerous space that might be home to a murderer alongside two other seasoned detectives, decides that she should take this opportunity to quote Star Wars.
That all being said, Judgment is at least authentically unsettling: there are scenes scattered across the film that have a kind of horrific charge, including one sequence where the detectives find, in the middle of broad daylight in a public space, a shrine made of disembodied hands clenched into fists. Beethoven's "Für Elise", sounding like it's playing from an out-of-tune music box, is used as a motif for the Auditor (who keeps popping in to remind us that there's a more interesting version of this story that could be happening), and it's suitably distressing and uncomfortably dreamy. There's atmosphere here, good and thick, it's just attached to an excessively boring story being executed by three pedestrian leads.
And then along comes that final scene, bringing with it the first extended appearance of our new Pinhead (Paul T. Taylor), who appeared as a sliver of light in the opening scene where he and the Auditor commiserate about how much mortal humankind sucks nowadays. Taylor's fine - he's playing a parallel version of Doug Bradley's take on the character, but not directly copying him, and he actually has a threatening presence, so it's leaps and bounds above Revelations. But the story embarks at this point on a deadly combination of nonsensical twists (which are of the "you couldn't predict this because it's too stupid to be plausible" variety, only the film foreshadows it so hard that you in fact could predict it) and belaboring the politics of Hell and Heaven, the latter of which gets its own avatar in the form of the bossy archangel Jophiel (Helena Grace Donald), envisioned here as a sexy businesswoman. Which isn't a terrible way to envision an archangel, really. It feels very much like a child, having gotten overstimulated during playtime, just racing into a series of "okay this and then THIS" improvisations, just trying to resolve all of the loose ends to get all the toys put away before Mom has to ask for a third time. And some of this works: the very last twist before the credits (there's a post-credits scene, though it's not really a twist) is even kind of clever, and appropriate for what turned out to be the last Hellraiser made by Dimension and the last one in the original line of continuity, however tattered and inconsistent it became over ten mostly unrelated films. But ending on a fun grace note hardly makes up for the complete mess the film makes of itself in the 15 preceding minutes, and that after an hour of almost unwatchably clichéd serial killer movie boilerplate. The Hellraiser series had been so much worse than this, and more boring too, but there's something about Judgment that feels uniquely petty in its badness, coming as it does with so many beats that, in and of themselves, actually do feel like they belong in this series.
Body Count: 3 dead, 2 exiled to an eternity of suffering, the owners of several pairs of disembodied hands, and an open question of whether it "counts" to kill an immortal being who's apparently just annoyed by it if the death of their physical incorporation is perhaps the goriest scene in the movie.
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 (Garcia, 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!
Categories: crime pictures, horror, needless sequels, summer of blood, violence and gore
