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 […]
“Hello, my friends. I want to put on record that the flic out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN’ CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” -Clive Barker, who […]
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 […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
Whatever else is true of it, Hellraiser: Deader has an extremely dumb title. Formally speaking, “deader” is correct English, but it’s not a word that I think anybody uses except in those moments when it is useful to compare things to doornails. And in the context of a horror movie sequel, it’s not just awkward, […]
Recent years have seen an impassioned debate about the merits of what some call elevated horror. By “elevated,” these folks generally mean exhibiting any sort of ambition beyond scaring the bejeezus out of viewers; this can range from being snail-paced and lugubrious (with intermittent grotesque shocks), à la Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, to simply having […]
The story of how Hellraiser: Hellseeker came into being as the sixth film in the Hellraiser franchise, the second to go direct-to-video, is rather more complicated than it ought to be. The short version is that it’s a heavily rewritten version of a script, titled Hellraiser: The Hellseeker (note the definite article), that was commissioned […]
Among those people invested enough in the ongoing development of the Hellraiser franchise for such issues to matter, the direct-to-video era of the franchise that started in the year 2000 – four years after the last theatrical release, the much-disliked whipping boy Hellraiser: Bloodline – is also accused of being the “we just stuck Pinhead […]
There are a few different ways we can make sense of the title of Mad God, a new stop-motion animated feature that’s also not very new at all: with some footage dating back to 1989, it’s one of the longest-in-production films to have ever been released. But probably the simplest explanation is the one we […]
There have undoubtedly been sequels that more thoroughly squandered the glories of a strong original than 1972’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again, though very few that I find more personally irritating. The Abominable Dr. Phibes, from 1971, is a film I greatly cherish, a singular blend of Gothic horror, camp, viciously outré death scenes, dreamily surreal […]
Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]
I don’t know what was going on in 2018, but the odds of this happening twice seems too high for it to be pure coincidence: a long-running slasher film franchise that had gotten snarled on insoluble convoluted and self-contradicting inter-film continuity rebooted itself by tossing out everything that had created that snarl, making a new […]
