Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Being one of the best Hellraiser films released since 1988 is such a non-achievement that it’s a little discouraging that I can’t bring myself to say that the eleventh film in the series, simply titled Hellraiser, isn’t better than “one of” the best in that time span. This attempt by screenwriters Ben Collins & Luke […]

There should never have been any sequels to the 1960 film Psycho, of course. It is not at all a perfect film (that godawful psychiatrist scene at the end is more than sufficient to guarantee that), but it is a fully-realized film, and one whose profound impact of the movie landscape is maybe literally impossible […]

Psycho II being an actually good movie was about as unlikely a miracle as any I have ever encountered in all the annals of unnecessary sequels. To expect that kind of miracle to happen twice in a row would be far, far, far too much to hope for, and indeed, Psycho III – which I […]

There probably aren’t more than a half-dozen movies in the history of American cinema more sacrosanct than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960, a film standing proudly alone as such a defining achievement in cinema that the mere notion of ever trying to cash in on it in any way is genuinely immoral. Which hasn’t stood […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 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 outrĂ© death scenes, dreamily surreal […]

Frank Henenlotter deserves at least this much credit: he has not lied about what went on in the creation of Basket Case 3: The Progeny, and he does not pretend that it turned out perfectly well. Basically, 1990’s Basket Case 2 went so well that he and everybody else wanted to get a jump on […]