Released in the year 2000 in that awkward time of technological change from vhs physical media and flip phones, this is just barely a Hellraiser film, taking a full hour and twenty minutes for Pinhead to show up and start tearing people apart. This definitely has a ‘movie of the week” feel and I think would be right at home in the late 90’s version of Stars or HBO. The main character is a coked up cop who reminds me of a cross between David Boreanaz and Thomas Jane, he’s cheating on his wife with prostitutes, one of whom ends up dead due to some evil shenanigans that can be traced back to someone named “The Engineer”. I have no clue why they went with that name instead of pinhead, because as you can likely predict from the moment film starts, pinhead is going to be involved somehow.
It definitely feels like a movie that was half way made and someone made a decision to make it a Hellraiser film, but they had already filmed too many scenes mentioning the wrong bad guy’s name, so had to fix all that with a couple voice overs and clever editing in post. My biggest beef here is that there is no fire, and there’s no relation to Dante’s Inferno, so why the name? Another relic of it’s past life on Cinemax?
My one good comment on this film is that the soundtrack has some nice beats that show up from time to time.
See, I liked that pinhead wasn’t front and center. It was a lot closer to the first movie that way. Yes, this is where the “let’s slap the Hellraiser name on a different script” starts. This one pulls it off better than most. I like the rug-pull mind fuck of an ending too. I think after Bloodlines my expectations were zero and this was better than zero.
I haven’t revisited this one in awhile either. Going to see if I can give this one a cheap/free because I already subscribe to something that has it rewatch.
Spoilers for a 21 year old movie.
I believe the Inferno name is because the cop has been dead and in Hell for most of the movie, it just takes him until the end of the movie to figure it out. It relates back to what Frank said back in Hellraiser II, everyone gets their own personal Hell.