Sometimes, you will find yourself watching a film or a TV show of a certain... quality, and when you come to check the credits you might will find that the director is someone called Alan Smithee. And if you were to then look up Mr Smithee's filmography, you'd see that the man has had a very long and varied career. The thing is, despite all evidence to the contrary, Alan Smithee is not actually the worst director in existence. Alan Smithee, in fact, doesn't even exist. The name is actually a pseudonym that directors use when they feel that a film does not reflect their creative vision for it, or otherwise want to distance themselves from it for whatever reason.
Hellraiser: Bloodline is an Alan Smithee film.
The year is 2127 (and incidentally, Jason Voorhees has been cryogenically frozen for 117 years at this point) and onboard a suspiciously familiar-looking space station a man is using a combination of VR gloves and what looks like a T-400 to open a Lament Configuration, before being interrupted by a squad of space marines who promptly arrest him. The man is Dr Paul Merchant, the descendant of Phillip L'Merchant - a toymaker who was commissioned to create the very first Lament Configuration. We see that, in 1796, L'Merchant created the puzzle box for the Duc de l'Isle, a magician and occultist who goes on to summon a demon princess from hell named Angelique, thinking that he can control her. Things don't end as he expects as Angelique and his assistant betray him, and L'Merchant dies before he can be forced to create more puzzle boxes that can open doors to hell. After that we jump forward to 1996 and the building we saw was built up around where the Lament Configuration was buried in concrete at the end of Hellraiser III. Angelique travels to New York to track down John Merchant, the architect that designed the "Lament building", because he is descended from L'Merchant and so possesses the knowledge in his bloodline to finish what his ancestor started and open up a permanent gateway to hell. This brings her into conflict with "Pinhead", who wants to control the gateway himself. Oh, and Pinhead also has a Cenobite dog now. Finally, we return to 2127. Paul Merchant, who of course is another descendant of L'Merchant, has finally perfected the Elysium Configuration that can send the Cenobites back to hell and destroy them once and for all - but only if the space marines believe him and let him activate the device...
Hellraiser: Bloodline was actually directed by Kevin Yagher, who worked primarily in make-up special effects before and after deciding to try his hand at directing. Among many other credits in the horror genre, he was responsible for the make-up design of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies 2,3 and 4, so we can clearly see that he's got some skills in this genre. Yagher's version of Hellraiser: Bloodline contained much more graphic imagery, plot and explanations for everything that happened in the film (which, after having read the synopsis above, I'm sure you'll agree was needed). The producers, however, didn't like his version and wanted Pinhead to appear in the film and play a much larger role much earlier in the runtime than at the 40-minute mark that Yagher's version would have brought him in at. In the end the producers just went behind Yagher's back and cut the film to fit what they wanted, which caused Yagher to quit the film in disgust and remove his name from the credits. And who could blame him? The part of the film that suffered the most was the story set in 1796, which had included four "Gambler" Cenobites created by Angelique. All of the scenes involving them were deleted by the meddling studio executives, however, so the most we have of them are a few grainy pictures. Which is a shame, as their visual design is far far better than the Cenobites we ended up with - the Twin Cenobite and Fido the Cenobite dog (and you thought that the new Cenobites in Hellraiser III were cheesy).
Obviously the story suffered terribly from the cuts... but if I'm completely honest there are some plot holes in the film that I'm pretty sure would have been there regardless of whether anything had been cut from the film or not. Why can Pinhead pull the box from people's hands again suddenly after not being able to before? What's the deal with the Cenobite dog? Why does Angelique have such different powers than Pinhead, despite the film implying that they were more or less on the same rank? And seriously, what the hell was the deal with that Cenobite dog? It could barely move without showing how animatronic it was, so it looked cheesy as hell, and was pretty much useless for most of the film anyway except for an airlock gore shot.
Hellraiser: Bloodline was supposed to be the end of the entire Hellraiser series, wrapping it up neatly. Amazingly, despite how badly received the film was by fans and critics alike (I myself spent years insisting that there were only ever three movies in the series because I just wanted to forget that Bloodline even existed), it didn't kill the franchise, but this was the last in the series to get a theatrical release - all the movies after this one were direct-to-video, which was in itself a kiss of death for the franchise, at least in terms of quality...
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