Well then. I suppose we should all be grateful that we got this movie instead of the PG-13 reboot the studio had been threatening us with for some time. Because whatever else you might say about Hellraiser: Judgment (including that it's not suitable for emetophobes or questioning whether Judgment is spelt with one or two es), it's not a sanitised teen movie. There's violence and dark themes and blood and large-breasted women working around wearing nothing but thongs. Sounds great, right?
Sean and David Carter are brothers and detectives who are investigating a serial killer who calls himself "The Preceptor", who is killing people in ridiculously theatrical and unpleasant ways based on which of the Ten Commandments he feels they've broken. They're unexpectedly joined in their investigation by a new detective, Christine Egerton, and the brothers are soon suspicious of her true motives in the investigation. At the same time, at an abandoned house elsewhere in the city, the Cenobites are trying a new tactic to lure in victims, the Lament Configuration having apparently fallen out of fashion in the 21st century (much like the Jumanji board game, and there's a crossover that should now happen...). Now they just invite their prospective victims to the house to confess and discuss their crimes, before they are then judged and slaughtered and sent to Hell for the Cenobite spa treatment. These two plots are inevitably going to come together by the end of the film; the question is how are they going to end up linked?
You can probably tell from the above plot synopsis that I'm not all that impressed with the two plot arcs that make up Hellraiser: Judgment, and you'd be mostly right. The big plot reveal - the identity of The Preceptor - becomes quite obvious long before the film finally reveals it, and most of the rest of the film's "plot points" are pretty dull. The arc involving the Cenobites and their "assessments" of their new victims is actually interesting but after the initial opening scene (and I stress again, this is not a good film for the vomit-phobic, or possible anyone suffering from the flu as I was) it kind of fades into the background in favour of Carter and Carter, stereotypical detective duo and their serial killer investigation.
Now, let's talk names and name appeal. As we waited the past year or so for this film to come out, a big deal was made of the fact that none other than Heather Langenkamp was starring in the film. As it turns out, she appears in only one scene and even then it's a brief role (I had to check IMDB to find her); this is an even worse situation than Halloween: Resurrection using Jamie Lee Curtis' name for cheap publicity and it should be called out for the cheap manipulation that it is.
Another name to take note of here is the writer/director Gary J Tunnicliffe, whose previous writing credits include... Hellraiser: Revelations - and I can hear all those winces from here. To be fair, Hellraiser: Judgment is certainly an improvement on that hack-job put out solely so that Dimension Films could hold on to the movie rights, and Tunnicliffe clearly knows his Hellraiser lore with little nods such as the house on 55 Ludovico Street, so I think we can give him the benefit of the doubt on that previous film and that he was just trying to make the best of a bad situation. As I said earlier, for example, I really did like the Cenobites' new way of "hooking" (haha) new victims in... but the "human" story that runs parallel to that for a lot of the film is still pretty obvious and the film in general chooses to develop the wrong ideas. There's an interesting germ of an idea about a Heaven/Hell conflict, for example, that could have been left open as an interesting potential sequel hook, but for some reason, the film rather clumsily tries to tie that end up at the end of the film.
A large amount of the film is lit in sepia and orange tones for whatever reason, possibly an attempt to look dark and sinister without just turning out all the lights and having the audience guess what was happening on the screen. But I think that - and, let's be honest, all the Hellraiser films past Inferno - just misses the point of series. The first Hellraiser had most of its most horrific scenes shot in bright, crisp daylight - it was about people's dark sides being hidden in mundanity; secret pleasures and perversions and WASPish yuppies doing terrible things, and that juxtaposition made the terrible acts all the more terrible. Now we've got serial killers sewing up dogs in their victim's uterus (no actual animal cruelty took place on set, the director is quick to assure everyone) because shock value has become more important than atmosphere, and until that changes I can't see this series returning to the heights of its 1980s entries.
Comments