Sweet Home

Sweet Home (1989) aka Suito Homu
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring Nobuku Miyamoto, Shingo Yamashiro, Ichiro Furudate, Nokko

Summoning James Brown won't save you now.

    Wow, so this was a surprise. I knew I had to have at least one Kiyoshi Kurosawa film in my Chainsawnukah festival this year, on account of the fact that he is clearly one of the best overall directors still alive and productive today, and he primarily makes horror movies. Which make for two pretty compelling reasons, in my calculations. KAIRO is probably in my top ten favorite movies ever, and CURE and SEANCE are both absolutely top-notch horror films, mixing the tension of Hitchcock with the patience of Ozu while retaining the elegance of both. Though Kurosawa (motto: “Just because I’m a Japanese director with the common last name of Kurosawa does not mean I’m related to... oh, forget it.”) has worked in other genres, it’s horror which seems to be his first love and his main focus. How many other directors of his caliber have devoted most of their career to his most disreputable of genres?

    Funny thing about that career, though, is that it’s little-known outside Japan. CURE, from 1997, is about the earliest work of his which seems to be easily available in America. But his first full-length seems to be from all the way back in 1980. What was he up to back then? To find out, I ventured way off the beaten path to acquire a copy of his 1988 haunted house film SWEET HOME. Details about this film are a little murky. It appears to be tied to a NES video game of the same name which also came out in 1989. IMDB claims it’s unclear if the movie is based on the game or the other way ‘round, but they were certainly promoted as a single package, as seen from this commerical which features footage from both. Wikipedia even claims that Kurosawa himself supervised the game’s design, though I can find no direct confirmation of that anywhere. Both wikipedia and this obsessive fan site seem convinced that the film came first, though, and the game’s designer* recalls being able to refer to the film to come up with elements of his game so that’s the best conclusion I can offer. All parties, anyway, seem to agree that the game, at least, is a pioneering classic, the first real attempt at a horror survival game, and an enormous influence on later games (particularly the genre-defining “Resident Evil”).

This freaked our shit out in 1989.

Given all that, I didn’t exactly know what to expect from the film. But I definitely didn’t expect this. Kurosawa’s mastery of pacing and camerawork are as apparent as ever, but in terms of content it’s a radically different film from his quiet, dread-soaked later work. It’s actually kind of a frantic, broad, effects-driven thrill ride with more in common with POLTERGEIST and HOUSE (the Japanese one) than with KAIRO. Unexpected, but not a bad thing. It starts a little slowly, with too much goofy broad comedy, but quickly builds itself into a nonstop machine of relentless craziness.

We start, though, by setting up the premise: a TV documentary crew want to make a special about the abandoned mansion left behind by a famous painter after an at-first unspecified tragedy claimed him and his family. They’re an odd bunch, sometimes seeming more like a dysfunctional family than a group of seasoned journalists (this illusion is furthered considerably because their producer has brought his precocious young daughter along, and she’s dead-set on sowing romance between her dad and a nice lady whose actual job description seems a little on the vague side). Along with our makeshift family group, we also have the egocentric on-screen reporter, a bumbling, irritating lighting guy, and eventually a badass local gas station attendant (long story). They spend most of the beginning of the film having interpersonal drama, wacky hijinks, and polite, extremely Japanese conversations about how they need to work together for the benefit of the group. But then a giant ax shows up, and you know you’re gonna be in good hands.

If you got ghost problems, I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems, but this seems like the most pressing.

     While it starts slow, once it gets moving it doesn’t stop. Although there are hints of Kurosawa’s anxiety-soaked implied-but-never-stated ways in the buildup, the showpieces of this thing are some surprisingly intense special-effects-laden ghostly smackdowns. We’ve got a guy burned in half, a not-entirely unrelated torso that crawls around, a melting body, some nifty creeping shadow hands, a gigantic distorted demon which wouldn’t look out of place in GHOSTBUSTERS (and I mean that as a good thing), and... well, you know that rule where if a gun shows up in the first half of a movie it’s going to be fired in the second half? Well, this movie has that giant ax.

    This sort of shit is buckets of fun, and executed with real artistry by Academy Award winning makeup and FX wizard Dick Smith (THE EXORCIST, LITTLE BIG MAN, SCANNERS). But crucially, Kurosawa walks a fine tonal line between eye-popping special effects bonanza and genuine serious horror. You’re gonna have to smile at a 20-foot-tall screaming semi-transparent green demon, but we’ve also spent enough time with the characters that when they start to get gruesomely offed you do feel a stirring of real horror. It’s awesome to watch a guy get burned in half, but less chuckle-worthy that he crawls around, weeping and begging someone to help him. Combined with the excellently designed haunted mansion (complete with gigantic creepy murals), darkly atmospheric lighting and camerawork, and a genuinely twisty mystery that reveals a suitably horrible secret, the film as a whole finds the right tone somewhere between extravagant thrills and darker themes. The performances of the leads are strong enough, and their story is simple enough, that it never gets entirely overwhelmed by the ghosts, either. Not an easy balance to maintain, but Kurosawa makes it look effortless.

So, holy shit, it turns out that the producer's adolescent daughter (far right) is actually played by single-namer "Nokko", a pop star in her mid - twenties. The fuck did they pull that off?

In true POLTERGEIST fashion, this film is rumored to have been heavily tampered with by producer Juzo Itami (THE FUNERAL, TAMPOPO) which might explain the broad humor and breakneck pace. Many sources claim that Kurosawa ultimately disowned or disassociated himself from the final product, although once again, I can’t find any direct confirmation of that. It’s certainly different enough from his later, better work that it’s not hard to imagine that he wants to leave it in his more commercial past. Still, I hope he at least has a certain amount of pride in the work. Even if it’s not quite the unique voice he would eventually develop, there are plenty of great things about SWEET HOME which make it unique unto itself. It’s technically superb, filled with memorable gimmicks, and manages to find the right mix of hysterical thrills and genuine horror while still leaving room for a human element. It’s one of the only films I saw this month that I can genuinely describe as a wild roller coaster ride, and as a bonus you got solid atmosphere, awesome effects work, and just enough inexplicable Japanese weirdness** to keep you off-balance (I should mention: at about the three-quarters mark, a minor character suddenly has a musical number). It ought to be better known, or at least legally available, on this side of the Pacific. Oh well, at least we’ll always have SWEET HOME: The video game.***

PS: And don't forget to check out Dan P's take, as ABBOT AND COSTELLO DISCUSS PUTTING ASIDE THEIR INDIVIDUAL AMBITION AND WORKING FOR THE BETTERMENT OF THE GROUP AND ALSO THERE ARE GHOSTS.

*Tokuro Fujiwara, himself something of a visionary developer, having worked on “Mega Man”, “Ghost N’ Goblins,” “Resident Evil” and, good lord, A WILLOW video game!

**One great example of it’s Japanese character is that one of our heroes, after learning the ghost’s tragic backstory, still berates it for causing such a fuss. It’s actually a great point that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in another haunted house movie. Sure, the ghost had one horrible, horrible thing happen, but otherwise lived a pretty charmed life. The fuck does it have to complain about? It’s an entirely charming Japanese perspective which probably explains all that talk about working together for the greater good at the beginning.

***Considering that the NES version is considered the direct forefather of the Resident Evil series, I suppose you could consider the film version an ancestor, however distant, of Paul W. S. Anderson’s series of catastrophic follies. Maybe that explains why Kurosawa is none too keen on being associated with it.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No, possibly video game adaptation. Or maybe the other way around. Japan is crazy, dude.
BOOBIES: Japan, so no.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Actually yeah, there's some pretty decisive kills in here.
SEQUEL: None.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Extremely high.
MONSTERS: Definitely some monster-y demon things.
SATANISTS: No.
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: No.
CURSES: The Mansion is definitely cursed, several people say so.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: She did indeed!

The female director and reporter talk about working together for the greater good, and later the same director talks at length with the daughter about staying alive.

The Reeds

The Reeds (2010)
Dir. Nick Cohen
Written by Chris Baker, Mark Anthony Galluzzo (“contributing writer,” whatever that means)
Starring Anna Brewster, Geoff Bell, Daniel Caltagirone

    Another from that indie horror “8 Films to Die For” circuit (in this case from the first last year, 2010), this one shares a lot in common with fellow British indie horror wannabe SALVAGE. Again, we got a bunch of pretty young Brits giving reasonably good performances at being menaced in a closed location by a mostly unseen evil. I have to confess, though, that I kinda liked this one, even though there’s not much original here. It’s the same old ghostly shenanigans, but it has basically the gimmicks from maybe three average horror films mashed together to make a single film that may not completely make sense upon further reflection but is at least complete enough to hold your interest. Independently, none of these gimmicks would be enough to blow your mind, and even together they’re derivative as hell-- but it does make it kind of difficult to guess where things are going.

The strength of the movie, though, is actually in its execution more than its labored concept. We’ve got your typical motley crew of college kids to pick off, and this time they’re on a boat stuck out on a winding marsh somewhere. Not really much of a concept to build off of, but cinematographer Dennis Madden manages to evoke something very eerie about the endless fields of swaying reeds which seem to expand as far as the eye can see in every direction. It feels strange and lonely and isolated, but with a kind of desolate beauty, too. That helps bolster the weirdness of everything that happens, so even when the movie doesn’t quite have the imagination to truly creep you out, it still has a unique spooky flavor to it. You don’t see too many movies that marry genuine beauty to uncanny dread, so even if the horror isn’t the best it’s kind of a treat to see the two paired so successfully here. Next time, I hope director Cohen stops worrying about the story so much and lets some nightmare logic take ahold of his pretty images and unusual setting. 

And check out Dan P's take as ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET THE REEDMAN.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: Don't think so.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Nah, not too bad.
SEQUEL: Not a sequel to BRASSED OFF as far as I can tell. Proposed prequel THE WOODWINDS has yet to get off the ground.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. Indie horror no one would ever have heard of except for its inclusion in the After Dark Festival.
MONSTERS: None.
SATANISTS: There's some kind of weird ritual, but I don't think Satan is directly implicated.
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: Not in the traditional sense.
CURSES: Nothing specific.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A. Alex points out that she was, in fact, awake for possibly as much as two or three minutes at the very start.

House of the Devil

House of the Devil (2009)
Dir. Ti West
Written by Ti West
Starring Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Dee Wallace 

    Wow, so here it is. I’d been waiting to watch this movie for 3 long years -- waiting for the right moment. When you watch as many horror movies as I do, the number of truly great ones that you haven’t seen dwindles down and down, until finally there are just a few left. Sure, sometimes you get surprised and blown away like I did this year with ABSENTIA and RED LIGHTS and to some extent TALL MAN. But you can’t count on that. Mostly you’re gonna get a few things which mildly impress you, a few things which mildly disappoint you, and mostly things that are exactly as middling as you’re afraid they’re gonna be. I hope it’s obvious from my output up til now that I am both willing and able to find plenty of things to love about almost any middling genre junk, but sometimes you just want something great. So HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, which everyone with any sense has been raving about since the day it opened, was my ace in the hole this year, the thing I knew I could count on to blow my mind just when I was getting to the summit of my Chainsawnukah 2012 adventure and I needed a surefire win to take me over that final peak.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a micro-budget love letter to cheapie 80’s Satanic Panic era horror films, but after seeing THE INNKEEPERS (and his segment of this year’s V/H/S) I was convinced that Ti West was up to the task. Guess what. He was, and then some. Turns out everyone was right, this movie is fucking awesome, a perfect mix of clever black humor, meticulous production detail, slow build, and genuine horror. It tells a simple tale: A feather-haired collegiate babysitter agrees, against her better judgement, to hang around an isolate house all night while Tom Noonan and and Mary Woronov (who are suspiciously enthusiastic about astronomy) go watch a rare and almost certainly evil eclipse. Nothing much happens at first, but you know this isn’t gonna end well. Gradually, the hints that something sinister is going on start to pile up, and the tension mounts to a great climax.

Some people, I suppose, find the long buildup too slow, but of course they’re wrong, it goes at exactly the pace it needs to to gradually build our anxiety. And just like THE INNKEEPERS, it’s not like it’s boring or purposefully trying to test our patience. This isn’t THE BROWN BUNNY or something, it’s just a horror film which is secure enough that it doesn’t have to throw in phony jump scares every five minutes. Star Jocelin Donahue (She’s the female lead in THE BURROWERS, but “best known for her work in Zune and Levi’s commercials”) is immediately likeable and gives a funny, ingratiating performance so she’s entertaining even when she’s just ordering a pizza or dancing around to The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another.” And the fact that we know this is all building someplace bad adds an additional layer of dread to keep you interested. If you’re impatient to figure out what the hell’s going on, it’s because West wants you to be, you jerk. It’s called suspense. Here’s a link to the definition, since if you got annoyed with this movie for taking too long I can be pretty certain you’re not the kind to look it up for yourself.

I was a little more worried about the 80’s trappings here, but as usual West was right on the money about that, too. As you know from my review of HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of the GRINDHOUSE-inspired subgenre of jokey b-movie parodies like PLANET TERROR, DEATH PROOF, and MACHETE. All those films have their merits, but they mostly come from their actual content, and are in my estimation actually held back by their overly cute conceit of mimicking the technical follies of cheapie films from another era. PLANET TERROR, for instance, has some inspired gore and wacky gimmicks in it, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a shame that it openly admits that it’s not actually a real film, but a goofy parody of a low-budget zombie b-movie. Given that, I didn’t know what to make of the opening credits to HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, with their solid yellow titles over zoomed-in freeze-frames. Seemed a little on-the-nose to me. But it quickly became clear that, thank god, this is not a parody of slow-burn 80s Satanism movies, it just is one. Setting this in modern days would just not have worked, you would never buy the main character’s adorable naivete, nor the movie’s genuinely earnest concern about the dangers of Satanism lurking beneath a facade of normality. You’d have to make it hip and self-aware, the character would have to comment that this is just like those old movies, and so on. Which would totally kill the vibe that the movie needs to get you to take it seriously. That, and no one lives in those spooky old Victorian houses anymore. Like HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, setting it in the 80s is not a gimmick, it’s just the only way to tell this particular story. And having done that, it actually seems less obtrusive to simply include all the trappings of that era so the whole experience seems complete.

This is the point in my positive reviews where I usually say something like, “that having been said, the film isn’t perfect.” But actually, this one is kind of perfect. There’s not a false note in the whole thing, it’s just a elegantly simple slow march to a final hysterical finale. It’s assured, effortlessly entertaining, occasionally shocking, and they even got Tom Noonan in there in maybe his best villainous role since ROBOCOP 2*. There’s plenty about it that could be analyzed, plenty of parts that could be broken down to see why they work so well. But honestly, it’s a film which I suspect is best left as an experience, something to simply sit back with some red wine and let yourself get immersed in. And an excellent reminder that it’s possible to craft something riveting and scary from nothing more than a lone, likeable character in a big, empty house. Ti West you handsome devil, you’ve done it again. 

*Which I sincerely hope reads as the complement I mean it as. Someone, I think maybe Mr. Majestyk, once told me he briefly ran into Tom Noonan somewhere and all he could think to say was “Good job in ROBOCOP 2!” which he thought Noonan read as sarcasm, even though it was intended as genuine. Which I think we can all agree is a pretty heartbreaking tale. So Tom Noonan, if you’re reading this, you were awesome in ROBOCOP 2 and also this one. I’m glad we had the chance to put this matter to rest. 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: No
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Ehh, a little blood, but not really.
SEQUEL: There's a 1984 movie called THE HOUSE OF GOD, but as far as I can tell this is not a sequel or spinoff.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Well-known to those who know about these things.
MONSTERS: No.
SATANISTS: Heck yeah, and "based on true events!"
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: No.
CURSES: No.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Awake and entertained!

The female lead and the landlady talk about their renting situation.

Hellraiser V: Inferno

Hellraiser V: Inferno (2000)
Dir. Scott Derrickson
Written by Paul Harris Boardman, Scott Derrickson
Starring Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro, James Remar, Doug Bradley

    The advent of HELLRAISER V: INFERNO brings with it a number of new features to the series. For one, it’s the first time some shady producer came up with the genius idea of sticking a few Pinhead scenes into an unrelated horror script and calling it a sequel (PUMPKINHEAD 2 obviously set a dangerous precedent). It’s also the first HELLRAISER to bypass theatres entirely, admitting that the last two entries had left this franchise a cheapened, burnt-out husk of its classy original. Realizing this, the producers consulted with top Bush administration education experts, who agreed that the thing to do was to make sure we punish the failing institution by cutting its funding and diverting valuable talent away from it, letting it die a slow and humiliating death until it could be replaced with a private institution (in this metaphor, the inevitable remake/reboot).

But no one puts Pinhead in a box. Well, metaphorically anyway. Even though this humbling DTV cash grab isn’t great, it’s actually better than I was expecting. Basically, it’s the same low-imagination atmospheric mindfuck movie that every wannabe horror director has to make when they’re young and poor and before they can afford more interesting scripts. It’s a bit dull, and contains literally nothing you haven’t seen a million times before, but other than that it’s actually reasonably well made, and even reasonably well acted. If you can get over the fact that Pinhead probably has under 5 minutes of screen time and even those are completely unnecessary, it’s watchable enough.

Yes, the title comes with ripple effects to drive home the point that its an INFFEEEERRRNNNOOOO.

The story here is that Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer, no stranger to the Barkerverse, having already played Boone in NIGHTBREED) is a brilliant but somewhat corrupt detective. He seems like an OK guy, but he also takes cash from the evidence room and cheats on his whiny wife with a suspiciously attractive hooker. In terms of corrupt cops, I’d say he’s way less corrupt than Harvey Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT, less than Harvey Keitel in THE BORDER, maybe on par with Harvey Keitel in CORRUPT (at least before he chains Johnny Rotten up in his bathtub), slightly more corrupt than Harvey Keitel in CLOCKERS, and much more corrupt than Harvey Keitel in THELMA AND LOUISE. But still, he seems like flawed dude who’s fundamentally decent. So when he finds a suspicious puzzlebox at the scene of a gristly hook-related fatality, you’re kinda hoping that he won’t try to solve it, even though he explicitly says earlier that he loves puzzles and that’s why he became a detective.

So what happens when he opens the box? Hooks, right? And maybe a Chatterer dog? Well, remember that this wasn’t originally written as a HELLRAISER script. So Pinhead’s MO this time is to briefly appear in a weird dream along with two female cenobites with long tongues and a walking torso with Chatterer’s head (both, to the movie’s credit, look pretty creepy, and are probably the best cenobites since the first one). I miss the hooks too, but I guess he got bored with them during the long ordeal of hook-murdering the guy Thorne took the box from and decided to try something new. Or maybe he finally got tenure and just doesn’t give a shit anymore. At any rate, that’s the last we’ll see of Pinhead for awhile. But Det. Thorne (there’s no Inferno anywhere in the movie, so maybe that’s his nickname) still has other problems. Some psychopath called “The Engineer” has kidnapped a child and is murdering people that Thorne knows and leaving the kid’s severed fingers behind, one at a time. You know, to fuck with him. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Thorne keeps having weird hallucinations and freaky encounters with a guy in a leather jacket and hood who also has Chatterer’s face (what, no love for Butterball?). And to top it all off, he’s being forced to talk to a bearded new-agey psychologist (James Remar) about his issues, because his fellow cops (including partner Nicholas Turturro) think he’s cracking up.

Still preferable to the two-guys-one-girl variation.

All this is reasonably well executed, with decent atmosphere (although like all DTVs, it overuses those lame green filters) and a good feel of surreal menace waxing and waning. Problem is, there’s just nothing very imaginative in here to make it memorable or unique. I doubt there’s a single thing in this movie that you haven’t already seen somewhere else in a better --or at least more interesting-- movie. To it’s credit, there is an occasional decent idea or jump to the truly bizarre here and there. The cenobites look pretty good, there’s a pretty rough early “found footage” type deal where Thorne gets a tape of an informant being whipped to death with a cat-o-nine-tails made of fishhooks. And there’s one amazing scene where he goes to this poolhall in search of “The Engineer,” only to find that everyone there is inexplicably dressed like a cowboy. Later he goes out into the woods, and two Asian women dressed like cowboys (one in all black, the other in all white) come out of nowhere and kick the shit out of him with kung fu. That’s almost some David Lynch shit right there, so I gotta give ‘em credit for that. It escalates pretty nicely and even though the climax is nothing you ain’t seen before, it works in its own derivative way. Oh, his memory of his mother gets possessed and he has to kick her ass, I guess that’s one other thing I haven’t seen before.

One of the funniest moments of the movie comes during the big revelation about what’s actually going on, which I hope you can infer from the previous sentence I’m going to SPOIL. It’s customary in these type of movies that the person secretly planning, “engineering” all this, if you will, is gonna be a character you already know, and it’s usually pretty easy to spot because there’s one character in the cast who’s played by a well-known character actor but doesn’t have much to do with the plot. It’s a tough spot to be in for a movie, because you know you’re telegraphing your villain this way, but you also want to have a good antagonist for the hero to face off against at the end, not some hammy low-watt extra. Here, you’ve got Craig Sheffer, his partner, and hmmm... James Remar as the psychiatrist who’s always going on about metaphysics and morality and so forth. OK, it doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on here, Remar is actually the engineer, and feeding Sheffer clues while fucking up his life based on the things he reveals in their sessions. But get this: you’re right, he is, but there’s another twist: James Remar is actually the Engineer, and the Engineer... is actually Pinhead! It’s all a weird dream that Thorne is having after having open the box, to teach him a lesson about his wicked ways what with the stealing evidence and banging hookers in motel rooms and whatnot. So even though you’ve got James Remar revealed to be the bad guy all along, as soon as you find out he just morphs into Doug Bradley and Remar never even gets to have an evil speech or anything! Why the hell would you cast him in this role, it makes no sense, it just alerts us that he’s gonna be the villain and then you don’t even get to use him to give us some good villainy. Setting aside the odd change of character for Pinhead (what, he teaches us lessons about morality now? Guess he watched SAW and had a change of heart?) I think we can all agree that this was a silly thing to do. Shit, they should have just cast Doug Bradley as the psychiatrist. They could have saved some cash, and Remar could have had more time to prepare himself emotionally for being on Sex and the City. END SPOILERS.

Not to fear, Captain exposition has arrived. I only have five minutes so I'll make this quick.

The whole thing is surprisingly watchable, and probably on a whole works better than HELLRAISER IV: BLOODLINES, but it’s pretty low on reasons why you should watch it. BLOODLINES, despite it’s disastrous incompetence, is way more fun and more unique. This one coasts on a constant low level of decent competence, but only has maybe three or four memorable sequences in the entire runtime, and most of those get almost no mileage out of any of the familiar HELLRAISER tropes. They throw a few hooks in there, and even got some decent cenobites, but it’s hard not to notice how superfluous it all is to the actual plot, which is acceptably well-executed but unremarkable in almost every way. Amazingly, director Scott Derrickson would move out of his own DTV hell to helm the well-regarded THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, that abysmal remake of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and, holy shit, last month’s SINISTER, a movie I generally enjoyed (and which also incorporates a well-utilized found footage angle). Hell, he’s even co-writing that movie DEVIL’S KNOT about the West Memphis Three that’s gonna be directed by Atom Egoyan (he also wrote URBAN LEGENDS: THE FINAL CUT, so don’t get too excited, Egoyan fans). Wow. In the movies, Pinhead punishes you for your sins, but I guess in Hollywood, you get rewarded. No wonder Pinhead stays in that box all the time, things make more sense there.

THE WHOLE SORRY HELLRAISER SAGA:

1: HELLRAISER (1987)

2: HELLRAISER 2: HELLBOUND (1988)

3: HELLRAISER 3: HELL ON EARTH (1992)

4: HELLRAISER 4: BLOODLINES (1996)

5: HELLRAISER 5: INFERNO (2000)

6: HELLRAISER 6: HELLSEEKER (2002)

7: HELLRAISER 7: DEADER (2005)

8: HELLRAISER 8: HELLWORLD (2005)

9: HELLRAISER 9: REVELATIONS (2011)

10: HELLRAISER X: JUDGEMENT (2018)

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No, but adapted from an unrelated script.
BOOBIES: No, not too many chicks interested in going topless for DTV. Even the hooker he fucks at the beginning is one of those leave-the-bra-on hookers.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Some good hookey stuff.
SEQUEL: First DTV sequel out of a total of 9 total HELLRAISERs so far.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: DTV, so I'll call it high.
MONSTERS: That torso thing.
SATANISTS: Nah.
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: Well, "The Engineer" is a serial killer, and a couple stabbings. I'll say yeah.
CURSES: No.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines

Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines (1996) aka Hellraiser IV: Pinhead in Space (and also France)
Dir. Alan Smithee (in reality, Kevin Yagher)
Written by Peter Atkins
Starring Bruce Ramsay, Valentina Vargas, Doug Bradley

    Remember those simple, naive days, back when I reviewed HELLRAISER 3: HELL ON EARTH and was surprised that --aside from the significant decline in quality at the last act-- it was actually a pretty respectable little horror movie, particularly considering it came from the 1990s? Of course you remember that, so it stands to reason that you also remember that it tantalized me with a completely crazy final twist that immediately made me want to see if HELLRAISER IV would be as insane and awesome as it had every right to be.

    Well, the answer is that it’s exactly as insane as it has every right to be. Not so much with the awesome. Instead of the awesome, they thought it would be a good idea to substitute a generous helping of shittness even for the fourth movie in a dubious franchise that probably didn’t need to go past the first one. Let me be blunt, this is a horrible, horrible movie with almost nothing redeeming about it save its towering ambition and the utterly unbelievable disaster its hubris leads it to. I mean, wow, they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, or ever, thank God.

    Obviously part of the abject awfulness of this movie comes from the studio interference (though who could blame them if they were getting a look at the dailies). That Alan Smithee directorial credit should be an immediate indicator of a troubled production, and indeed someone who is either director Kevin Yagher or a borderline-illiterate friend of Kevin Yagher added this to the IMDB trivia section: “Kevin Yagher disowned the version with cuts made behind his back due to conflicting artistry ideas. Yagher's version contained much more graphic imagery, plot, and explained everything that happened in the film. The producers disagreed and demanded Pinhead should appear sooner despite every version of the script up until then having him appear around the 40-minute mark. When Yagher was unable to satisfy he disowned it and never finished filming some final scenes. Joe Chapelle was brought on to finish the film, filming new scenes from re-writes including the narrative framing device. Some scenes of the original script were thus never shot.”

The original twist ending for CUBE,

    While it’s good to know that somewhere in Kevin Yagher’s brain there’s a cut of this film which “explained everything” and is obviously superior in every way, the real problem here is more fundamental, and there’s just no way of cutting the film to improve it. The problem is that the movie is simply not nearly well made enough to realize its wild ambitions. I like the craziness of setting a Hellraiser movie across 400 years, two continents (plus space, the final frontier) and dozens of generations where the male offspring always look like Bruce Ramsay with a different haircut. I like plenty of the wacky additions, including but not limited to the chatterer dog, the twin cenobites, the demoness Angelica, the robotic puzzlebox solver, the unexplained holograms, the space marines. But boy, is it all pulled off with exactly the chintziness you’d expect of a special-effects guy (he did Freddy’s makeup, The Crypt Keeper, and Chucky) directing a monster movie in 1996. If this was going to work, it would have had to be good. And this ain’t good.

    But wait a second, did I just say “spans 400 years, two continents, and space, making it THE FOUNTAIN of Hellraiser sequels?” Well, that’s kind of a paraphrase, but yeah, I guess I did say all that. This particular Hellraiser concerns a curse visited upon the descendants of Phillip L’Merchant, 18th century French toymaker who designed the first puzzlebox (which also goes by its hoity-toity nickname, “the Lament Configuration”) for a rich depraved Duke of some sort so he could kill a prostitute, cut her skin off, conjure a demon to live in the skin, and then fuck the demon-in-human-skin in a manner  presumably more kinky than any human hooker would be up for. Boy, if only they had better porn back then, this could all have been avoided. But no, rich guy’s gotta fuck a re-skinned demon woman (you can imagine how well that goes for him), so now we’ve got the evil demon princess Angelica (Valentina Vargas) loose in the world. So yeah, a little bit of a twist on the ol’ Hellraiser formula.

Another robot putting honest blue collar puzzle solving Americans out of work.

    Wait, what? When? Princess Amidala who? Where’s Pinhead? How did cenobites even get into the world prior to 1784? Oh wait, Pinhead wasn’t around back in 1784, because Captain Eliot Spencer didn’t even get his hands on the box until 1921. So I guess this chick is the new Pinhead? Or maybe Pinhead used to be a girl? What’s the deal? We don’t know, but she kills the guy who summoned her and then spends the next 212 years having kinky sex with his creepy butler until she remembers that, oh yeah, she cursed the toymaker guy and his descendants and she probably ought to get around to doing something about that. She’s the patient type, that Angelica. But now that she’s done with the demon fucking, she’s motivated to find the conveniently named John Merchant, who is not exactly incognito given that he’s just won a major architectural prize for designing --good lord, what’s this, it can’t be!-- that crazy office building that looks like a giant puzzlebox from the end of part 3! Turns out that part of the Merchant family curse is that they’re genetically predisposed to be obsessed with puzzleboxes. It’s kind of a letdown, because the way part 3 ends with Lt. Dax hiding the puzzlebox in wet cement makes it look like the building grew there from a puzzlebox seed, which is way cooler. But oh well. Anyway, turns out that the damned thing is still there in the basement, so Angelica hops a plane over to America, pulls the box out, and summons Pinhead.*

    Finally, Pinhead, and we only had to wait 212 years for him! But there’s the problem: we’ve already established that the conflict is between Angelica and the Merchant family (Philip L’Merchant in 1784, John Merchant in 1996, and Dr. Lando iMerchant2000 in the futuristic year 2127). So Pinhead’s sort of a third wheel here. He’s quickly on board with her plan to force Merchant to use his puzzlebox expertise to create a giant puzzlebox gateway to hell sort of deal, but otherwise doesn’t seem to have a dog in this fight, although he does now have a dog, don’t know if I mentioned that earlier. It looks a little like if Chatterer from part 1 fucked one of those rat-wolves from WILLOW, so obviously it’s a highlight here. Problem is, the producers of this film are correct that we don’t really give a shit about Princess Angelica’s plans for global domination any more than we cared about that charmingly roguish old Irishman druid in HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (MASK, ALSO THE SKELETON AND PUMPKIN). We want some fucking Pinhead action. Now, imagine if Michael Myers had been in HALLOWEEN III, but as a kind of pussywhipped sidekick to the uninteresting main antagonist. That’s HELLRAISER IV. I know the studio fucked with it, but shit, this was a terrible idea from the start. The studio intervened to make Pinhead more important, but that just made things worse because once he appears he just sort of takes over, even though this particular grudge match has nothing to do with him, eliminating any actual drama that might have once been at the core of this conflict. 

Yeah, unfortunately none of the cenobites from HELLRAISER 3 could be here with us today...

So, long story short, Pinhead tries to force Merchant into helping them in their evil plans (actually kind of like the plot to THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, come to think of it), there’s a long but pretty good sequence where he turns two security guards into this nifty grafted-together twin cenobites, then he’s foiled and has to wait another 131 years for another crack at it. Only this time, future Merchant (you know it’s future Merchant because he’s bald like that chick from STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE) will be ready for him. Also there’s an adorable early CG puzzle-solving robot, some holograms, space marines, and a transformer.

All this is plenty amusing, but something with this scope simply needs to be better made if we’re going to get much mileage out of it. On paper it seems pretty cool, but in reality it’s mostly not trashy enough to be fun and nowhere near decent enough to be taken seriously. The lighting, camerawork, editing... all scream mid-90’s studio hackwork, and arrive with all the intensity and atmosphere of a Kriss Kross video. The acting, too, is all that weirdly stilted sitcom acting that I guess people liked back then. Doug Bradley is reliable as always, and poor Bruce Ramsay is definitely trying hard, but if there is indeed an actor who could have pulled off this three-parts-across-400-years role, Ramsay ain’t him. Actually Valentina Vargas is better than you might think as Angelica, creating a somewhat more believable threatening villainess than you typically get in this sort of crap. But honestly, the cast is so low-rent that I can’t find a single interesting thing about the career of any of these screwballs (although Pat Skipper, who played “Carducci” whoever that might be, went on to play a member of the Scottish Mafia named “Glen Livitt” in John Leguizamo’s “The Most Dangerous Game” update THE PEST, and “Redneck” in INDEPENDENCE DAY, so I guess he must have some range.**)

Behold! The awesome special effects power of... computers!

And you know, it is kind of a shame because there is a grain of true greatness in here. Pinhead beat Jason to space by a full 6 movies, and it turns out to be a perfectly acceptable arrangement for him. Pinhead is weird enough to work in any setting or century (he even appeared in that daisy field in broad daylight in part 3, remember that?). The epic scope of the movie is pretty cool, as is the way it connects this long chain of human tragedy in this family -- I mean, its pretty epically harsh that these poor Merchants go 400 years getting their asses handed to them by cenobites (although if the movie is any indicator, only 3 guys in all that time are affected by it, which actually seems like pretty good odds all things considered. Hell, poor Kirsty from Part one already had to fight them twice, and she’ll be back again for part VI).  But the actual construction here is just too shoddy to get anything much out of the scenario -- in fact, when all is said and done, there’s not really much to connect our three eras besides Bruce Ramsay’s face (but not hair) and his misfortunes with various cenobites. It’s almost an anthology of three vaguely related uninteresting poorly done shorts rather than a full feature. The central conflict doesn’t even begin until Pinhead enters the picture halfway through, and then it stops abruptly at the end of 1996 and picks up 131 years later, all momentum gone. The original script (which you can read online) was purely chronological, but to really underscore how any of these events are connected a less linear edit might have helped (the studio guys were right, I think, to stage the whole thing as a flashback from 2127, even if they just did it to get a Pinhead appearance in sooner).

I admire its tenacity, but watching the final product it’s pretty easy to understand why this was the last script originally written for the HELLRAISER franchise until 2011 (in fact, it would start the trend of Pinhead being shoehorned unnaturally into an unrelated story, but at least he has more than two scenes here). After the epic failure of this one both critically and commercially, no writer would (to date) attempt the kind of grandiose, imaginative mythos that made the Clive-Barker-directed original so cool and was mimicked with various levels of success in part 2, 3, and now 4. Instead, we’d get muddled, convoluted stories with almost nothing to do with the cenobites and certainly nothing to do with expensive special effects and audacious production design. It was time for the series to follow the PUMPKINHEADs down the dark road to DTV slumdom. It was time for Pinhead to face the ultimate destiny of any franchise that ventures here: co-starring with Lance Henriksen. But first, that guy who played Boone in NIGHTBREED, the chick who played Kirsty Cotton in the first two, that guy Paul Rhys who played both Charlie Chaplin's AND Vincent Van Gogh’s brother (not at the same time) and finally, some guy who isn’t even Doug Bradley.

Obviously it’s a lonely and desolate road that I am about to tread, but hey, that’s the Lament Configuration for you. Open it and you’re gonna get... hooked.  

*He greets her with a “Good to see you again, Princess!” but I don’t know how that’s possible since she’s been on Earth mucking about since 1787 and he’s only been around since 1921, but maybe he looked her up in the years between HELLRAISER and HELLRAISER 2. Maybe that’s what Yagher means when he says his original version “explained everything.”

**Also, the sleazy butler “Jacques” that Angelica wastes 200 years with is the first acting role of Adam Scott, who is unknown to me aside from playing “Novak” in PIRANHA 3-D, but may be better known to some as Ben on that TV show “Parks and Recreation” if you’re into that sort of thing.

THE WHOLE SORRY HELLRAISER SAGA:

1: HELLRAISER (1987)

2: HELLRAISER 2: HELLBOUND (1988)

3: HELLRAISER 3: HELL ON EARTH (1992)

4: HELLRAISER 4: BLOODLINES (1996)

5: HELLRAISER 5: INFERNO (2000)

6: HELLRAISER 6: HELLSEEKER (2002)

7: HELLRAISER 7: DEADER (2005)

8: HELLRAISER 8: HELLWORLD (2005)

9: HELLRAISER 9: REVELATIONS (2011)

10: HELLRAISER X: JUDGEMENT (2018)

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: Yeah, Angelica has a sex scene.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Yeah, some pretty creative moves on Pinhead's part.
SEQUEL: Part IV, direct sequel to III and the last one with a script actually written for the series.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, fourth film in well-known franchise.
MONSTERS: Fuck yeah, chatterer dog!
SATANISTS: No.
ZOMBIES: No.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: No.
CURSES: Yeah, Merchant's family is cursed by the box.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Absolutely not.