Oh how I wish I was still doing the Female Led theme week but no. For this week, I am on to looking at the Hellraiser franchise. Now, I’ve already seen the first three films in this series and those are, by all accounts, the only watchable ones (and that’s being incredibly generous to the 3rd one). I mean, you know you’re in trouble when it’s only the 4th movie out of 11 and they’re already going to space. It took Jason ten whole movies to jump that shark.

Bloodline takes place over three different timelines. The framing of the story is the year 2127 and Dr. Merchant is aboard a space station trying to explain to some generic soldiers (are they military? are they company?) why he sent everyone home. To figure that out we have to flashback to France in 1796 where Phillip LeMarchand, famed toy maker, has just been commissioned to make a puzzle box for weird diabolist. The box is used to summon a demon (not Pinhead) and now his bloodline is cursed with puzzle box related obsessions. Then in 1996, John Merchant, an architect, is making a building with a room that’s basically got puzzle box walls. The ol’ French demon shows up to try to make him use the building for stuff but summons Pinhead and he doesn’t have time for bullshit and starts to murderin folks. They get puzzled back to hell. Then, back in the future, space Merchant now has to use the anti-puzzle box technology of his ancestor to maybe kill Pinhead?

Look, I can appreciate them trying to flesh out the whole backstory of the Lament Configuration a bit and get into where it came from and who built it. I even like Angelique, the new demon lady we get that is more about temptation than Pinhead’s straight up pain obsessed chain-hook torture. Honestly, if the movie had just been a period piece Hellraiser set in 1700’s France, that would have at least been an interesting idea to play with. Instead we get this weird mish-mash of timelines where it feels like they had the ideas for three different movies but not enough plot for any of them so they just crammed them all together into a barely coherent single film. Thank god Doug Bradley was here, at least, to make the ridiculous lines they give him still sound fucking rad as hell.

I’m also sad that the franchise basically abandoned a lot of the stuff from the first couple films immediately because it would be difficult to make horror films with those constraints. Gone are the Cenobites being these agents of exquisite pain-pleasure that only collect those that seek them out. Now they’re just generic demons that want to open the gates of Hell and murder people. While I know they did it in the third movie as well, I also kind of hate that they can just torture random people they find into being new Cenobites. Like they just find a couple of security guards that are twins and Pinhead does a weird body horror thing and BOOM, new Cenobite. Those guys didn’t even solve the Lament Configuration. Why are they suddenly demons?

Anyway, the saddest part of all this is that this will almost undoubtedly be the best of the movies I will be watching for this week.

Score: 2.5 out of 5