Back once again into the pit of torment that is Hellraiser sequels. The only thing I knew about this one going into it is that this film marks the point where they stopped trying to actually get these movies into theaters and just did direct to video releases. Which means lower budget and they were already struggling to make me give a shit with real money, so I had exceptionally low hopes for the straight to home video Pinhead.

This movie follows Joseph Thorne, a Denver detective that is great at his job but, get this, is kind of a shitty person. He also has an incredible knack for solving puzzles. What a wonderful coincidence then that he gets called in to a case where they find a torn up body and a weird little puzzle box. Solving the box doesn’t get him a quick and lethal visit from our favorite spikey boy, though. Instead it starts a spiraling case a murders and visions centered around a figure known as The Engineer who taunts him by leaving the severed finger of a child at each murder scene. Now Joseph is scrambling in a race to try to stop the Engineer and save the life of the child while still holding on to his sanity.

For a direct to video horror movie, this isn’t really all that bad. It’s a noir, psycho-thriller that uses a lot of surreal fucked up shit to tell a story about a cop that sucks. Honestly, the biggest issue this movie has is trying to squeeze the Hellraiser franchise into it. Removed from the series, this movie would be a fairly interesting if not entirely remarkable look at the whole loss of innocence and the way we torture those around us when we torture ourselves type things that works well in these pseudo-Lynchian, noir movies. You have Dollar Store David Boreanaz (Craig Sheffer) doing a good job as Joseph Thorne and James Remar even gets a couple scenes to class the joint up a little.

Again, the big problems come from trying to shoehorn the whole Cenobites thing into a story that desperately doesn’t need it. Pinhead gets a drastic change to fit into this movie. Gone is the BDSM torture-fuck demon of the first films and he’s nowhere near the mirthless murder machine of the last film. Now he is a full on puppet master doling out ironic punishments in actual, literal hell where he has omniscient knowledge of everything you’ve ever done as soon as you open the box. Like they basically just turn him into Satan in this movie and give him the ability to disguise himself with illusions and play fun games with reality. Do what you will with the Hellraiser mythos but Pinhead is not here to teach anyone a lesson and be a trickster demon. My dude wants to put hooks in you and maybe (definitely) be horny about it.

Given how wildly different the last two films have been, I can’t even begin to guess where the hell this series is going to go now.

Score: 2.5 out of 5