While I knew nothing about any of the Hellraiser sequels going into this, I have to say that this one definitely wins the award for Dumbest Name. Like all the rest of them have a name that sounds like it belongs in the franchise but this one feels like it’s just describing the state of it. Also, bless her heart, but seeing that your main star in a film is Kari Wuhrer immediately trips the alarm that I am about to watch some serious low budget garbage.

Our plot follows Amy (Wuhrer), an American reporter in London that gets sent to Bucharest because it’s cheaper to film there, I mean because her boss is sent a mysterious tape that seemingly shows a cult there where a woman kills herself and then comes back to life. Calling themselves “Deaders”, these followers all gather around a man named Winter that seems to have the power to reverse death. Amy follows the clues and finds the ol’ Lament Configuration and a tape telling her to stop Winter and not to open the box, which she obviously immediately does. Then it’s time for an hour of “what’s real and what’s imaginary” like the last few entries in this franchise until the movie blessedly ends.

This film apparently started out as a spec script that didn’t have anything to do with the Hellraiser franchise and, like Inferno before it, should have stayed that way. The addition of Cenobites and making it so Winter is actually a descendent of LeMarchand serve only to further distort and confuse what exactly this franchise is. It’s said in the movie Winter is looking for someone to open the box because he can’t do it but he thinks because he’s a descendent of LeMarchand that he’ll be able to control the Cenobites or something but that also means that he has resurrection powers completely unrelated to Pinhead or the Lament Configuration. That’s apparently just something you can do if your ancestor made a hellbox hundreds of years ago, I guess. They left that part out of Bloodline, I guess.

I am also just so tired of these movies trying to be Jacob’s Ladder at this point. You did it once in the 5th movie and I guess it was interesting as a new experiment. The 6th movie did it better and at least tried to tie it into the first movies. By this 7th movie, I fully do not want the consequence of opening the Lament Configuration to be “you have to spend an hour plus of screen time living out surreal representations of your sins and trauma” anymore. I want the consequence to be Pinhead and some other freaky little guys show up and spout off about how pleasure and pain are actually the same thing if you think about it and then they jam a spike up your dickhole.

The 8th movie, by all accounts the worst, is a podcast episode because I need to subject Jef to this as I am a budding Cenobite.

Score: 1.5 out of 5