I absolutely loved DEADER, and I feel that it's one of the strongest additions to the series since HELLBOUND. So, I held back from watching HELLWORLD so that I could have something to look forward to watching in the future (as I hadn't read ANY of the comments in this thread...) Finally, I decided to gave in and decided to watch it last night.

I am utterly shocked at the chasm in quality between DEADER and HELLWORLD. Stylistically, HELLWORLD has all the makings of a PG-13 theater horror flick. There were only two things that stopped it from being PG-13; one was the presence of a few vividly sexual scenes and the second was insufficient death to be a teenage slasher.

I'm all for trying new things with the franchise. Certainly, almost every installment since HELLBOUND has taken the franchise in a new direction (well... except maybe HELLSEEKER.) Regardless, DEADER showed us that a decent, intelligent (though at times incomprehensible) Hellraiser story can even be woven from a non-Hellraiser work. I'm assuming that the HELLWORLD script was written specifically for the franchise, and I have to tell you, this was far from a good story.

1) CHARACTERS - The first half of the film is driftingly slow. It revolves around the characters spending troves of time on each, yet managing to develop NONE of them. The token minority/asthmatic served little purpose beyond poorly timed comic relief, the horny bastard was NOTHING more than a horny bastard, the brooding teenager was nothing more than a brooding teenager, Chelsea tried oh so hard, and the British girl was a throwaway. How can you spend 45 minutes barely moving the plot forward, and STILL not expand the characters beyond two dimensions?! (And by the way, I think someone should recut the film and edit out the asthmatic comic the way STAR WARS fans edited that annoying fellow out of Episode 1. At least the film would be SOMEwhat darker.)

2) MUSIC - Nothing said "PG-13 teenage slasher wannabe" like lots and lots of party rock. It absolutely killed almost any sense of mystery and darkness that this film COULD have approximated.

3) CENOBITES - I love Chatterer, Bound and Pinhead, but come on. Where was the aura of majesty and intrigue and control that make the Cenobites so alluring? They were reduced to little more than slashers. Honestly, Henriksen could have done the killing scenes himself and it would have probably been BETTER. I'm all for keeping Cenobitic appearances limited, but then when you DO use them, for God's sakes, use them WELL.

4) "HOW'S THAT FOR A WAKEUP CALL?" - Besides the fact that the ending made less sense than the ending of BLOODLINE, and that it was probably more far-fetched than the ending of HELLSEEKER, throwing in this oneliner was the single worst thing they could have done other than have the Cenobites burst forth into glorious song... Pinhead has NEVER sunk to pun oneliners (unless I've forgotten.) Even in HELL ON EARTH, the puns were limited to the makeshift Cenobites, and Pinhead retained his majesty with some fantastic speeches. Someone needs to tell the screenwriter that he was writing for a HELLRAISER film, not A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

5) SHODDY EDITING - Take your DVDs to timecode 1:01:41 and watch closely with the volume up until 1:02:20. Ignore the fact that Pinhead jams a wooden stake (?!) through the cop's throat. Watch the actors' mouths and listen to the dialog and just picture the actress and a voice-over actor in a recording studio with headphones, microphones and a sound mixer. This was the most POORLY CONCEALED looping I've seen since HELL ON EARTH's "S***!!! GASOLINE!" And at least that was only one line, not an entire exchange. I'm all for ADR, but TRY to do it a bit better...

6) ENDING (SPOILER WARNING) - This was a lot like A.I. (the Spielberg film), in that it could have ended several times, but was dragged unmercifully on and on. It could have ended with Chelsea screaming in the coffin. That would have been best under the circumstances. Or it could have ended at her rescue. Or it could have ended with Lance looking at his son's photo. But no, they threw in a puzzle solution with no apparent reason. (See #4.) And then they dragged it out EVEN FURTHER with a vanride and scenes from the police arrival at the hotel room.

7) The minor stuff - Then there's the stuff that's just plain petty, things that annoyed me in this film, but probably wouldn't have in a stronger film: 1) Lance, lose the earring. You're cooler without it. 2) In the scene in the attic (1:13:00) In ONE minute of edited footage, they cut to the flapping pigeons SEVEN BLEEDING TIMES! ENOUGH!!!! 3) Did anybody notice in the beginning that van had a European license plate while driving and then pulled up with an imitation New York one? That was just blatant. *sigh* ...

Grr...

"How's that for a wakeup call?!" THAT was how we followed DEADER?! If there's EVER, EVER another HELLRAISER film on the table, please, PLEASE give it to Tim Day to correct FIRST.

"How's that for a wakeup call?" *sigh* On the other hand, it was begrudgingly better than VAN HELSING.

Hey you wanna know what I hate? Lines of dialogue like this:

"You been away from the dark realm a while, Chels, how'd it feel playin' again?"

"Just like any other ultra-violent twenty-four hour wildly popular and yet utterly purposeless embraced-by-the-masses Internet role-playing game."

It's one of those lines of dialogue that they always put into movies like Hellraiser 8 that are impossible to avoid sounding like they were written and re-written and rehearsed and re- rehearsed and then finally they just give up trying to make it sound natural after 30 or 40 takes and, exasperated, just drop the best bad take into the movie. That, being said, let me tell you what I have figured out.

After years if deliberation about what it takes to make a good horror movie and what is missing in a bad one, after countless theories (the presence of teenagers or college-age kids being near the top of that list, by the way), I have finally discovered for certain the exact point at which a movie stops being scary and good and instantly becomes stupid and bad. There is a perfect illustration of the solution near the end of this film, when Chelsea gets locked in the room and Adam starts calling to her from under the floor.

She has becomes absorbed in some photo album despite having found herself locked into the creepiest attic imaginable, and she hears someone whispering her name from behind her. She spins around just in time to see a hand disappear beneath a crack in the floorboards, and she cautiously moves over to investigate. As she peers into the hole, she continues to hear her name being called and she can see the tiniest glimpse of a face in the darkness, and at this point I am absolutely cringing in my chair. No matter how sure I am that something is going to spring out in a situation like that it still gets to me.

And then she did something stupid.

Literally the instant Chelsea put her hand through that crack in the floorboards, I immediately relaxed, almost to the point of breathing a sigh of relief because I didn't have to worry anymore because I completely stopped caring. And it's not just because she doesn't realize she's in a horror movie (despite the fact that the entire cast of this movie are hardcore Hellraiser fans, so the fourth wall has already been breached), it's because the moment her hand crosses the threshold of that crack in the boards she instantly ceases to be a victim.

And you know what my analogy is? Suicide! When someone in a horror movie does something that stupid, it is generally because the filmmakers need to have the character killed off but can't think of a really clever way to have it happen, so they just have the character do something monumentally stupid, but the problem is that this places the blame for their death on themselves, and in a horror movie, it's not only not scary when someone is attacked after doing something as idiotic as putting her hand through the crack in the floorboards because she thinks she sees her dead friend down there, it's satisfying, and not in the good way either.

Stupidity should be painful, but in the movies, it should be lethal.

That being said, it's amazing how little effort was made into making it clear what exactly was going on in the movie. It starts out with the funeral of a college age kid having been killed because of his over-involvement in something called Hellworld, which itself is never very clearly explained. His friends later mourn that they all knew what was happening to him but still kept playing Hellworld, although if you watch the making-of featurettes on the DVD, Director Rick Bota refers to Hellworld as "a website, or video game." It's kind of an ominous sign when even the director doesn't know what his movie is about. Either that or he doesn't know the difference between a website and a video game.

The story follows the death of their friend, something about that game, and then cuts to a few years later when all of his friends get invited to a party celebrating the said video game. Needless to say, it's kind of like an overblown Halloween party where everyone seems to be fascinated with the macabre (serious macabre, too, like dead babies in jars, sounds like a blast), and girls randomly pull their breasts out (curiously, the first bit of wildly gratuitous nudity is followed by the following exchange – "Gratuitous breasts?" "Necessary breasts! Ha ha ha!" Clever.).

When all is said and done and you finally realize what has been happening throughout the entire movie, it is such a ludicrous and ridiculous twist that it distantly surpasses the Saw movies for absurdity. If you thought Jigsaw had some time on his hands to come up with some incredibly complex machines of torture, wait until you see the plot that is hatched by the Host (played by Lance Henriksen, who wastes his talent completely in this movie).

Also don't miss the making-of featurette on the DVD, in which you can witness Pinhead eating a piece of pizza and, my favorite, Khary Payton, one of the actors in the film, makes the following mysterious analogy – "Horror movies are like roller coasters, you know, they're not gonna win Oscars or that kind of thing, but they're just a lot of fun."

I don't know, Khary, have you ridden Xtreme at Magic Mountain in Southern California? I see an Oscar in that ride's future!

Your suffering will be legendary, even in direct to video sequels! Doug Bradley gets another paycheck as Pinhead in the newest poopfest from Rick Botard, Hellraiser: Hellworld. This time, Rick insults the fans by having a story that acts as if Hellraiser was a movie and all made up. A bunch of cool style kids (punk girl, heroine, jerky guy, hero, and black guy) play a computer game and win a chance to go to a lame as hell (get it????) party run by Lance Henriksen who starts killing the kids off one by one because he blames them for the death of his son who poured gasoline on his body because Rick Botard wanted him to be in a Hellraiser sequel. At first I felt sorry for Lance but then I remembered he was in Mangler 2 so he deserves what he gets. Lance, we loved you in Aliens and Near Dark so stop making direct to video sequels! What's next, Prophecy: Lancelot the Angel or Witchcraft VXIVX: Couldron of Lance? Oh I got one, Children of the Corn 8: Lance's Children! These Hellraiser movies have turned into a Freddy's Nightmares but without Freddy and with Pinhead. Is it real or a dream? Who cares! I asked myself the same question as I was watching this DVD. I would have rather paused it on one of the scenes of nudity, send some knuckle children onto the TV set, and go to bed.