Franchises: Hellraiser. Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

Since I wasn't a Fangoria kid, nor was I at all in the loop with the goings-on in the horror genre or the film industry in general, once I stopped going to Harold's Video, I lost track of the Hellraiser franchise for a long time after Bloodline. I actually did see a tiny bit of Inferno in the previews for the DVD of Halloween: Resurrection, which I got for Christmas in 2002, specifically a clip of Pinhead standing amongst a bunch of chains and snow (I'm surprised there wasn't one for Hellseeker as well, since that was the newest one at the time). And the following year, when I bought The Horror Movie Survival Guide, Inferno was the most recent film at the time of its publication and was listed in the section on Pinhead, but after that, I had no idea how many more of these movies were being made, let alone what order they went in. I wouldn't learn that, or Inferno's plot, for that matter, until I got The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy in the summer of 2010. Like I said in my review of Bloodline, when I finally came around to Inferno, the DVD of which I picked up randomly at the Texas Frightmare Weekend convention in spring of 2011 (the one where I met Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence, and Clive Barker, I might add), I'd already seen both Hellseeker and Hellworld, and I also learned from that book that the former was very similar in plot, almost coming off as something of a do-over. So, when I watched it, I already had a hint of what was going on and what the resolution would be, meaning it wasn't as effective as it could've been. I also knew going in that some had trouble fully embracing the film because the main character was something of a bastard and, yeah, that is definitely an issue I have with it as well. Finally, I also knew that it sort of went back to the original movie's approach, with Pinhead and the Cenobites being mostly in the background, and that the following movies did the same. While I could understand why many didn't care for that, it didn't bother me, due to just how great the original is. But that said, the original Hellraiser had such an amazing, unique, gruesome, and engaging story that the Cenobites' small screentime didn't matter, something I can't say for Inferno.

Just as Inferno is a very polarizing movie for the diehard fanbase, I have very mixed feelings about it myself. On the one hand, I applaud them for trying something different from what came before, Scott Derrickson's direction does help it stand out among the batch of movies that followed, and it's most definitely a twisted mindfuck, with a lot of freakish and grisly imagery throughout. Also, in terms of tone, taboo subject matter, and overall nastiness, it feels closer to the first two than the last couple of movies. But, as good as the performance is, the lead character is not an easy person to become invested in, I'm not that keen on the ultimate reveal of what's been going on (some aspects of which I find confusing), as well as Pinhead's role in it all, and, as is infamously the case with the next handful of movies, this feels like the mythos was pasted onto a story that already existed, even if whether or not that is the case here is up to debate.

Denver police detective Joseph Thorne, a brilliant but very shady man, with a knack for solving riddles and puzzles, is called to a very grisly crime scene that appears to have been ritualistic in nature. To his surprise, the victim is Jay Cho, someone he knew in high school. Among the chains and pieces of flesh attached to them, as well as some hidden cocaine, which he takes for himself, he also finds a strange puzzle box, and a candle with a severed child's finger inside it. Some fingerprints belonging to someone other than victim are found on the box, and while they're being analyzed, Thorne takes the box with him. Despite having a wife and young daughter, he picks up a hooker, named Daphne, and takes her to a motel. After snorting the cocaine and having sex with her, he fiddles around with the box in the bathroom, solving it and then having an apparent nightmare about encountering a number of horrific, humanoid figures. Awakening and returning to his precinct, Thorne learns that the finger belonged to a child around six or seven years old, one who was alive when it was cut off. At his desk, he gets a call from Daphne, hearing her frantically beg for help, followed by her screaming and being murdered. He and his partner, Tony Nenonen, go to the motel, and find her brutalized body hanging in the shower, as well as another child's finger; despite not liking it, Tony helps Thorne remove any evidence that he was there. Meanwhile, the other fingerprint on the box is revealed to be that of Leon Gaultier, a tattoo and piercing specialist. When Thorne confronts him, Leon reveals that Cho stole the box from him, and that it's actually the property of a fearsome criminal known as the Engineer. Thorne's informant, Bernie, tells him what he knows about Daphne and her possible connection to the Engineer, specifically how Daphne's employer, Terry, once tried to take a woman he loved away from his boss, only for her to be horrifically murdered. Now, Thorne is determined to find the Engineer, but the deeper he delves into the case, the more nightmarish visions he has, making those around him, as well as he himself, question his sanity. And while he desperately wants to save the child whose fingers are found at the crime scenes, he also finds himself trying to protect both his loved ones and his very soul.

Although Hellraiser: Bloodline ended up being the lowest grossing film in the series at the box-office ($9.3 million on a budget of around $4 million), both Clive Barker and Peter Atkins confirmed shortly after its release that Dimension was keen on making more. Gary J. Tunnicliffe said he even came up with his own idea for the opening to a possible fifth film but that, on the weekend he was going to meet Bob Weinstein to pitch it, Scream was released and became a monster hit; Tunnicliffe was then told that, as a result, Hellraiser wasn't exactly a priority at the studio. Once development on another film finally did begin, Atkins not only begged off the whole thing but Barker, despite initially intending to continue his involvement, had a falling out with the Weinsteins and would himself wash his hands of the series for a long time. Moreover, whether it was a genuine criticism or a case of sour grapes, he was very adamant that he absolutely hated Inferno when it was released; Scott Derrickson, in turn, fired back at Barker, saying he made a movie, "Too good, or at least too provocative, for him to just simply dismiss... Quite simply, I subverted Clive Barker's franchise with a point of view that he does not share, and I think that really pisses him off."

Out of all the Hellraiser directors, Scott Derrickson is definitely the one who's gone on to have the most successful career in the years since. At the time, though, both he and his writing partner, Paul Harris Boardman, were graduates from USC who hadn't yet had a big break in the industry, but an unproduced screenplay they'd written together, Darkness Falling, caught the attention of Dimension, after they'd rejected a number of concepts for the next Hellraiser. The studio liked the script the two of them turned in for Inferno and, after Derrickson proved his mettle by shooting a $10,000 test scene, Bob Weinstein allowed him to direct the film (around that same time, Derrickson and Boardman were also commissioned to write the second Urban Legend movie, Urban Legends: Final Cut). Even though he only had 30 days to shoot it, and was working with a small budget of $2 million, Derrickson had a lot of freedom in making the movie, mostly because, according to him, Dimension was focused on other movies at the time, like Scream 3; thus, in stark contrast to Bloodline, shooting went very smoothly. Derrickson has also said that, all throughout production, he wasn't sure if Inferno was going to play in theaters or not, and according to Boardman, neither were the studio. In the end, while I've heard it did play in one or two theaters, it was mostly a direct-to-video film.

In an interesting coincidence, the film's lead is played by a Clive Barker alumnus: Craig Sheffer, who starred in Nightbreed. However, unlike the flawed but decent character of Aaron Boone in that film, Inferno's protagonist, Detective Joseph Thorne, is quite reprehensible. While undoubtedly intelligent, having had an inquisitive mind since he was a kid, and a knack for solving puzzles and riddles, Thorne indulges in cocaine use, taking a small vial of it he finds at a crime scene, and is not at all faithful to his wife, whom he hardly ever sees anyway, due to his job. When he and Detective Tony Nenoen are examining the scene of Jay Cho's murder, Thorne, after noting that he went to high school with the victim, smiles when he talks about how, when Cho tried out for the basketball team, he and the others tormented him until he gave up, adding, "We gave him hell." At the station, he adds insult to injury by taking $300 from Cho's wallet, as well as the Lament Configuration, a piece of evidence, to indulge his love for puzzles. Later in the film, he threatens and brutally beats on his informant, Bernie, to make him tell him what he knows about the Engineer. Granted, said informant is heavily implied to be a sleazy pedophile, and Thorne is shown to have a soft spot for children, referring to them as, "The only sacred thing left in this world," but even that knowledge doesn't make his actions too heroic, as he still lets Bernie operate an ice cream truck that's quite frequented by kids, mainly because he relies on him for cocaine. And, in a really scummy move, when he has Tony help him remove all of his fingerprints and anything else incriminating him from the motel room where he had sex with the hooker named Daphne, he plants evidence making it look as though as Tony was the one who was there. He brings this up when Tony threatens to go to the captain about it, knowing he has a family and reputation to lose as well, and even says they won't believe him, as Thorne has been on the force longer. He promises to cook up an explanation for how Tony's items ended up at the crime scene, but even that will get him reprimanded by the captain, as it will make him come off as careless.

Even though Thorne shows a soft spot for kids, and does have genuine affection for his young daughter, Chloe, one of their few interactions, when he comes home at the beginning of the movie and nuzzles his face against hers and softly kisses her while she sleeps, comes off as more unsettling than wholesome, due to the expression on Thorne's face, the bizarre camera angle, and the music. It gets downright sad later on when, like her mother, Chloe asks Thorne if he's home for good, and he

says that, yet again, it's just for a few hours before having to go back out. Even worse is how, even though his wife, Melanie, is an apparently loving and attractive woman, and has been under the weather recently, he cheats on her without remorse. He rationalizes it in his narration, though it's a very warped viewpoint: "I believe in loyalty, fidelity. I understand the concept. My parents have been married for forty years. But I live in a different world. Most marriages fail. Most men just leave. I know that would kill her. But if she doesn't

know, if doing this keeps me coming back, then who's to say what's right and what's wrong?" And, again, while he definitely has a brilliant mind and loves intellectual games just as much as solving riddles and puzzles, there's also a need for him to not only win but win decisively. The movie opens with him playing chess with a professor following a basketball game he partook in, when he gets a call on his cellphone from Tony, who should've been there. He tells him, "Yeah, we won by seven, but it shoulda been twenty." He also wins the chess

game, and drives it home by telling the professor, "You played right into my game." In his first bit of narration just seconds later, he not only explains his lifelong love of puzzles, riddles, and mysteries, but adds, "I learned that careful of examination of 'how' and 'what' and 'why' would inevitably lead to understanding, and even to control," which not only tells us why he became a detective but why he takes winning so seriously.

Thorne's penchant for puzzles is what initiates the ever-growing nightmare he soon finds himself. After doing cocaine and having sex with Daphne, he goes into the motel room's bathroom and fiddles with the Lament Configuration. Solving it, he soon finds himself stumbling around a large house and running into some Cenobites, as well as Pinhead, who does something to his eyes. Thorne then awakens, having seemingly dreamed it, and leaves, with Daphne still asleep in the bed. But he then

gets a disturbing phone call where he hears her begging for help, before being murdered. Returning to the motel, he not only finds her brutalized body hanging in the shower, but also a child's finger, like the one found at Jay Cho's crime scene. Knowing the child was likely still alive when the fingers were severed, he becomes obsessed with finding the one responsible and saving the child before he's murdered. This leads him down a progressively deeper and darker hole,

searching for a fearsome, almost mythic figure called the Engineer, whom he's warned will begin hunting him if he persists. That's when Thorne really begins seeing nightmarish visions and imagery. He receives a videotape of Bernie being brutally murdered just off-camera by a man with a completely flesh face and a long tongue, but when he tries to show it to the captain, Tony, and a crime lab technician, there's nothing on it. He's then ordered to begin seeing the department's counselor, Dr. Paul Gregory, as the captain begins questioning

his mental state. Bernie is then found dead, just as Thorne described, and another child's finger is found in his cash register, as Thorne also saw on the tape. The investigation leads him to this redneck bar where he confronts Mr. Parmagi, someone who Bernie was told to meet, and tells him to inform the Engineer that he won't give up until he's saved the child. Even when he gets beaten up for his trouble, Thorne's resolve isn't diluted, as he thinks saving this child's life will be the best thing he could ever do. He also begins seeing the same flesh-faced figure who was on the tape, including at the bar, and starts to believe he may be the Engineer.

In the film's creepiest scene, Thorne meets with Gregory, telling him that he'd heard of the Engineer before, when he first joined the force, but thought it was just a way of creeping out the new guy. Gregory, in turn, tells him about another detective who ultimately killed himself after taking on a case connected with the Engineer. Moreover, upon hearing that the detective had the Lament Configuration with him at the time, Thorne learns about both it and the Cenobites, and becomes truly

frightened when he realizes that, since he opened the box, they came for him and are likely still around. Things grow even scarier for him when his wife gets a phone call from his mother, saying she had a visit from the Engineer. Giving his wife a gun to protect herself with, Thorne rushes to his parents' nursing home (which he's never visited once before), and has a bizarre vision that involves him hearing a child screaming for help, a sound he's been hearing continually, as well as his parents

being torn apart on the other side of a door. Thorne then awakens, only for his wife to get that very phone call, and when he rushes to the nursing home, his attempt to save his parents not only fails but he finds a box containing two more severed fingers. Going to the address named on a card inside the box, he witnesses Tony, with whom he just had a violent confrontation, being murdered by the Faceless Killer, another finger being shoved into his mouth afterward. He then gets a phone call from the Engineer, and when he demands to know

what he wants from him, he's told to go home. He returns to the home he shares with his wife and daughter, only to find them chained to a flesh pillar, dying from exposure to extreme cold. Thorne tries to take his daughter's hand, only for her arm to snap off, and both her and her mother's bodies fall apart completely. In his bereavement, he's further confused when Gregory, who suddenly appeared there after he arrives, tells him that the finger found in Tony's mouth was examined and the print turned out to be... Thorne's.

When Gregory tells him that he was the one who told him to go home, Thorne, naturally, thinks he's the Engineer. With that, Gregory drops his disguise and turns out to be none other than Pinhead. He tells Thorne that he's not the killer he's been looking for, and that to find the answer, he must go back to his childhood home. He chases after Pinhead, only to find himself on the very farm where he grew up, watching a vision of himself as a young boy head downstairs upon being called by

his mother. Down there, he finds an idyllic scene of his father asleep on the couch in the living room, and his mother serving his younger self brownies in the kitchen. But then, it's literally shaken apart, his childhood self disappears, and his parents become the old, mentally fragile nursing home patients they are in reality and attack him, forcing him to shoot them. He's also attacked by Daphne, Tony, and Bernie's brutalized corpses, and is forced to shoot them as well in self-defense, all while

hearing the sound of the young boy calling for help. That's when the Cenobites appear to him once more, and he finds himself in a black void, confronted by visions of his childhood self, with all but two of his fingers severed, and the Faceless Killer who, when Thorne pulls his gun on him, removes the mask of skin to reveal his own face. With that, Thorne is trussed up by hooked chains and Pinhead appears again, finally revealing what's going on and what it all means. He's in the Cenobites' realm, in his own private hell, and the

Engineer is a manifestation of everything despicable, cruel, and hedonistic about his character, which has been slowly killing the innocent person he once was, as personified by his younger self and the severed fingers. As Pinhead tells him, "Your flesh is killing your spirit," and Thorne watches helplessly as his cruel self cuts off the child's penultimate finger. Then, with only one death left, he's ripped apart by the chains, as his evil self watches, before walking off into the darkness. 

Initially, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel for Thorne, who suddenly awakens back in the motel bathroom, lying next to the Lament Configuration, as he was after he solved it. Finding Daphne sleeping soundly in the room, he leaves the motel and, clearly intending to turn his life around, goes back to his desk at the precinct, puts a photo of his wife and daughter on it, and has a friendlier interaction with Tony than ever before, ribbing him about having missed the basketball game. But then,

he gets the very same phone call he got from Daphne, beginning the whole thing all over again. Desperate to escape, Thorne shoots himself, only to find himself right back in the motel bathroom. He gets up and walks out the door, into his childhood bedroom, as happened after he first fiddled with the box, revealing that there's no escape from this private hell of his. As he says in the final part of his narration, "I lived in a world of facts, of a reality that I thought I understood. I believed I was the center of the design, and I was

certain that I knew all the answers. But now, I face the truth about what I've done to hurt those around me, and in hurting them, what I've done to myself. I've confronted my own demons, and now, the only thing I know for certain is that I will live with them forever." Sitting on the bed, the reality of this hits him like a ton of bricks and he screams, "No!", at the top of his lungs, which is where the movie ends.

Besides my mixed feelings regarding the nature of that entire revelation, as well as some confusion about it, it also just kind of leaves me cold and detached because of what a crappy person Thorne has been. It's nothing to do with Craig Sheffer's performance, as he does a good job, despite teetering on the edge of going cartoonishly over-the-top at points; rather, this guy is such a scumbag that I find it hard to feel sympathy for him, even when he himself realizes it at the end and makes an

attempt to fix it initially. Some may argue that watching a horrible person get what he deserves is akin to what eventually becomes of Frank and Julia in the original Hellraiser, but while they were definitely despicable characters as well, I could find some sympathy with Julia, and the story was balanced out by scenes with the genuinely likable Larry and Kirsty, whereas here, Thorne is the center of the movie, is in every scene, and so, we get into all the minutiae of every terrible thing he does. In the scene near the end when he finds

himself back in his childhood home, they try to allude to him having been a lonely young kid, with no one to play with on the farm, and spending his time alone in his room, solving puzzles, but that doesn't quite cut it for me, and as I've already said, making him someone with a soft spot for children in general only goes so far.

I have a lot more sympathy for the people in Thorne's life whom he either uses, abuses, or flat-out stabs in the back, like his partner, Tony (Nicholas Turturro). Though Tony hasn't been with the department as long as Thorne, and they don't come off as the absolute best of friends, they're still fairly chummy with each other, with Tony often testing Thorne's intelligence, and the two of them being on the same basketball team together. It also initially seems as though Thorne brings Tony with him back to the motel after getting that horrific phone call from Daphne and has him help wipe the scene clean because they're partners and he feels he can trust him. And despite not liking it all, as he's the kind of cop who plays things straight, and because he's risking his livelihood and reputation too, Tony still helps Thorne out. However, his conscience eventually prompts him to decide to tell the captain about Daphne... until Thorne reveals that he planted evidence that would incriminate Tony himself at the scene, much to his shock and anger. Also, having just said that their partnership is important to him, Tony is clearly hurt, calling Thorne a "scumbag" and saying, "I trusted you," before walking out on him at the bar they meet up at. Their interactions are fairly tense from then on, with Tony becoming further irked when Thorne waits a while before telling him about Leon Gaultier and how his fingerprints were on the box found at the Jay Cho crime scene. And since this is immediately after Thorne has tried to show him and the captain the videotape depicting Bernie's murder, only for it to turn out blank, Tony has a hard time believing Thorne's claims that he saw the murder weapon in Leon's parlor. But when Bernie does turn up dead, with the crime scene looking exactly the way Thorne described it from the videotape, Tony sticks with him when he goes to the redneck bar to meet with Mr. Parmagi. Even though he gets badly beaten up at the bar, Tony does take Thorne to see Paul Gregory rather than the hospital as he demands. After Thorne goes to the nursing home and learns his parents have been murdered, Tony shows up and tries to make him come back with him to the station to talk with the captain, clearly worried for his sanity. The two of them get into a scuffle and Thorne drives off to find the Engineer, only to see Tony get murdered, later revealed as a symbol of how he betrayed him.

Like I said before, it's impossible to feel completely sympathy for Thorne's snitch and cocaine dealer, Bernie (Nicholas Sadler), as it's heavily implied he's a pedophile who's operating an ice cream truck, but at the same time, Thorne absolutely beats the crap out of him to make him tell him what he wants to know. Because he has connections to the prostitution business, Bernie is able to tell Thorne that Daphne worked for a man named Terry who used to run such an enterprise for the Engineer, and goes on to talk about how Terry fell in love with one prostitute, enough for the two of them to try to escape the Engineer's reach. However, while they were living in a cabin in the countryside, the girl disappeared, only for Terry, after a long period of looking, to eventually find her severed head in his bed, with a very macabre note from the Engineer. Thorne demands that Bernie contact Terry and find out how to contact the Engineer, and when Bernie is, again, hesitant to do so, he gets kicked around some more. He promises he'll do it, but he gets brutally murdered by the Faceless Killer, although he did get a message from Terry that leads Thorne to the redneck bar where he meets Mr. Parmagi, as well as sees the killer again. During the climax, a manifestation of Bernie attacks Thorne with the hooked whip he was murdered with, again saying that they way he treated him wasn't right.

You especially feel for Thorne's wife, Melanie (Noelle Evans), and young daughter, Chloe (Lindsay Taylor), as they hardly ever see him because he's either on a job or using it as a cover to go out, do coke, and bang hookers. Melanie clearly senses that he's lying to her, calling him out on it when he claims she hasn't heard from him in a long while because he's been working on a case, but then, when she sees how badly beaten he is from what happened at the bar, she does treat his

wounds. Upon her getting the call from Thorne's mother, saying she was visited by the Engineer, Thorne rushes out of the house, after giving Melanie a gun to defend herself with. What's really sad is how Chloe, who earlier asked Thorne if he was home yet, and then asked when he would be home for good, comes walking down the hallway, crying for him, only for him to run right past her. Melanie has to comfort her hysterical daughter, who says she wants her daddy, only able to tell her, "Daddy's gone." When both this and what follows is revealed to have been a vision that Thorne had while lying on the bed, he rushes out without warning Melanie that something bad is happening or giving her something for protection, and when he returns home later, he finds them chained to a rotating flesh pillar, dying from exposure. Thorne is finally able to tell Chloe that he's home when she asks, only for her frozen arm to snap off, followed by both of their bodies literally crumbling.

Thorne's parents (Kathryn Joosten and Thomas Crouch) are also pitiable in that they're both stuck at a nursing home and, until he first runs to check in on them after Melanie gets the phone call, are never visited by their son. When he walks in on them, his mother, Mary, is in a rocking chair, knitting, and asks Thorne why he doesn't visit them, saying they don't like it there; Thorne's father, meanwhile, is a complete invalid, hooked up to a ventilator and unable to speak. There's a bit of

dark humor in this scene when Thorne, again hearing the child's voice screaming for help, pulls out his gun and heads towards a door, only for his mother to admonish him like he's a little kid: "Joseph Thorne, you put that thing away." Near the end, when we get a sense of what Thorne's childhood was like on his parents' farm, he seems to have had a fairly comfortable home, despite not having any siblings or friends to play with. While his dad is seen sleeping on the couch with the television playing, Mary seems to have been quite a sweet, loving mother, baking brownies for her son and calling him a good boy. But then, the idyllic scene turns horrific, and both of Thorne's parents become old and ghoulish, with hollowed out, bleeding eye sockets, and attack him, forcing him to shoot them.

One guy I don't mind seeing Thorne being a dick to is this crime lab technician (Brian Sostek) who constantly comes at him with an attitude when he has no reason to. When Thorne asks if he could run the other set of fingerprints found on the Lament Configuration that night instead of the next day, the guy sneers, "No, because, believe it or not, detective, I also have a life." Following the discovery of Daphne's body, Thorne goes back to the lab to check on the fingerprint analysis, and finds the technician sitting in front of the computer, reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with a sucker in his mouth. He tells Thorne about how long it could possibly take to find a match, and refuses to change the parameters of the search, as Thorne suggests, before commenting, "Come on, Detective. Let's not waste my time." With that, Thorne grabs his book, dumps it in the trashcan, and tells him that his time means nothing at the moment. Now that he has his attention, he gives him some new parameters, and it comes up with a match within seconds, prompting the technician to comment, "Wow, Sherlock fucking Holmes."

Even though his one scene is not only pointless but gets downright ridiculous as it goes on, I kind of like the character of Mr. Parmagi (Michael Shamus Wiles), whom Thorne meets at that redneck bar, as he has such a weird presence about him. Dressed up as a stereotypical cowboy, except that he's wielding six guns, and towering over Thorne, he asks him if he's there to play poker, then says he has a permit for the guns. He also tells Thorne that he's not the Engineer, and when Thorne says he's not going to stop until he saves the child, Parmagi tells him that the Engineer wants him to continue playing this game. After Thorne gets badly beaten up after chasing the Faceless Killer out of the bar, Parmagi appears again. Thorne reiterates that he's going to find the child, to which Parmagi says, "That, I suspect, is the object of the game." He even gives back Thorne his gun, which he dropped, before suddenly disappearing.

James Remar has an interesting and, as it turns out, very significant role as Dr. Paul Gregory, the priest/psychiatrist whom Thorne is ordered to begin seeing. Their first interaction is mundane and fairly friendly, with the two of them talking about their young daughters; Gregory notes, "I envy children. I envy their innocence," a sentiment that Thorne agrees with. Thorne also shows him a trick with the Chinese worry balls he often has with him, noting that such tricks are to entertain himself, as he's never done them for his daughter. But their second meeting, after Thorne has been beaten senseless at the bar and is really starting to question his sanity, is much more serious and eerie. When Thorne sees Gregory's reaction when he mentions the Engineer, he makes him tell him that he knows. Gregory then tells him about a veteran detective he counseled who, when investigating a case that involved the Engineer, began to gradually lose his mind until he committed suicide at his desk. He also mentions that he had the Lament Configuration on him at the time but it disappeared afterward. Thorne then shows him that he now has it and Gregory tells him, "It appears in occult literature here and there, throughout the centuries... They say it's a window, or a gateway. You open it, they come for you, and they tear you apart... Some call them Cenobites. Some call them demons, and say they take you to Hell." When Thorne then tells him that he opened the box and has been seeing the Cenobites ever since, Gregory tells him, "I'm more of a psychiatrist than I am a priest. Ask me if I believe in the devil, I don't know what to say. But ask me about this box, from what I've seen and read, I believe it's real. But the history is consistent: it opens, they come for you, and they leave. So, if you're saying they left you behind, and you're still seeing them, maybe they're still here." Gregory appears one last time near the end of the movie, when Thorne returns home to find Melanie and Chloe chained to the flesh pillar, dying from exposure. After revealing that the fingerprints from one of the child's severed fingers have been identified as his own, Gregory also tells Thorne that he was the one who spoke to him on the phone in the previous scene, telling him to go home. Thorne, naturally, thinks Gregory just confessed to being the Engineer, to which he says, "It's as good a name as any," before dropping the charade completely.

Although we first see him less than twenty minutes in, Pinhead's true introduction into the movie doesn't happen until the 79-minute mark, when Gregory is revealed to have been him all along (meaning he actually has a little more screentime than people think). With just twenty more minutes left at that point, and his most significant scene coming right before the ending, when he reveals the truth about what Thorne has been going through, a lot of people find his appearance very disappointing. Now, even though the Cenobites weren't the main focus of the first two movies, I can understand people's frustration with it here, seeing as how Pinhead was both a bona fide horror icon by this point and had been heavily featured in both Hellraiser III and Bloodline. I, however, don't have a problem with his lack of screentime; rather, what I don't like is the way in which he's utilized, which is as, of all things, a kind of moral guardian. He's been psychologically torturing Thorne in his own private hell for apparently the whole movie as punishment for the horrible things he's done in life, personifying his hedonism, avarice, and cruelty as the Faceless Killer, and the innocence he's been slowly killing through it as his child self. He tells him, "This is the life you chose, Joseph. All the people you hurt, all the appetites you indulged. You have destroyed your own innocence. Allowed your flesh to consume your spirit." Alluding to his penchant for chess, he adds, "You are your own king, and this is the hell you have created for yourself." And to drive the point home, as his adult self severs the child's next to last finger, Pinhead says, "Your flesh is killing your spirit." 

Therein lies the problem: this doesn't feel like the Pinhead we've seen in the previous movies. Yeah, we've seen his portrayal fluctuate from stoic and melancholic to out-and-out evil and homicidal and, in the case of the previous film, something of a combination, but even in the first two movies, where his and the other Cenobites' functions were at their most basic, he was never a moral guardian. Doug Bradley has said that he saw the character as an impartial judge, but I don't know if that's even

true, given how, even though he made the Cenobites spare Tiffany when she was manipulated into opening the box in Hellbound, he and the others were eager to have their way with Kirsty, despite her never opening it because she desired an unparalleled sensory experience. And even though Frank was a horrible man who deserved the horrific torture he was put through, he only got it because he solved the box wanting an experience beyond the limits, and was then put through it again as punishment for escaping the Cenobites when he decided he didn't like their concept of "pleasure." So, hearing Pinhead pass true judgment on Thorne for all the bad things he did, even coming off like he's admonishing him for it in his summation, rings false for the character. I've heard Bradley himself say the same thing (although, Gary Tunnicliffe has said he just doesn't care for the movie due to his lack of screentime, which Bradley has admitted was something that didn't sit well with him), and I have a feeling that's one of the reasons why Clive Barker particularly despises this film.

Speaking of Tunnicliffe, he's also been critical of the way Pinhead was shot in this film, which is always in a deep blue light, as he feels he was overlit. I, however, disagree with that sentiment and think Pinhead looks really cool like that, with the blue mixing very well with his white makeup (that could be personal bias, though, seeing as how blue is my favorite color). In fact, I may go as far as to say that I think this is the best he's been filmed outside of the first two movies. There's little else to say about the makeup that hasn't already been said, although you can tell Tunnicliffe was still intent on keeping the classic look, as had been his mandate when he took over the makeup for Bloodline.

Like a lot of Italian and European horror films from the 60's onward, Hellraiser: Inferno lacks in the story department but, visually, it's a very striking film. It's definitely the best-looking of the series' initial spate of direct-to-video entries, with an overall look that's very lush, with a warm feel to many of the interiors, like Thorne's home and the precinct, while the nighttime exteriors sometimes have a surreal blue-green look to them, even before things start to become truly otherworldly. Since it is a noir-style detective story at its heart, there are

many scenes filmed in that very contrasting, shadowy manner, although, in a nice subversion, the few daytime exterior scenes we get are very bright and sunny, with a feeling of a major heatwave, rather than coming off as gloomy, overcast, and cold, as per usual for the genre. Something of a prelude to just how bizarre the movie gets is when, as Thorne is having sex with Daphne, the shot of them doing it is inexplicably overexposed. But once he solves the Lament Configuration and has his first encounter with the

Cenobites, things start to become more and more visually startling. The moments where he finds himself back in his childhood bedroom are always completely bathed in a bright, bluish green lighting scheme; there's a moment in his childhood home's foyer where the picture seems to become sepia-toned, to the point where it looks black-and-white; and all of the scenes and moments with Pinhead have a blue look to them, from the icy blue in Thorne's living room when he finds his wife and 

daughter chained to the pillar, to the very deep blue that always lights Pinhead himself. Scott Derrickson and his cinematographer, Nathan Hope, also sometimes go for unusual and even uncomfortable camera angles, like in that moment between Thorne and his daughter when he first comes home at the beginning of the movie. Also, following his first encounter with the Cenobites, it suddenly cuts to a close-up of Thorne's face, and the camera both turns and pulls back to reveal he's

lying on the bathroom floor, next to the Lament Configuration. A similar edit and instance of camerawork follows Thorne first seemingly going to check on his parents at the nursing home, only to find himself still lying on his bed, as well as at the end when he finds himself back in the motel bathroom. Speaking of Thorne going to check on his parents, when he walks down the nursing home's hallway the first time, both his POV and the tracking shots of him are constantly tilting, and the former has moments where the back of the hallway seems to pull back and his vision appears to go out of focus. This disorientation is further punctuated by the flickering lights in the hallway. 

A noteworthy editing style is established from the opening scene, where Thorne and the professor's chess game becomes an increasingly rapid series of close-ups of their hands moving the pieces and punching the buttons on the timer, while the scene where Thorne has sex with Daphne has it fading to bright red rather than black for a transition. The moment after that, where he goes into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, is done in a series of dissolves that I'm not particularly fond of, as it reminds me of how John Carpenter got really

egregious with that in his last few movies, but fortunately, this is the only time where I really noticed it here. There are also some instances where the editing blends with Derrickson's direction for some instances of very well done filmmaking. When Thorne and Tony go to the motel after the former gets the phone call from Daphne, they hold off on showing us her body for a while. Thorne first goes in to investigate, walks into the bathroom, pulls back the shower curtain, we see a close-up of his shocked expression, and

then, we see him head out the door and back to the car. Getting back into the passenger seat, he sends Tony in to see for himself, and after sitting there for a bit, gathering the items from the glove-box he later uses to potentially incriminate him, he gets back out and heads to the door, where he's met by a shocked Tony. The two of them go inside, Thorne explains to Tony how he was with Daphne the night before, and before he asks him to help remove all traces that he was there, says, "I have no

fucking idea who did that to her." We now know for sure that it's bad, but we still haven't seen it. Then, after they wipe the place down and Tony calls it in, saying, "Somebody hung her in the shower like a piece of meat," Thorne walks back into the bathroom, and we're hit with three lightning fast cuts: a close-up of Daphne's face with her cut throat, another of her dangling legs, with blood running down them and collecting around the drain, and a wide shot of her hanging

body as Thorne walks in, all accompanied by the sudden sound of her strangled screaming from the phone call. Another example involves the videotape of Bernie's death, with the camera cutting back and forth between a close-up of Thorne's face as he watches and of the TV screen, and once the tape is finished and goes to static, the camera pulls back to show that we're now back in the precinct, and Thorne has unsuccessfully tried to

show Tony and some others what was on the tape. And before Thorne's final judgment, he breaks down a door, and the camera pulls back from him standing in the doorway to reveal a dark void, as the image of him fades and he himself is now in said void.

Obviously, with the low-budget, you're not going to get the kind of elaborate sets like in Bloodline, but just like with the movie's look, Derrickson was able to create a lot out of very little. Though some of the settings are fairly normal, like the motel where Thorne has his fun with Daphne, the interiors of the police precinct, and the bar where Thorne and Tony meet up, others stand out due to the art direction, cinematography, and how, in some cases, they start out innocuous but become off-kilter and strange; sometimes, it's a

combination of all three. The most obvious example of the latter is Thorne's own suburban home, which initially comes off as perfectly normal, but is made to look off with those unusual camera angles and becomes surreal near the end, when he finds his wife and daughter chained to the pillar in the snow-filled living room. Jay Cho's home at the beginning of the movie looks like a ritzy, upper-class home on the outside, but when Thorne and Tony enter the crime scene in the main sitting room, what they find is not only grisly but

also hauntingly ritualistic, with all of the lit candles, including around the spot where Cho's remains were found. Leon Gaultier's piercing parlor is memorable for how it's ugly and uncomfortable, with the gray walls featuring pictures of various piercings and stitches, as well as masochistic tools, hanging from them, as well as cramped and claustrophobic. The same also goes for the inside of Bernie's ice cream truck, the back of which is papered with all kinds of dirty pictures,

and it later becomes downright disturbing when his brutalized corpse is found inside. The interiors of Thorne's childhood home is another place we get to see looking both normal and even welcoming, when he enters it near the beginning of the climax, and unsettling and creepy, like when he first finds himself there, with the lights flickering constantly, and when the idyllic scene at the end suddenly becomes warped. Conversely, the interiors of the nursing home come off as creepy when Thorne

first goes there to see his parents, but when he rushes back there following that initial vision, it now seems innocent enough, until they find a very gory surprise in his parents' room. Following that, the dark, seemingly abandoned building he's led to, where he witnesses Tony being murdered from across the street, not only has those same flickering lights but also the interesting image of a telescope sitting in front of a pair of windows that have been papered up.

The best example of a totally mundane environment being made creepy in this film is the second scene between Thorne and Dr. Paul Gregory in the latter's office. This place had already been established before, in the middle of the day, when it was bright and sunny, but during this scene, which takes place at night, as a thunderstorm begins to move in outside, it takes on a completely different vibe. Not only is it literally darker in there than it was previously but the unsettling mood created by the actors' whispering

performances, what Gregory tells Thorne about the Lament Configuration and the Cenobites, the sound of the rain beginning to fall outside and the distant rumbling of thunder, and the very subtle but eerie bit of score you hear throughout the scene, all come together to make it one of the creepiest scenes in the entire franchise. Even though nothing happens besides the two of them talking, you feel like something is going to, or that the two of them are possible being watched, reinforced by Gregory's last line when he warns Thorne that the Cenobites may still be there at that very moment.

Speaking of the Cenobites, this film has some of the most truly unsettling ones since Pinhead's original group. The Wire Twins (Lynn Speier, Patricia Kara, and Leigh Taylor-Young) whose design is something of a spin on Angelique's, are the definition of S&M, not only with their very revealing, leather outfits and gloves, but their anorexic bodies, stitched up eyes, dark, puffy lips, dark-painted fingernails, the wires extending from the undersides of their chins to the edges of their bodices, and how their hair is tied up to come off

almost like one long strand extending down their backs. They also have very long tongues that they often use to lick Thorne's face, and their first interaction with him is, as I'll get into, exactly what you expect to see in a full-on Hellraiser movie. There's a new version of Chatterer (Mike J. Regan) here as well, only it's just a torso walking around on its hands. While it doesn't do anything other than look scary, that's more than enough, as this thing is bone-chilling when you see it coming up

some stairs, watching from a tree branch, or sitting in a doorway, as are the sounds it makes, which are both the chattering teeth and some growls. And while he's not a Cenobite, the Engineer (Ray Miceli) is also creepily memorable with his completely blank, flesh face, save for his mouth, which has vividly white teeth and another long tongue.

Overall, the film has a bizarre, David Lynch-like approach to it that definitely makes it one of the more unsettling Hellraisers, with plenty of imagery that can make your skin crawl. Thorne's first encounter with the Cenobites, where he comes across the Wire Twins, is genuinely freaky, with one of them suddenly emerging from a dark hole in the ceiling and jumping down in front of him, and the other does the same behind him. They proceed to force him into a corner, licking him with their long tongues, and sensually caress his chest, only 

to suddenly start sliding their hands directly under his flesh as well as above it (one of my personal, "Oh, shit!", moments for this movie), as he seems to be both aroused and in pain at the same time. That has to be one of the must pure realizations of this series' running theme of the intertwining of pleasure and pain that you're ever likely to see. It's followed by his first encounter with the Torso Chatterer, who crawls up the stairs at him while munching its teeth and growling. Speaking of the Wire Twins, they're at the center of another

freakish moment, when Thorne sees their image tattooed on  Leon Gaultier's back in a mirror, and they turn to face him, with the bizarre music during that moment making it even more nuts. Bernie's story about Terry's horrific brush with the Engineer comes with an off-kilter, blue-tinted flashback following Terry as he returns to his cabin in the countryside and walks in, ending on him entering the bedroom, finding his missing girl apparently lying under the cover, only for him to pull it back

and reveal just her severed head and a note below it. The videotape of Bernie's murder is especially disquieting, as the actual killing takes place offscreen, with the video focusing on the killer's legs, as he lashes and flagellates him with a hooked whip. However, we can hear Bernie screaming in pain and begging him to stop, along with the sound of the lashing and his flesh being ripped and torn, all while his ice cream truck's jingle plays in the background. Once the screaming has stopped, the

killer drops the whip, brings yet another severed child's finger into view, then pulls the camera up to himself, revealing that his face is nothing but flesh, and licks the finger with his long tongue, which steams when it makes contact. He pans the camera over to reveal Bernie's brutalized corpse, before placing the finger in the cash register, where the tape ends.

Things become even more bizarre later on, when Thorne first goes to check on his parents at the nursing home. As he walks down the hallways, with the camera tilting and his POV becoming warped and disoriented, he passes between two twin nurses who comment, "What a fine-looking boy," and is then passed by a man in a wheelchair who's wearing a straight-jacket, his face pulled by chains, and lets out a child's giggle. Thorne's attempt to visit his parents in their room leads to him ending up back in his childhood bedroom yet

again, as he hears his mother being ripped apart on the other side, followed by blood pooling underneath the door. Then, when things repeat themselves and Thorne heads to the nursing home again, he learns his parents are missing, and inside their room, as he, a nurse, and a security guard search it, the nurse inspects his father's empty bed, only for blood to ooze up through the sheet and cover her hand when she pushes down on it. Thorne then rips back the sheet to find that the

mattress is absolutely soaked in gore. His investigation of the address he finds on a card accompanying the two fingers at that scene leads to some Rear Window-inspired imagery, as he looks through a telescope pointing out the window and sees Tony being tortured and murdered in the building across from him. The image of Melanie and Chloe chained to the rotating flesh pillar in their snowy, chain-filled living room is a very memorable one in and of itself. And the climax is just full of visuals you're not likely to forget, like the nice, warm view of Thorne's childhood home turning sinister, with his parents becoming old and attacking him, him running into vengeful versions of the other people he mistreated throughout the house, and him ultimately finding himself in that black void.

The one scene where the movie's surreal nature ends up being just silly, though, is when Thorne and Tony go to that redneck bar. When they walk in, it suddenly feels like we're in a noirish western, with people in cowboy hats, boots, and period-style costumes sitting around, playing poker, which makes the two detectives feel very out of place (they even look at each other like, "What the hell?"). Thorne sits down at one table when another person leaves, is ignored completely when he asks those still sitting there some questions, meets Mr.

Parmagi, and spots the Faceless Killer across the room... wearing a cowboy hat. That's not disturbing or eerie, it's just funny. He chases him outside, into the woods, only to lose sight of him and see the Cenobites watching him (admittedly, that is creepy). He then stumbles down a hill, loses his gun, and when he gets two his feet, he sees two figures emerge out of a thick fog. Despite the growling sounds and they're initially being shot in creepy silhouette, these guys turn out to be long-

haired, Asian cowboys (that's how they're billed in the credits) who attack Thorne with karate kicks and roundhouse punches. One of them even does a whirling kick in midair, and when Thorne is on the ground, beaten to a pulp, they do swirls in front of him before Parmagi shows up! I have a feeling that even David Lynch would say that was too bizarre for its own, and Scott Derrickson has said that friends of his who otherwise enjoy the movie have told him it was stupid.

Inferno is the first movie since the original two to really lean into the taboo, both in subject matter and imagery. Even though it eventually turns out to be a metaphorical construct, the running plotline of a killer leaving the severed fingers of a still-living child at various gruesome crime scenes is a horrific one, as is the idea of the Engineer leaving Terry that woman's severed head with a note that reads, "You win, Terry. I kept what I needed. The rest is yours," especially when the Engineer turns out to have been a representation of Thorne's own cruelty.

That latter notion of sexual depravity intertwined with death is also depicted in how, some time after Thorne and Daphne spend a night together at the motel, she's brutally murdered and hung up half-naked in the shower. By extension, as I mentioned before, this is one movie that really emphasizes the franchise's dual themes of pleasure and pain, with that first scene between Thorne and the Wire Twins, as well as the real images of piercings and stitches at Leon's parlor, a close-up of a tongue

being pierced, and a hooked whip hanging on his wall, which is later used to murder Bernie. Speaking of Bernie, while it's only brought up in passing, the notion of an unashamed pedophile operating an ice cream van is an icky one, to say the least. And finally, while corrupt cops and infidelity are hardly rare concepts, it's upsetting to see just what a piece of work Thorne is, in how he tries to frame Tony at the motel crime scene and not only cheats on his wife but also all but abandons his little daughter, who wants him to be home even more than her mother.

Even though he was told upfront that the movie's low budget would only allow $50,000 for makeup effects, Gary Tunnicliffe opted to take the job without getting a paycheck himself in order to remain involved with the franchise and maintain a good relationship with Dimension. You'd never know they had so little money to work with, as the Cenobite designs and makeup effects are phenomenal, from the small pieces like the severed child's fingers at the crime scenes (Tunnicliffe said that the first one, inside the candle at the Jay Cho

scene, was especially tricky to create), the woman's severed head in the bed, and the hollowed-out, bleeding eye-sockets of Thorne's parents during the third act, to the bigger, really grisly setpieces, like Daphne's hanging body in the shower (you get a better look at her cut throat during the third act, when she attacks Thorne), Bernie's brutalized, flayed open backside (you look at that and just go, "Oof, ow!"), the huge amount of blood oozing out from under a door at one point, the bloody mattress beneath the sheet at the nursing home, the effect of

Chloe's frozen arm breaking off, and the shots of the boy's hands missing all but two of his fingers. The effects of flesh being pierced and stretched by hooks is also more potent here than it was previously, especially when it happens to Thorne's face at the end. Not only does that visual look painful in and of itself but, even though we only see it from the back and in extreme close-up, the same goes for when the flesh is completely pulled off his head as part of his final punishment. And

that's to say nothing of how painfully and grotesquely real the twins putting their hands under Thorne's flesh looks, right down to the flesh's translucency (ugh). Unfortunately, the visual effects are more on the mixed side. While some look pretty decent, like the Wire Twins and the Faceless Killer's long tongues, the tattoo of the twins on Leon's back coming to life and the cracks appearing on Melanie and Chloe's frozen bodies before they crumble apart, the actual crumbling,

the vision of Thorne's childhood home going from picturesque to broken and rotted, and some of the filter effects they put in certain shots, sometimes to simulate earthquake-like shaking, are pretty poor. The most notable visual effect, when Paul Gregory turns into Pinhead in one shot, looks really bad, although I do admire how, in the middle of the effect, you can see James Remar's image apparently fade into that of Doug Bradley out of makeup, and then into full-blown Pinhead.

But, for all of the compliments I can give Inferno, there are several major things about it, besides the character of Thorne, that keep me from fully embracing it. As I said, it's similar to many European horror films in that it prioritizes the visuals and atmosphere over the story, and that's certainly true in how, when you closely look at it, the story falls apart. I mentioned before how the entire scene at the redneck bar with Mr. Parmagi is completely pointless, as you could've easily cut

from the crime scene in Bernie's ice cream truck to Thorne visiting Gregory for the second time, given how Gregory has no reaction to Thorne's injuries after he got beaten up. Also, Pinhead's disguising himself as Gregory serves no purpose other than to provide a twist before the big reveal at the very end; Gregory could've easily been his own character, one who tells Thorne of the Lament Configuration, and Pinhead could've just appeared as himself at Thorne's home before the climax.

And that leads me into my biggest problem with the film's story: when exactly did Thorne get pulled into this private hell of his? You would think it was after he solved the box in the motel bathroom, but he finds the first severed child's finger at the Jay Cho crime scene, suggesting he's been in this purgatory from the very beginning (not to mention that the finger is inside a candle, which would be a tad difficult to pull off in reality). So, how did he get there? Did he find the Lament Configuration before the movie begins and then got pulled into

this hell then, and if so, what's the point of him finding the box, opening it, and then running into the Cenobites if he's already there? Also, are all of the other characters representations of people from his actual life whom he betrayed, screwed over, or even possibly killed, as well as the various settings? Or are they all just specific constructs of this realm? The ending would have me lean more towards the former, since everything keeps repeating along with the scenario that Thorne finds himself unable to escape, and he also finds himself

in that same bedroom after his suicide attempt only resets it all yet again. But it's just so vague that I'm not entirely sure, and I don't mean "vague" as a compliment, either, because it feels half-baked. And unfortunately, this third act reveal would set a precedent for the next three films, as each of them would feature some variation on it.

Like the previous sequels, Inferno is to be commended for doing something completely different rather than just rehashing a plot that had already been done, but in this case, it also feels far removed from what you would expect a Hellraiser movie to be, given what's already been established. This mostly has to do with how Pinhead, the other Cenobites, and the box operate here, which flies in the face of what we've seen before. I've already talked about how Pinhead passing moral judgment

on Thorne at the end feels completely wrong for the character, but that's only part of the issue. It's long been set in stone that, when somebody solves the box, they open the gateway to the Cenobites' realm, they come for that person, and drag them off to be tortured for eternity. They even have Gregory, or, technically, Pinhead himself, tell Thorne this, adding that it's always consistent. But now, suddenly, the box is taking people to a realm where they're faced with their sins over and over again in

a continuous loop, something which the Cenobites become involved with, and while that is certainly a potent manner of torture, it's not the sort of thing we've seen others put through in the past. It actually feels even more out of place than the box's role in the summoning of Angelique in the previous film, as if Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman were really interested in making some combination of Se7en and Jacob's Ladder but were forced to make it a Hellraiser movie instead.

Even though Derrickson has always insisted that, unlike the next handful of movies, this script was always meant to be a Hellraiser movie, you have to wonder if that's true, given how pasted on the familiar elements feel, how everything else fits together more naturally, and how much harder the movie leans into them, especially the detective story side of things. (Doug Bradley also maintains that this was a separate script that was turned into a Hellraiser film, but given his disdain for the movie and his reported penchant for embellishing the truth, I'd take that with a grain of salt.)

Fittingly, the music score by Walter Werzowa is just as strange as the movie itself, and is quite eclectic in its styles. For instance, he leans into the film's detective story feeling for some parts, playing a low saxophone for the scene where Thorne picks Daphne up on the street, and later goes into the country/cowboy feeling for the scene at the redneck bar. There are some parts of the score where it feels like you're watching some low-budget skin flick, like this weirdly sensual, smooth jazz sort of piece for when Thorne goes home the first time and nuzzles his daughter cheek, and the use of this song, From Eden by Mod:1, in the scene between Thorne and Daphne, as well as over the ending credits (which I felt was a mistake). Weirdly, the moment where he gets beaten up outside of the bar is done in that same smooth style, with an attempt at otherworldly sounds in the background. And then, there are times where the music is just plain weird, like when the Wire Twins tattoo on Leon Gaultier's back comes to life, which has this high-pitched, female voice sound that feels like it's ululating the word, "Hey." All that said, Werzowa's score does have its highlights. His main title theme is pretty cool, coming off as nicely haunting and even sorrowful, with a vocalizing choir that really blows up near the end, sounding, as Paul Kane noted in The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, akin to Jerry Goldsmith's music for The Omen. As previously noted, the low, very eerie sounds you hear in the background during Thorne and Gregory's second scene adds to how creepy it is. The music for Pinhead's reveal is like a crazed church organ, and the piece that plays during Thorne's judgement is similar, but softer, before it crescendos into epic-sounding vocalizing when he's pulled apart. And the music for the horrific and freakish moments are often as nightmarish as the images they accompany.

While it's still a very polarizing film among fans, those who love Hellraiser: Inferno often really love it, with some even considering it among the best in the series. Whether or not you'll feel that way depends on what it is you want from a Hellraiser movie. Make no mistake, this film has some of the most surreal, bizarre, and insane imagery you're likely to find in this franchise (or most other franchises, for that matter), as well as a well-done visual style, some memorably unsettling Cenobites, excellent makeup effects, and a feel for the taboo we haven't seen in this series for quite a while. But, on the flip side, your protagonist, though well-acted, is a terrible person; the story doesn't stand up to scrutiny, with some scenes and plot elements being entirely pointless; the music score ranges from quite good to head-scratching; and, above all else, the use of the mythology, the Lament Configuration, the Cenobites, and Pinhead himself are nothing like what we've come to expect at this point. If a Hellraiser movie that has more in common with Jacob's Ladder, Se7en, and the movies of David Lynch sounds appealing to you, you'll probably love Inferno; otherwise, this likely isn't the movie for you, especially if you want to see Pinhead.