Hellraiser III: Puerta al infierno III

In New York City, Pinhead, the puzzle box, and the other Cenobites are trapped in a pillar. J. P. Monroe buys it for his nightclub, The Boiler Room. Frustrated TV reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) encounters Terri (Paula Marshall) at the hospital who brought in a victim of the club. She decides to investigate when her story is turned down. Terri turns out to be one of Monroe's many girlfriends and she has the box.

This is the franchise turning into a more standard horror. It has the skin-ripping fun. The characters work. I love Farrell from Star Trek and she's fine as the protagonist. I like the mind games from Pinhead. The WWI dream stuff can be better substituted with an additional character. It's trying to explain the monster when it doesn't need explaining. It does give a final solution which is very important. Honestly, Pinhead is a brilliant monster design. The new ones are pretty cheesy. The camera and the CD Cenobites can exists no other time. They even try some quippy dialogue although Pinhead is undefeated as a character.

I have yet to see Bloodline or Inferno, but Hell on Earth is the worst of the first three Hellraiser movies. It lacks both the wit and the sheer terror of the first two films. What's more, it breaks the rules established in the previous Hellraiser films (that is, Cenobites cannot harm the truly innocent, the Cenobites can be summoned or banished by the box, and so on). And while Pinhead actually spoke very little in the first two films, in Hell on Earth he is downright talky. Unfortunately, only a few of his lines are very memorable. It is unfortunate that Clive Barker did not have more to do with this movie (he wrote and directed the first and wrote the story for the second), as it might have turned out much better.

Cheap looking sequel reduces the complicated Hellraiser and Pinhead legends into your standard Freddy and Jason cliches complete with teenagers running around in distress and discussing their so called problems in between.

This time around Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and a TV news reporter (Terry Farrell) battle it out for possession over a box that can open the gates of hell and end the world as we know it. Not even Bradley's commanding presence can breath life into this.

Unrated; Sexual Situations, Nudity, Extreme Graphic Violence, and Profanity.

Watching this film as part of a four movie Hellraiserthon, I was full of expectation after the brilliance of the first two films. This third venture was a total disappointment, replacing the plot and tension of the earlier films with pretty girls and lots of mindless violence. The only saving grace was the excellent performance by Doug Bradley as a very confident and menacing Pinhead. Personally, I'd watch the first two films many times again, but skip this vacation from quality.

Where Hellraiser 1 and 2 were both very dark and very British, Hellraiser 3: Hell On Earth is very Hollywood.

J. P. Monroe is the scumbag, soulless owner of The Boiler Room, a somewhat gothy dance club decorated with morbid art. In his search for more profane objects to add to his collection, J. P. comes across, and subsequently purchases, an odd pillar in an art gallery, which fans of the first two films will have no trouble recognizing. Enter Joey Summerskill, a frustrated reporter who comes across a bizarre death in a hospital emergency room. As she watches, a young man is torn to pieces by hooks and chains that appear out of midair. Eager to discover the story behind the gruesome, supernatural death, and with only one clue to follow, Joey arrives at the Boiler Room and befriends the insecure and abused Terri, J. P.'s ex girlfriend. Together, they discover the history of the Lament Configuration, the bizarre happenings at the Channard Institute and the story of Kirsty Cotton. But it doesn't end there. Joey begins having dreams about a man named Elliot Spencer, a World War One soldier who warns her that evil has been unleashed in the form of his own evil alter ego, the Cenobite Pinhead. Indeed, Pinhead soon breaks free and turns The Boiler Room into a slaughterhouse. Now he wants Joey. But can Elliot Spencer stop Pinhead before Joey is taken to Hell?

This isn't a terrible sequel, really. It's not great, but it's nowhere near as bad as some of the others that followed. There's some nice bloody gore and naked girls, and Pinhead, as always, seems to be enjoying himself immensely, seducing his victims with a smile and making his offer of an eternity of pain seem quite irresistible. His scene with a priest is particularly nasty and blasphemous...and wickedly funny. The storyline doesn't always make sense, there's a lot of unintentionally laughable moments and some of the acting borders on the ridiculous, but all in all, Hellraiser 3 is pretty good cinematic junk food. If nothing else, Doug Bradley alone always makes these films watchable with his flawless portrayal of Pinhead.

6 out of 10.