Hellraiser: Línea de sangre

For years, I'd heard that Bloodline was one of the worst sequels of all time. Having just finished watching it, I can safely say it's nowhere near as bad as some people have made it out to be. It's not as good as the first three by a long shot, but the production design and effects are excellent and I was never bored. The story can be confusing and the characters could have been better drawn, but it's far from the disaster many have made it out to be.

It's been four years since "Hell on Earth" which was a big letdown. Now we have part four which is "Bloodline." It seems the "Hellraiser" franchise departed from the storyline of the previous three to create another storyline altogether. It starts in space in the year 2176. A lone space station crewmember is solving the hellcube. By the time he's done some agents/officers of some sort come to detain him and remove him from the station. At that point we get a history lesson in the form of a doctor asking the lone officer what he was doing. He then goes into his historic bloodline and ties to the hellcube as well as the potential of a cube to forever imprison the demons.

"Bloodline" just didn't hold my interest. I always like to see Pinhead. Of all of the scary movie villains he has the most ominous voice, but when he speaks about pain, suffering, and pleasures it's almost poetic. Chucky and Freddy go for comedy while Jason and Michael Myers choose not to speak at all (if they can speak). Maybe Candyman would be the closest vocal comparison to Pinhead. In any case, the movie as a whole fell flat.

When the beginning of this movie started in OUTER SPACE, I was thinking this movie was doomed from the start. However, I was pleasantly surprised that the rest of the story wasn't too bad. Between Jason X and this, I think it's safe to say that '80s horror does NOT belong in sci-fi. But as a whole, I'd say the movie could've been much much worse.

If you search around, you'll find in the Internet the original script for Bloodline as well as the 'Workprint' videos saved by the film's original director. To be honest, the original script needs a couple more drafts in order to properly explain the story to the audience. Too much of it was left vague and poorly explained. But the plot did make sense when both the script and initial footage are considered together. It's hard to know exactly what happened to drive away the film's director. But what happened afterward is a classic Hollywood mess. Core points of the plot were ignored, others ripped away, others turned inside out to the point of blatantly contradicting basic Hellraiser plot and character concepts. Despite the idiotic mess made of the plot, much of it is beautifully done. It was the very last of the Hellraiser films with any level of inventiveness and class. As such, it's worth watching. But raspberries to the dolts who bolted together the elegant remnants of this film into a lumbering ignoramus.

The year is 2127, and a descendent of the maker of the box that opens the gate to Hell is trying to figure out a way to open the box and trap the demons that come out of Hell. He has commandeered a space station (that he himself designed) for this task. He opens the box, lets the demons out, and is detained (people begin to investigate his questionable behavior on the ship) before he can capture them. Almost the entire film is told in the form of a story which he tells the people holding him, in an effort to get them to let him go so he can finish his work. Needless to say, it takes a lot of gory deaths to convince them.

There is a small bit of tension created by the fact that the entire time he is telling the guards what is going on, the Cenobites are out and are on the ship. However, this is largely forgotten about for the majority of the film because so much of it takes place in 18th century France, the time when the box was created. Basically, some toymaker makes the box, opens it, demons show up, and they terrorize his family for generations. You'd think they'd be grateful because he let them out into the world of the living. Anyway, the guy in 2127 has taken upon himself the task of building a NEW box that will be sort of an antidote to the first box, one that is designed so that it can actually trap LIGHT inside.

It's an interesting enough story, and it was actually fairly entertaining, but the film itself was still somewhat lacking. The acting was pretty bad (but at least Ashley Laurence was blissfully absent again), and there wasn't much effort put into the directing. The movement back and forth from the distant future to the distant past was also a bit detrimental at times to the tension of the story, but luckily the film did present a few cool new cenobites (one that was satisfactorily created out of a couple of idiot security guards), and Bloodline also displayed probably one of Pinhead's best performances ever. I would say that Bloodline is more of an informational movie than a good Hellraiser movie. While it is interesting to watch, it is almost more informational than entertaining. So even though the movie itself may have been disappointing, I think that it is a good addition to the series as a whole. It works better within the Hellraiser series than it does by itself.