Hellraiser: Bloodline

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.

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.

This movie succeeds if you're a fan of Clive Barker's comic book. It follows the mythos quite logically, and adds a good deal of conjecture to the "reality" of the cenobites. As a sequel this film fills a void.

As a film on its own, this movie should be watched. Its engaging story and thought-provoking plot is enough to keep any viewer entertained, not to mention the violence and gore. Not a bad movie or wasted time.

Taking place over the course of 400 years, three generations of the Lemarchand/Merchant family consisting of toymaker Phillippe in 1796, Architect John in 1996, and engineer Paul in 2196(all played by Bruce Ramsay) all find themselves haunted by their connection to a puzzle box made by Phillipe that has served as the cenobite's gateway to Earth. Over the course of several lifetimes, Cenobite Angelique (Valentina Vargas) has confrontations with the Merchant bloodline eventually culminating in Paul Merchant's attempts to end the cenobite threat forever.

Following the release of Hellraiser III, Clive Barker took a more active role in Hellraiser IV hoping to give the series a refresh. Inspired by the ending of Hellraiser III which featured a building inspired by the aesthetics of the Puzzle Box, the initial premise was built upon the idea of a shape changing structure used to capture Pinhead and teaming with Hellraiser II & III scribe Peter Atkins the two pitched their take to Miramax who greenlit the project. The script was seen as the most ambitious Hellraiser film as it called for elaborate special effects and a story spanning three different eras but a limited budget provided by Miramax forced rewrites scaling back the film's script to work within the limitations. After no suitable director could be courted, including Stewart Gordon who declined following artistic disagreements, directing duties were given to Kevin Yagher, a special effects technician who impressed with his directorial work on the TV series Tales from the Crypt. Following negative reactions by Miramax to the initial 110-minute long workprint, executive mandates soon followed which demanded Pinhead appear more prominent and earlier in the film, a framing story added, and a happy ending ordered. Exhausted from the shoot, Yagher declined to return with Joe Chappelle brought in to direct the reshoots who's no stranger troubled Miramax produced horror films as he directed Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. Upon release the film was negatively received by critics and audiences, and its box office saw a sizable dip making $9 million against its $4 million budget and resulted in further entries being released directly to video without Clive Barker's involvement (until later this year where a long gestating reboot will be released on Hulu). Because of its troubled production history (and Alan Smithee credit), Hellraiser: Bloodline does carry a certain level of fascination of "what might've been?". While no director's cut exists due to 10% of the original intended material not being shot, there have been fan curated attempts at producing something close to Yagher's original intentions. But even if Bloodline were to have been finished as intended, there's some sizable problems inherent to the film that even fan driven editing can't fix.

Due to the fact Barker took a more active role in the film's production as opposed to Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, there is definitely an earnest attempt that comes through on screen that the filmmakers are at least trying to bring Pinhead and the series itself back to something more in line tonally with the first two entries rather than the over the top excess we saw in the third entry. The script is truly epic in scope as we see the box's 18th Century origins involving a Marquis de Sade esque duke who dabbles in the dark arts and the themes of legacy and destiny are certainly ambitious with Bruce Ramsay called upon to play three different generations of the Merchant lineage and he does really well in all three, particularly in the fan restoration where some solid work from the 2196 storyline was jettisoned in the original theatrical cut. The film also features solid work from Mickey Cottrell playing the despicably evil Du de L'Isle and his equally reprehensible assistant Jacque played by Adam Scott is also very fun.

Unfortunately, the major problem with Bloodline is like Hellraiser III, Bloodline tries to make the cenobites the primary antagonists and much like how it fell flat there, it also doesn't work here. While Pinhead may be the "face" of this series, he really only works in a supporting capacity and shouldn't be the primary driving force behind the plot as we saw with the antagonists in the first two Hellraisers who made those films work. The movie does have a secondary antagonist in Valentina Vargas' Angelique, but she's frankly so similar to Pinhead that even though the character acts as a succubus for the various Merchant descendants there's really nothing she does all that different from Pinhead aside from seduction. A lot of the cenobite scenes just feel old hat at this point with Pinhead's piercing chains that tear people apart having lost the original simplistic impact they once had. Even if this entry had been the third movie instead of Hell on Earth it wouldn't have worked all that well because it's a massively overstuffed movie with its three timelines and whether you're watching them play out linearly or with the framing device the characters and actions feel too thin and disconnected from each other to make for a satisfying experience.

Hellraiser: Bloodline can't be faulted for its ambition or scope, but that can't make up for the fact the Cenobites have exhausted most of their novelty at this point and the series is struggling to keep itself fresh. The movie does get unfairly dismissed as just being "Pinhead in Space", but that's really not a fair assessment of this movie and undersells its ambitions as a cheap exploitative gimmick. Bloodline does feel like a movie with a brain and ideas but maybe those ideas were muddle and lost with the scaling back of the script and would've been allowed to flourish if they'd divided it into three separate films (as Barker had considered). It's not a trainwreck, but it's also not some maligned masterwork either.

I've been a Hellraiser fans since I was 15 years old, my all time favorite in the series being the amazing HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II. The nightmarish trip to hell with the fascinating vision of hell and the theatrical staging was just marvellous. Add in the bombastic soundtrack and it ranks as one of the top 3 horror movies of all time, surpassing even the original HELLRAISER. HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH was total garbage. They attempted to make Pinhead a wisecracking anti-hero like Freddy Krueger - and that was just so out of character. HELLRAISER (IV): BLOODLINE attempts to go back to the roots, exploring the origins of the box and was literally butchered by the f#kin producers, which led to the director (Kevin Yagher) withdrawing his name from the project and it became one of those imfamous "directed by Alan Smithee" movies. The movie takes place over 3 time periods, the past, the present and the future. In my opinion they should have scrapped the future plot - Pinhead's excursion to space - it's just ridiculous and absurd and does not fit into the Hellraiser universe. Also HELLRAISER: BLOODLINES was chopped down to a meager 85 minute runtime and feels rushed. A lot of scenes were cut out on behest of the producers which keeps the film from being a great entry into the series. If they had ditched the "Pinhead goes to space" scenario and focused more on the past and present this movie could have been FAR superior. It still is not nearly as terrible as HELLRAISER III, VI and all the successors, but it is wasted potential here. Not all is bad though: the makeup effects are superb, the sado-masochistic scenes are among the best in the series and the cenobites don't look like the clowns of HELLRAISER III (except for the twins. They're just weird). Also, the past "segment" of the film drips with atmosphere. Overall, this could have been a 9 out of 10, but the space opera drags it down quite a few notches.