mindsclay

I have been a fan of the Hellraiser movies 1 and 2. They were directed by the author of the Hellraiser books, Clive Barker. They worked for me. But then the franchise following became extremely lame. Usually some sort of mystery having a few people in a turmoil, then the Cenobites show up. Movie over.

But today I just watched the 10th installment (I must have missed 3 or 4 in between), and it surprised me. It went right into the Hellraiser mythos from the beginning and continued through to the end. Some decent detective story genre thrown in with a relatively good twist. The story concepts seemed really close to what Clive would have written. The ending could have been better (some missing tie-ins), but well done.

This writer-director did good. Bravo!

Not at all what I expected. At first I was all enthralled, but then as I saw what they were doing with the story I was more like "What the heck, guys?"

For this being the "last" one, they sure didn't tie up any loose ends. I felt the general theme was a cop-out. I waiting for it to resolve, but it never did. Well, it kind of did. Too much bouncing around and not enough substance. Perhaps if it were another 20 to 30 minutes of substance, it would have been an awesome movie. Substance as in meaningful human interaction, dialog, dynamic plot devices... cutaway scenes to previous movies did not help.

Don Coscarelli did not direct it and I hear it had a really low budget, so maybe that's what happened??

I thought Reggie Bannister did a good job.

I can't go into details as I do not want to generate a spoiler alert.