Saturday, October 27, 2012

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth


Everybody seems to hate this movie.  Talk to fans of the franchise and it's typically placed down there at the bottom of the pile, and I think undeservedly so, though this movie has its terrible moments.  I really tried to pay more attention this time watching the movie for the third time, because I'll admit that in the past my attention wandered because for long stretches of time, the movie doesn't do much, so I get distracted by shiny objects and wind up basing my positive opinion on the parts of the movie I saw and not the stretches of time when I was ironing my socks or whatever.  I must say though, the movie still holds up as better than everyone else says it is even under closer scrutiny.

Of course the story is kind of garbled, and it's a little silly with the lead character's nightmares about her father that don't do much but tell us that there's a way for Pinhead to get to her, but there's still a lot to like in this movie.  The gore is pretty cool, and most of the characters that I don't like get horribly mangled, so there's a cathartic release there.  The movie also adds some cool touches like showing us a character rushing off to help after watching a TV news report of something horrible happening, only for the camera to pan down and show us that the TV was unplugged the whole time.  Whoops!  Of course, there SHOULD have been cops and news crews at the scene of this crime (everyone in town must be blind and deaf not to have noticed) but never mind that, the movie still has some cool tricks in store.  this is the beginning of reducing Pinhead to a wisecracking smartass horror villain instead of mysterious denizen of hell, though, so I can see why fans of the series piss on this movie so much.  I still find it an entertaining way to kill an hour and a half though.

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