Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Hellbound starts off almost immediately after the end of Hellraiser. Kirsty has been sent to a psychiatric facility after she and her boyfriend, Steve, were found outside her family home following the explosion that occurred as the Cenobites were sent back to hell.

I’m using “hell” as a term for the realm they inhabit as it’s an easier frame of reference and it’s still not adequately explained to me by the end of this film where they actually come from.

For reasons that aren’t explained in any way, Steve is sent home rather than being kept under observation after telling police and medical staff what he saw but Kirsty, after waking from unconsciousness corroborates Steve’s story, is kept in for observation.

Hysterical women, am I right?

It turns out that it’s not just the strange story that she’s spinning that is keeping her in the facility — her tales have piqued Doctor Channard’s interest. It turns out he’s been investigating the lore of the Cenobites and the puzzle boxes for some time and has developed and infatuation with them.

After hearing Kirsty demand that the mattress her step-mother Julia was murdered by the Cenobites on be burned, Channard contacts the police and has the bloody mattress moved to his house (more on that later).

After bringing one of the hospital patients to his home (more on that later), Channard sets him up on the mattress with a straight edge razor and lets the poor man go to town on himself. The patient is usually in a straight jacket as he thinks his body is covered in maggots and will do anything to get rid of them — including carving off his own flesh. When the poor fellow begins hacking at the non-existent creatures and his blood mingles with Julia’s on the mattress she’s brought back to this world from the hell-realm she’s been in.

Channard has been obsessed with the brain, memories, pain and how it all interconnects, including conducting some rather unprofessional, unnecessary and sadistic operations on unsuspecting patients it appears, and he’s eager to explore this new realm of possibilities which includes luring multiple victims to his home (more on that later) so that Julia can regain her human flesh form again.

In order to fully experience what the Cenobites have to offer, Channard tricks a young puzzle-mad patient named Tiffany into opening one of the puzzle boxes he has collected.

When she is successful, Kirsty uses it as an opportunity to enter the Leviathan’s Labyrinth as she thinks her father is trapped there and needs rescuing.

Can Kirsty find her father and keep Tiffany safe while avoiding Julia, Channard and the Cenobites who all have their own dastardly plans for her?

Like Sands Through The Hourglass

🎃Spoilers for Hellbound: Hellraiser II below!🎃

Okay, before we get into the nitty gritty of my review, I have NO idea what sort of time system this film operated on.

Kirsty wakes up and Channard finds out about Julia’s literal death bed, makes a call and then it’s at his home seemingly the same night.

Kyle, Channard’s assistant and someone who I had a right massive “Oh! It’s that guy from that thing!” moment with (It’s William Hope who plays Lt. Gorman in Aliens) arrives at the house the next day (it’s daylight so we can assume it’s the day after the mattress was delivered), breaks in using the tiniest screwdriver I have ever seen, and then after seeing a resurrected Julia nom down on the poor mental patient runs back to the hospital to get Kirsty away from all of the very real madness she’s been telling everyone is going on.

Kirsty, because she thinks she can rescue her father from Hell, heads back to Channard’s house with Kyle where we see that the good doctor has somehow managed to abduct at least 8 people by my count, string them up in the attic and let Julia feed on them.

How did he have the time to do all of this? Eight plus people? Even if he were super fit I don’t see how he could man-handle all of those people on his own into his house in under 24 hours.

Unless it took Kyle several days to get back to Kirsty, but then how did he manage to get to the doctor’s house not long after the mattress had been delivered?

It really makes no sense and took me out of the story a bit, it would have been much better if Kyle wasn’t able to get to Kirsty for some reason which would give a delay in order for the doctor to have kidnapped people.

Evidence? What Evidence?

We know the police are a bit inept in this film. I mean in the opening 5 minutes we have a police officer unloading his pistol into one of the dead bodies Julia and Frank had stashed away in the first film.

And then we have an officer asking what he should do with the mattress. You know the mattress in the middle of a suspected murder scene. You know, the mattress with blood all over it.

He’s told to tag it and send it away as evidence, and yet a simple phone call from Doctor Channard gets it re-routed, not to a lab so it can be tested or perhaps a secure room in the hospital so they can use it as a therapy tool for Kirsty. No, it’s delivered seemingly by the police TO HIS HOUSE.

I mean, there is inept and then there is inept, but really? Do we honestly think Channard has that much sway in order to get an officer to “lose” evidence. And as terrible as Detective Ronson is at his job I think a missing bloody mattress is something you’d notice.

Although it did make me laugh out loud at the police’s shenanigans which was a nice respite from the horror.

The Doctor Will See You Now

How on Earth did Channard get a patient (in a straight jacket) from the hospital grounds to his house?

If we infer that his house in on the hospital grounds as Kyle and Kirsty make it there quite quickly (see my complaint about timelines above), his house would be secured and separate from it — you wouldn’t want a patient just able to wander from the hospital garden into your back yard while you’re having a barbecue.

So why did no one stop him? Surely someone would have seen him dragging a patient off the premises?

And then no one noticed him missing? Are there no room checks — I mean I guess not as no one saw the bloody writing on the wall in Kirsty’s room and raised the alarm.

So what kind of hospital is this?

We know Channard is a sadist who deserves to be locked up in his own hospital but Kyle seemed like a decent bloke, and other staff members would be too. Plus there are rules and regulations. None of it makes sense.

Cenobite Cop Out

I think my biggest gripe is that it’s too easy for Kirsty to get the Cenobites on her side when the evil Channard Cenobite comes for her and Tiffany.

Pinhead and the others have forgotten they were once human, I assume because time truly has no meaning for them (much like the writers of this movie it would seem) but a simple photograph was enough to trigger something in Pinhead to get him to stand up against Channard.

This robbed the Cenobites of their power in my eyes.

What would have been better was for Pinhead to have gone after Channard because of what he believes in — the rules.

When Tiffany first opens the box and the Cenobites are summoned, Pinhead stops the others taking her saying something along the lines of “hands don’t summon us, desire does.” Channard was the one that felt the desire to have the box opened, Tiffany was merely the curious pair of hands that let him do it.

So when Channard gets turned into his Cenobite form and has patients in the hospital playing with puzzle boxes and getting hooks in their skin, this isn’t really following the rules, is it?

I am sure Pinhead would have seen how Channard was going to upset the order of the chaos realm and that could have been reason enough to go after Channard, instead it was a “humanity conquers all” moment, even if they did all die.

Although it’s a hell realm so you can’t really die I suppose.

Final Thoughts

I had promised myself this would be a quick review as I have 31 films to watch this month but as you can see I had a lot to say!

Complaints aside, Hellbound: Hellraiser II wasn’t a bad film, it just wasn’t a good film.

I had been hoping that, as we entered the labyrinth, we would get to understand the Cenobites more: what their motivations were, how they picked people to have access to (or knowledge of) the box and what controlled them.

What we got was a mess of inconsistent (to me) lore, a God in Leviathan that didn’t really seem to control much as he left it up to Pinhead to run things, an inconsistent timeline that made no sense and Cenobites that were defeated ridiculously easily.

In terms of the filmmaking, it was reasonably competent and clipped along at a good pace. The editing did the best it could with the confusing timeline and didn’t linger where it didn’t need to.

And I don’t know if it’s because I was listening more intently than I did in Hellraiser, but the sound design was excellent. When Julia first appears and is wandering around Channard’s home there is a delicious squelching every time she moved which just highlighted the fact she had no flesh.

I also really liked the scene with Pinhead as his human self, sitting in an Indian tomb of some kind. He’s playing with the box and all of a sudden discordant church-like bells start to chime as if this place is meant to be holy but it’s somehow being twisted by the puzzle box being manipulated.

One let down though was the stop-motion animation used for some of Channard’s “weapon” effects, and it’s not that they were stop motion (I mean, there was no viable CGI at the time anyway), it’s just that they were cheap and poorly done. When you compare them to the maestro that is Ray Harryhausen, these effects were choppy and not fluid at all and it really ruined an an otherwise decent Cenobite effect for Channard.

So you might think that from all of my negative comments I didn’t enjoy the film, and that’s not strictly true. The acting was very good, and as I said I did enjoy certain aspects of the production, but I did feel that the film was perhaps chopped about it bit in the final edit which meant it kept a nice pace but that the timeline was all over the place.

There’s still 8 more Hellraiser films in the original run to go through so maybe some of my complaints will be addressed in later films and I’ll get to actually find out what the Cenobites are all about.

Watch this if you want to shout at incompetent police officers for 10 minutes or wonder why someone would don an entire suit made from human skin when they could have just slapped the face on themselves and been done with it.