A shady police detective becomes embroiled in a strange world of murder, sadism and madness after being assigned a murder investigation against a madman known only as “The Engineer”.
The franchise continues with the fifth instalment, “Hellraiser: Inferno”. This is around the time a franchise starts to drop off and become repetitive and stale, this film doesn’t do that, it actually takes more of a crime route that I found enjoyable.
With a new film once again we get a new Director, Scott Derrickson. He was an amateur at this point but he shows his early talents that would help him go on to make films such as “The Exorcism Of Emily Rose ” and “Sinister”. He also wrote the film (as he also did with his later films) and you have to give the guy credit, he wrote an amazing story and brought back the feel of the earlier films whilst still being able to not go backwards.
Our lead character in this film is shady detective Joseph Thorne, he’s not your typical lead role where you root for him and feel for him. That doesn’t mean he’s not an enjoyable character to watch, he’s very entertaining and watching him delve into the dirty world that attracts the Cenobites is great. The only annoying thing is the actor who plays him, Craig Sheffer, REALLY looks like David Boreanaz and it’s hard to watch him properly when that’s in your head.
Not only does the film have a great crime theme to it, it also has a sci-fi feel to it which may sound like a bad mixture but it actually works really well. One aspect of the film I love is the amount of depth that goes into the psychological torture of our lead guy. To see his cockiness break down little by little and slowly become a wreck makes for great viewing.
“Hellraiser: Inferno” was originally a non-Hellraiser related horror script owned by Dimension. To save money on writing a completely original Hellraiser story, the script was quickly edited to insert the Cenobites, sometimesthat doesn’t really work ut kudos to the team for making them gel together.
I really enjoyed this entry in the series, it seems to get a-lot of hate that I don’t understand. Maybe it’s because of the lack of Pinhead after being used to seeing him so much in the couple of films before this but in my opinion the Pinhead character has more effect when used sparingly.
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