Hellbound: Hellraiser II

  Hellraiser hadn't even hit theaters when New World pictures greenlit a sequel. Clive Barker could not fit it in his schedule, so he only remained on as an executive producer... though he provided the basic story and by all accounts was frequently on set and involved in many of the decisions.
 Fortunately most of the rest of the Hellraiser crew stayed on and, against all odds, good replacements were found for Barker: Tony Randel (who'd done some uncredited editing on the first movie) on the director's chair, and more importantly, Peter Atkins on scripting duties. Atkins, a long-time Barker collaborator (along with Doug Bradley) from his time in avant-garde theater, didn't just get Hellraiser at a fundamental level, he was somewhat ahead of his time in the way that he didn't just deliver more Hellraiser - he and Barker delved into it, expanded it, deconstructed it, made it even weirder.

 It's relatively similar to the way Aliens exploded, chest-burster-like, out of Alien, so it's funny both movies share Lt. Gorman in a key secondary role.

 Hellbound kicks off with a time-honoured cost-cutting measure: padding the runtime with a recap of the previous film's final scenes*. Just hours after facing off against S&M demons, a rapey undead uncle and an evil stepmother, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) wakes up to find herself as an inmate in a psychiatric institution under the care of smarmy, ridiculously posh doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and his hunky, earnest aide Kyle (William Hope).

 Kirsty recounts the events of the first movie to them as if she was reconstructing what happened - I love the dialog for this scene and how it's paced, though some of her guesswork is conveniently too accurate (and it's another excuse to recycle more footage from the first movie).

 Realizing, in another improbably leap of logic, that the mattress Julia died on could be used to bring her step-mother back, she asks the doctors to burn it. But as soon as the interview is over, Dr. Channard calls the police and asks that they send the mattress to his place.

 Kyle overhears that phone conversation and, his suspicions aroused, does what any normal person would in that situation: he breaks into Channard's house later that night to see what the deal is. And lo and behold, Channard's studio is full of occult diagrams and carefully preserved cenobite memorabilia... including three of the hell-raising puzzle-boxes. Oh, and the blood-stained mattress in the middle of the floor.

 Before he can take off, Channard gets home, accompanied by one of the inmates - one of those movie nutjobs who hallucinates bugs are crawling all over him. I'm imagine that's been at some point at least a real thing, but it seems to be really overrepresented in fiction.

 Anyhow! Channard sits the inmate (played by uncle Frank himself, Sean Chapman) on the mattress, gives him a straight razor, and just observes as he cuts himself to ribbons; it's a very effective, pretty horrific scene even before skinless Julia, summoned by the blood, comes out of the mattress and finishes off the poor sod. Then, in her weakened state, she asks Channard for help, and he reluctantly pushes the mattress towards her with his foot.

 Can I just point out how fantastic the villains are in these movies? Channard is such hateable, sociopathic asshole, and the ways he keeps finding ways to do 'disagreeable' things without dirtying his hands is truly great writing. And Julia, of course, gets a chance to go big this time around - the script thoughtfully hands her many variations of Frank's lines from the first movie, and even lets her get a little payback.

 Once the carnage is finished Kyle finally manages to escape and extracts Kirsty from the asylum. Meanwhile, Channard is busy providing Julia (Clare Higgins) with victims so she can reconstitute herself. There's a confrontation which Kyle doesn't survive [spoilers, don't read the preceding sentence if you haven't seen the movie], and afterwards Channard puts in motion a plan where he uses Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a previously-introduced autistic girl who's a puzzle-solving prodigy to solve one of his cubes. The whole second half of the movie literally goes to hell, which in the Hellraiser universe is a giant labyrinth full of surreal little nooks, presided over by Leviathan - an unknowable monolithical god that looks like a rhomboidal lighthouse that spews darkness instead of light.

 Oh, and the cenobites pop up for a little bit but they don't get a lot to do; if you'll remember, the movie was already in full production before the first one even came out, so no one had any inkling of how big Pinhead would become. This is Kirsty's and Julia's movie, with a side of Chanard and Tiffany; the demons are barely supporting characters.

 It's got a lot going on, and not everything works. Hellbound definitely lacks the elegance and simplicity of Hellraiser, but it makes up for it in ambition and weirdness. The film never quite follows the course you'd expect - still, despite some silliness and a fuzzy plot, most of its events make sense.

 Because the crew from the first movie is almost all in place, everything that was good there remains good in the sequel. Robin Vidgeon's cinematography really benefits from the enlarged sets, and does well by some wonderful visual ideas like a sterile, completely white apartment - all the better to frame Julia's skinless form. Bob Keen and his team provide some really great work, including a brand new cenobite that makes lovely use of stop motion, and Christopher Young delivers another classic soundtrack - it's not as fresh as the one for the first movie, but it expands on its themes beautifully.

 In case you can't tell by now, I'm a fan. I can see the seams and that many things don't strictly work, but it's still a wildly imaginative and original movie. Hellraiser is one of the movies that in many ways made me me, one I rewatch every few years. Hellbound, I hadn't revisited for a long time - more than a decade and a half, probably - but along with Aliens and Dream Warriors, I've considered it the platonic idea of what a sequel should be. Warts and all, I'm very happy to find it still is.

*: While New World provided a bigger budget for the sequel, the movie started filming just as the dollar's value fell precipitously against the British pound - and as the movie was filmed in London (at the legendary Pinewood Studios, no less), the crew suddenly discovered that their budget had been slashed down by a significant amount; Whole planned sequences had to be scrapped. Due to this and studio interference, it's been described by people who worked on it as 'heavily compromised'; It still kicks ass.