October 8, 2002

I get enough hell in my life, I don't need to see it on screen. Especially when it looks as boring and drab as it does in this movie

`Hellbound: Hellraiser II' (to site it's full, but still listless, title) is a movie so confusing and detached that it breaks all known laws of movie construction and apparently pins hopes that the audience has an attention span that doesn't stretch past the end of their noses.

What we have is a special effects clatterbox of the worst kind, a movie that sets up one minor idea then spends 90 minutes as a disjointed series of gruesome scenes for which the make-up department guys were likely patting themselves on the back.

The movie is constructed to look like a nightmare but doesn't look like any nightmare that I have ever had. My nightmare (in movie terms) run along the lines of `Night of the Living Dead' because at least that movie gave me an entry-point from which to enter my mind. I can imagine being chased by the living dead. I have a hard time imagining myself dreaming about what happens in this movie.

The movie opens about an hour after the first `Hellraiser' movie with Kirsty in the hospital having seen torture and dismay at the hands of her parents. We find that she isn't out of hell yet and that hell is in fact all around us and Kirsty and her friend Tiffiny are soon darting around the dusty corridors of the damned running into one bloody effects shot after another. This is one of those movies where the special effects credits are equal to the population of a small Third World country but only one person is credited with a screenplay.

I got so tired of hearing the named Kirsty and Tiffiny by the end of this movie that I actually had to stop and clear them from my mind. I could swear that about six pages of the script was populated by nothing but the two girls screaming each other's names `Kirsty!!' and `Tiffiny!!'

I mentioned the movie's construction – it has none. I don't ask much from a movie but I at least ask for an entryway so that I can get involved in the story. We are led to believe that KIRSTY! And TIFFINY! Have no hope of ever getting out of the corridors of hell and they never seem to be working on a plan, all they do is turn corners to the next bloody, tortured corpse. Was it suppose to make sense. Hell, I don't know.