best sequel
This movie is the best episode among all the sequels, it's beautifully filmed, the plot makes sense, there was creatitivity. I was really surprised because all the other films are really bad.
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MovieChat Forums > Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) Discussion > best sequel
I hated this movie in 2000.
But after watching it today, I have to agree.
It's by FAR the best sequel to the originals
"Wait!" "Worry" "Who Cares?"
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Just saw this for the first time last week. I agree: best sequel. In fact in some ways it's better than the first movie.
It's a lot like that great "Clive Barker's Hellraiser" comics anthology from the early '90s (with all painted art), where each story is a stand-alone that might have a lot or very little to do with Pinhead or the other Cenobites.
I'm still amazed how many people think this is the best sequel, let alone the best film, in the series.
At its very best it's an average horror movie. At its worst it's a derivative and dull retread full of ridiculous groan-inducing characters (those cowboys...). There's just not much to it. It's a plot that has been done a million times before, with Pinhead tacked on at the end for no other reason than to trick people into seeing it. It has nothing on the first two Hellraiser films. Even the incredibly similar Hellseeker is marginally better, if only by virtue of Ashley Laurence's few minutes of screen time.
Though I will say, Inferno is at least better than Deader and Hellworld.
Agreed. I'm also baffled by people's high ratings of this sequel. Your description is spot-on--this is a generic, derivative direct to video psychological thriller that thinks it looks cool and has something to say. I haven't really been impressed by any Hellraiser entry yet, and all the sequels have been terrible, but at least some of the others attempted to advance the narrative. I'm afraid of how much worse this is going to get.
shareOK, just finished VI. Waaaay better than V. It treads some similar ground, but has better acting, better storytelling, better production values, and actually relates to the original Hellraiser narrative. I had some minor issues, but if anyone were to watch these two films back to back and conclude V is better, they should be locked up.
shareSo why is Hellseeker so much better? If Inferno is derivative, Hellseeker should be that much worse by comparison since it's the same franchise and came right after the movie it's copying.
To me, Inferno was the only DTV entry that felt like it could have gotten a theatrical release. Hellseeker looks low-budget and they didn't even have enough money to create cenobite suits for the other cenobites from scratch, so they reused the Pinhead suit with a few alterations. Plus they all appear for about a second or two of screen time.
I'm not going to go through every single actor and compare their performances, but everyone in Inferno seemed more fleshed out and colorful than anyone in Hellseeker. The best example is Craig Sheffer. He has so much more personality than Dean Winters and is far better at emoting. Trevor looked bored even when he had hooks tearing into his skin.
Overall, Inferno is the more cohesive movie and I think a lot of it is due to the fact that the writer of the original story also rewrote it as a Hellraiser story himself and directed it. His vision wasn't lost in a lot of script doctoring like the others. Hellseeker went through two at least, because it also started out unrelated to Hellraiser, and then after it was converted into a Hellraiser story, it later had Kirsty Cotton shoehorned into the wife role with few changes. You say Hellseeker advanced the narrative, but you don't do something like make the main protagonist of the first two movies a murderer as an afterthought without giving a damn good reason for her motivation.
Hellseeker just didn't know what it wanted to be. Even without a speech condemning the protagonist for his sins, Pinhead still implies that he's being punished for being a bad guy, which is a lot of why it comes off as a weak copy of Inferno to me. It continues the wrong-headed idea that the cenobites actually care about punishing sinners, but does it in such a weak, throw-away manner. Hellseeker really didn't have much to say as a character study, I think, as opposed to Inferno. It was just a twisted version of the actual events prior to Trevor's death with a few Inferno-esque hallucinations and references to morality thrown in.
Great post, HellboundHero, one I very much agree with. You pinpointed exactly the absurdity of hating Inferno yet claiming that Hellseeker is better. Hellseeker suffers from any shortcomings that Inferno had and then some. Shoehorning in Ashley Lawrence into the role at the last minute does not a good Hellraiser film make. In Hellseeker, she is nothing like the Kirstie last seen in Hellbound. Making deals with Pinhead to exact revenge on her husband just isn't her character at all.
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