TYTD Reviews

I’ve lost track of how many times i’ve seen ‘The Brain that Wouldnt Die’ in one format or another, I’ve seen it riffed multiple times, remixed, novelised, theatricized, turned into a musical, remastered, remade and everything inbetween. On my bluray copy of ‘Phantasmatapes’ in the ‘Special Features’ they included a reasonble quality upscaled VHS rip of the full film to compliment their remixed take on it. Its the kind of quality you’d find on most ‘public domain’ box sets from the 90s and 2000s, Just; captured from a good source and upscaled for HD TVs…And, with Halloween just around the corner. I figured revisiting the film in the format im most familiar with (the kind shown on TV late night before anyone thought to ACTUALLY present the film as intended) was a fun enough way to kill an hour and 20 as any.

The plots straightforward enough. A genius surgeon has been working secretly on a syrum that allows surgical grafts to perfectly meld to the host with no complications and far less risky surgery to do so. Its a world first. But its having to be conducted in secret because, at this point in time that kind of surgery is seen as essentially a death warrent for anyone who wants to participate, and if it got out to the wider medical community before it was ready to be presented, it would be considered ‘Quackery’ at BEST…and aa possible long jail sentence at worst.

However! its vacation time! So! our surgeon and his young lady wife head off in their open top to live it up good and proper! However, disaster strikes when their car takes a bend incorrectly and the pair are flung from the vehical. The surgeons fine enough, other than being a bit shaken…But the wifes in a real bad way…She’s been decapitated. Thinking quickly, her husband bundles her head up and takes her to a nearby safehouse, where he’s been performing his experiments. And, working with a colleague who’s in on the work. They manage to perfectly preserve her head in a tray of ‘ressurection’ fluid.

Of course, the womans absolutely distraught and begs for death. But her husband refuses, saying he’s going to go and secure a body for her, and when he finds the right one. He’s going to use his miracle fluid to successfully transplant his wifes head onto the new body, and from there life will carry on. Shortly after announcing this, she also discovers a ‘failed’ experiment that still lives on, imprisoned behind a locked and bolted door. It turns out that, whatevers in the fluid allows her to telepathically communicate with the beast behind the door, and the pair begin to plot a mutual desctruction of the lab and themselves. While our surgeon friend hits the streets looking for the right body to connect to his wife. Leading to a firey finale.

I have a real soft spot for this one, its sci-fi horor with a twinge of fantasy and a heaping dose of camp and while I cant say its one of my all time favourites, I do find myself occasionally revisiting it for that monster movie quality I love.

The script isnt overly complex, in fact its a very linear, very one note production that deals with a complex theme in a way that a lot of movies of this time wouldnt really handle it. Most films around this time would have framed the husband as a hero for wanting to save his wife, and the wife would have been MORE than willing to have a new body to continue living with her husband, glossing over the more morbid aspects of the logistics of that.

This film tackles it head on, and its refreshing to see a female lead in a monster movie have both autonomy and a decisive wish that goes against the male leads expectations. They frame the husband as a monster in this movie, because he is. and as such its satisfying to see the discussions on letting go, death and having an opinion that goes against loved ones wishes explored in a more interesting fashion.

The pacing is a little ‘come and go’ sometimes it runs with a real zip, while othertimes it can get a little pedestrian. But theres usually something going on consistently throughout, and while I definitely think we could have lost 10 minutes and gained a tighter production alltogether, I appreciate just how much they cram into that 82 minute runtime.

Tonally; its working with a nice contrast, the campier monster sequences and violence are offset by some genuine pathos and depressing moments. its faily early body horror, and I think it handles itself really well.

Direction wise, we have a striking vision, while I can say that visually the imagery is distinct, the cinematography is a little bit generic for the time. The visuals here are unique for this movie, but the actual technical ability that produces them isnt really out of place with the cine styles of the time, and this slots in relatively well with the ‘Night of the ghouls’ and ‘Mad Monsters’ of the era. Its fine enough, maybe a little overly basic at times and the set dressing is minimal to the point of being almost non existent, but the plot and performances are so powerfull, that its only afterwards you really realise just how sparse and basic the production really was.

Virginia Leith as Jan (in the pan) is an absolute showstopper here, bringing a wide range of emotions and coming across as bizarrely understandable and naturalistic for a literal talking severed head. If you only catch the movie for one reason, her performance is almost certainly it. Contrasting her we have Jason Evers as her partner Bill. a malevolent and ruthless figure who we see slowly descend into demented determined madness across the runtime, with a powerful energy that clashes with Virginias wonderfully. The pair are superb on screen together and again, really lift what could have been a VERY corny film above its station.

‘The Brain that wouldnt die’ is one of those ‘Iconic’ Bmovies of the 50s and 60s, maybe lesser thought about than the larger studio funded pics, but a textbook example of the genre and a great starting point for people looking to dig into the lesser known/affectioned titles. Definitely worth your time, especially around the spooky season. Its a quick, fun and slightly messy movie thats got a heart of gold!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-brain-that-wouldnt-die/

It still kind of blows my mind that ‘Sinister’ as a franchise never got to fully launch, while movies like ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Conjuring’ were allowed to thrive. The first entry in this series was a bit of a slog in places, but it had a fun and interesting take on the ‘supernatural Horror’ genre, It handled the ‘found footage’ genre in an authentic and interesting way, the characters were well written and aesthetically it looked really solid. It certainly didnt commit any crimes that films of its time wernt doing in droves anyway…I was kind of cautious therefore, that the sequel HAD to be bad…I mean, most reviews slated the film, and a poor box office taking combined with bad test audience reactions all but cemented the fact that a part 3 would never materialise…something that has yet to happen to this day…

And yet, watching ‘Sinister 2’ tonight, I honestly couldnt see where the disinterest and even hate stemmed from. I actually thought it was a pretty solid horror movie that maybe in some respects even surpassed the original.

The film picks up a few months to a couple of years after the events of the first film. and we open by being introduced to Courtney and her two children Dylan and Zach. The trio are fleeing an abusive relationship, thats seeing them ducking and weaving private investigators and keeping ready to run on a moments notice. But at this point in time, a friends agreed to let them stay in an abandoned townhouse that sits on the land they own, in the hope that they can wait it out till the custody trial, in the hopes of averting Dylan and Zachs father taking them back into custody he legally doesnt have.

Problem is, that town house was victim to a terrible family murder, followed by the dissapearence of one of the families children. Yes Bughuul is back baby! and he’s bought a TON of dead kids along for the ride. And this time he has his evil EVIL eyes set on Courtneys kids.

Luckily, The deputy from the last movie (now an ex-deputy) has been picking up the research left by Ellison and his research team, and he’s struck on a winning strategy. If he burns the house down wherea Bughuul related murder has happened BEFORE a family can move in. He cant work he weird magic on the place and it breaks the chain. Unfotunately Bughuul has multiple chains going, so our Ex-deputy has to basically go state by state following media reports, hoping he happens to burn down the right house at the right time.

Well, as you can imagine his investigations lead him to the door of the townhouse Coutney is laying low in. and things basically explode from there, with the children taken by Bughuul trying desperately to coax Dylan into murdering his family for Bughuul, while the kids father returns on the scene with officers to demand Courtney and the kids return back to his home…where the chaos is sure to begin again.

Our ex dep, courtney and the kids must stand up against their abusive spouse, AND fight the forces of evil…and if they’re lucky…maybe discover true love along the way.

And I think all the issues I had with ‘Sinister’ largely get resolved here in the sequel. the lofty glacial moving script is cut down to a well paced 92 minutes, theres plenty going on in the narrative to push things along comfortably at that pace. The act structuring is smooth and consistent with seamless transitions across the 3 acts and a gentle ramp up across the 3 movements. The characters are maybe a bit less naturalistic and feel a bit more ‘horror movie’ oriented, but the trade off is a richer, more complex story that deals with difficult topics both up front in the domestic abuse storyline, and using a nice layer of subtext with Bughuul.

The film feels a bit more comfortable in its skin, relaxing more and dealing with human social interactions, rather than the first films reliance on one characters spiral out and the people he hurt in the process. This, felt like a movie you could more easily sink into and just enjoy as a movie. rather than an out and out ‘vibe’ piece.

The direction also ends up engaging in a bit of a trade off, the first film was very highly strung on Aesthetic, creating a smokey, woozy, dream like vibe for the full runtime, a strong visual aesthetic that the audience is supposed to let carry them across the runtime. This films a bit more grounded in traditional horror iconography and vision. But I feel that works to its favour here, its less aggressively in your face, it still happily gives the audience some of that wonderfully dark imagery. but it also gives the audience a nice visual contrast. A bit of light to work in with the dark…Something I felt the last film was missing.

Cine wise, its pretty solid, maybe not quite as solid as the first film. But compositions are pretty on the level, theres a bit more wobbly CGI here than the previous installment, and the Jumpscare element has more or less been fully stripped away in favour of a more unsettling atmosphere. But I actually kind of prefer that, with some solid sequence arrangements helping keep things pretty boiant for the full runtime.

Performance wise, James Ransone and Shannyn Sosssamon are pretty solid here…I was dubious when I saw that the deputy from the first film was being bumped up to a main cast member for this entry. But James nad Shannyn work really well together, they have great on screen chemestry and when Lea Coco comes onto the scene as Husband ‘Clint’ it really kicks up to the next level and properly cemented that this cast were really clicking with the material given to them. In a way, its kind of unintentionally funny tyhat Lea somehow manages to make a more terrifying villain in this story than the ACTUAL demon child snatcher…

and as for the soundtrack? its solid. It feels very similar to the first film. and I thought it was mixed to good last time…so, Im not going to complain about more of the same!

‘Sinister 2’ actually kind of surprised me, while we lose the distinct aesthetic and intense atmosphere of the first film, we end up with a much leaner, much punchier, much more engaging film. I could see myself watching ‘Sinister’ late at night, in a very particular headspace, when im wanting a specific vibe from a horror movie. Its the kind of movie that scratches a very particular itch.

Sinister 2, I could see myself putting on…Just because I wanna watch a 2010’s horror movie thats nice and digestable. I could easily see this becoming something of a comfort watch for just how smooth a movie it is. While it being that is a bit dissapointing, because it means it isnt a truely ‘great’ movie…the fact i’d gladly watch this again, and the fact I thought it inches ahead of the first entry, means it surely must have SOMETHING going for it.

Honestly? I could recommend either of these films. I’d say you’d probably need to watch the first film to truely appreciate this one. But as long as you’ve seen the first one at least once, this one is a lot more fun and has a much higher chance of going into your regular rotation.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/sinister-2/

Ohhhh I should have known when my ‘Hellraiser’ 4 pack multifilm bluray set missed this one off the list, that it wasnt going to be a fun ride…and Im dissapointed to say that it wasnt…’Hellraiser: Deader’ is a DRAG of a movie. and from top to bottom, its probably the farthest removed from the original intention of the films that we’ve gotten so far.

Right off the top; ‘Deader’ is not a real word. and to someone who hasnt SEEN the movie, they’ll have NO idea what that even means…Because something is either ‘dead’…or its not. you cant be ‘deader’ because you cant be ‘more dead’ than ‘dead’. So calling your film ‘Hellraiser: Deader’ without the vital context just makes the film sound dumb even before i’ve hit play.

What is the plot of this one? Well…we’re once again approaching the series from an ‘investigative’ position, ‘Inferno’ had a bad cop tracking down the cenobites, Hellseeker had a dirty stockbroker trying to piece together fragmented memories while being pursued by Pinhead…and this film? follows an investigative journalist called Amy.

Here is the literal full plot of this movie. Amy is an investigative journalist who specialises in ‘extreme’ or ‘unusual’ cases. Shes called into her bosses office one afternoon and shown a tape of a group of people in Romania who appear to commit suicide, and then get ressurected by a strange man dressed all in white.

Amy is confused and asks if this is some kind of ‘special effects’ joke…her boss confirms it isnt, and they’re a cult like group called the ‘Deaders’ who follow this mysterious man and his life giving powers…for some reason. And Amy is being tasked with heading to Romania to see if she can get the scoop on this.

So…She does, and what follows is about 40 minutes of her wandering around Romania (or an approximation of Romania) occasionally speaking to local residents and a handful of times boarding a ‘Romanian Sex Train’ to try and find this mystery cult. Eventually, she stumbles on a contact who’s died while leaving an envelope for help and clutching a mysterious puzzlebox. And after a short time, Pinhead appears, tells her that the man in white has somehow gained access to ‘his domain’ and stolen an ability to ressurect the dead, in order to try and lead a war on the Cenobites. With Pinhead telling Amy she must confront the cult in order to put things to rest once and for all…cue another 30 minutes of hobbling around Romania and Romanian adjacent locations. Leading to a suffling finale, thats bizarrely the best part of the movie, and probably the worst moment in the Hellraiser franchise so far…

There is VERY little to like about ‘Hellraiser: Deader’ The script is absolutely sedentary, NOTHING really happens in this movie for a good hour of the runtime apart from random wandering around, Bad CGI jumpscares, the occasional bit of guarded nudity, and a little bit of covered up gore. The plot is uninspiring, uninteresting and frankly VERY dull. The dialogue sound stiff and awkward for the most part, the reasoning for the characters to be doing what they’re doing isnt really made all that clear, and what points have been clarified are frankly, quite stupid.

The tone is aiming for straight horror, but it tries to ‘overserious’ itself to the point that it just comes across as flat and really dull. There are elements of ‘Flatliners’ and ‘Elm Street’ transplanted into this film to try and bring some life to it, but its all in vein. The characters arnt interesting or well developed, the act structuring is lumpy for the opening act and then idling for the rest of the movie up until the end.

When they started making these DTV Hellraiser movies, I was cautiously optimistic around the idea of some kind of ‘investigator’ approaching the Cenobites and Lament configuration as an outsider having to piece together the hints and clues, until they’re too far down the rabbit hole to be able to back out…But we’re now 3 iterations into trying this style, and im astounded that its been able to go this catastrophically wrong, THREE whole times…when this should in theory be a pretty easy win.

The fact that Pinhead is in this film for less than 10 minutes ONCE AGAIN and essentially just takes on the role of a ‘hints and tips’ tutorial aid to the narrative is dissapointing. It once again feels like the folks at Miramax just rustled through their ‘rejected script’ files, pulled something out that narrowly avoided being commissioned and forced Pinhead and a Hellraiser-esq narrative into it. Its not even rage inducing at this point…Its just depressing.

The direction is aiming for arty and high aesthetic, but it just comes across as a bit ‘Nice Video; Shame about the song’. They use every plug in imaginable to try and filter the footage to look weird and distorted. And while I will give them some credit in the fact that they make the gore feel somewhat believable and not cheap looking. They counter that with CGI where there didnt need to BE CGI…and its aged horribly and looks terrible. From a directoral standpoint the cast and crew clearly understood the brief. The brief was ‘Im not being paid enough to care about this’ and the directors vision was ‘2nd year arthouse film student’.

The cine is passable…but stale…REALLY stale, theres just…nothing original going on in this film. Nothing memorable, nothing enjoyable, nothing that even makes me THINK of those heady days of the original film and ‘Hellbound’ it looks like someone ground this out over a week and that the editor was more interested in exploring the lunch menu than trying to make this thing come alive.

The performances are AWFUL. full on theater acting at almost every turn, NOTHING sounds naturalistic, NOTHING sounds believable and honestly? i’d say 90% of the performances in this are just irritating. Doug Bradley is the only probably exception here. Here? he actually performs better than the last 2 films. He gets a little bit more to do if nothing else…and even with THAT considered; he STILL sounds like he’s phoning it in…By this point he wasnt even really bothering to memorise the script, he would annotate and improvise the lines on set, because at this point HE knew the character better than the ACTUAL writers. which is Insane….

I also need to say what a HUGE step down the Cenobites have had over the last 3 movies. ‘Bloodline’ reintroduced some new Cenobites that actually looked interesting and had stuff going on…But for the last 3 films we’ve been treated to 2 different varients of ‘Chatterer’ one varient of ‘Butterball’ and a growing issue over the last 3 films, a generic ‘Smooth’ eyeless cenobite. Which is THE cheapest prosthetics…and that one version has had like…3 redesigns across the last 3 films, and here? that ones basically the default other than Pinhead…This series used to be brimming with creativity and mystery…and we’re just floundering SO hard here…

The soundtracks unremarkable, drone and midi orchestral fodder that just makes the whole thing feel SO cheap. and the cherry on top of this rancid sundae? The dialogue is mixed SO quiet into the sound mix that I basically had to watch the whole film with subtitles on, because the soundtrack blasts out any dialogue the second it revs up. Its basically inaudible.

Hellraiser: Deader commits the cardinal sin of cinema ‘Thou shalt not bore’. The ONLY reason to pick this film up is the final 5-10 minutes with Pinhead…which is still not great, but its above the quality of the rest of this movie. It upsets me profoundly when a film has a half okay idea and squanders it so carelessly. Deader is 88 minutes of timewasting and VERY little to show for it. Watch at your own peril, avoid if you have any sense.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-deader/

Im going to keep this one brief because, honestly? I dont have that much to say. ‘Creepshow’ is a 1982 Anthology horror film written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, both were basically riding high at this point in their relative fields, with Romero fresh off of ‘Knightriders’ with ‘Dawn of the dead’ and ‘Martin’ not that far behind it. and King somewhere between ‘Cujo’, ‘The Running Man’ and ‘Christine’. The pair struck up on the idea of making a movie literally in the style of the old horror comics of the 50s and 60s. and so King wrote a few original ideas and re-adapted a couple of his short stories into ‘comic style’ takes of his works. With a star studded cast to help really lift this thing up and above where it could have ended up.

We go through the film like flipping pages in a comic book, with stories of ressurected vengeful fathers, killer weeds from space, 150 year old killer yetis, a bug infestation and a tale of betrayal and bloody vengence.

I didnt really get around to ‘Creepshow’ till about 3-5 years ago when I chanced upon a VHS copy in amongst a haul of tapes I picked up. Creepshow infamously hasnt really had a release past VHS in the UK. and even then, the VHS copy is kind of hard to come by. But for spooky season this year? I decided to upgrade, picking up the 4k release from Scream factory, and it looks absolutely astounding.

The film itself is really good honestly, The stories are all consistently decent quality, with the best stories being incredibly solid and totally engrossing, and even the worst ones are still pretty watchable…if not a little slow paced. While I do take some issue with the 2 hour runtime (an unfortunate fact that means I may not watch this one again for a while…) Its a rock solid production, that isnt as good as the sum of its parts…PURELY for how MANY good parts there are in this. When you have Romero and King on writing and direction, and a cast that includes Ted Dansen, Leslie Nielsen Adrienne Barbaue, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini, Hal Holbrook and E.G Marshall, its kind of inevitable that their combined performances dont really match expectations…But thats okay! because they DO get BLOODY close!

Direction is rock solid, hyperstylised ‘comic book’ aesthetics give this film a real flare that helps it stand out against its contemporaries, It could have been easy for this to look cheap, but it has a kind of endearing ‘cardboard’ feel to it for the most part that I really quite enjoyed.

Shots are heavily considered to match the ‘comic’ aesthetic, and transitions that include fades in and out of the comic book frame, page turns and other novelties, really help give this a feelgood ‘Halloween’ spooky vibe. In many ways, I think this is probably a perfect movie for this time of year, just for how it balances actual true horror with that hokey spooky vibe that Halloween gives off.

The scorings superb. Honestly? barring the length of the movie and a couple of slower paced moments dribbed and drabbed across the runtime. I think this is a fantastic little film. Not one that I think i’d choose to watch regularly, but definitely one i’ll keep coming back to over the years. Highly recommended, especially around Halloween time. If you havent seen ‘Creepshow’ you really gotta change that!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/creepshow/1/

Nudist Coloney of the Dead may be one of Mark Piros most infamous films, covered multiple times over the last 2 decades by the youtube Commentariat, Its a…BIZARRE work or comedy horror, taking a total dedication to unrelenting silliness and marrying it up to a scathing swipe at religious zealotry. And…I kind of love it for that? At a time when a LOT of the media were taking ‘concerned christian parents’ VERY seriously, this film quite happily mocks them in a way that, on the surface is blunt, idiotic and irritating…But below the surface knows EXACTLY what its trying to do and say.

The premise is simple enough, the film, as mentioned is a Comedy Horror, and a musical to boot! as we open with a judge reckoning on a case where some puritan Christians are arguing that the owners of a local nudist colony are taking up precious land that could be used for pure wholesome activities with there…NAKED SIN!…The Nudists protest and provide meaningful evidence to the contrary, but the Judge rules in favour of the Christians and the camp is forced to close.

But the Nudists have one final plan up their sleeve, they plan a kool aid style cult suicide, and with their final breaths swear unholy vengence on ANY religious zealots that happen to wander onto their land. After which they all die and are promptly buried at the former Nudist site.

Some time passes and a local pastor is preaching to his congregation, promising revelation and spiritual purification to the parents of sex mad, drug addled, EVIL teenagers, by sending them on a Christian retreat in the woods. Several members of the congregation jump at the chance and send their kids off on the retreat, led by two dyed in the wool, unwavering Christian evangelists. The retreat is on the land that was formerlly the nudist colony.

Cue mad running around, THE most catchy earworm musical numbers, DOZENS of fake blood soaked limbs and VERY anti PC language. As religion and personal freedom clash in the most bizarre and over the top ways, likely ever put to screen.

My score for this film would be higher if not for one, frankly tragic and fatal issue with this film. Up front, the script is absolutely delightful, Im a fan of dumb humour when its done right, and the way its done right is to get smart people to write it. See…when a dumb person writes dumb humour, its insufferable. Because Dumb people just write what they THINK dumb humour should be…meaning its often garish, over the top…but most importantly, not funny, its annoying. Smart people see dumb people every day, and learn what makes dumb people funny…they also see dumb ideas and points being taken seriously every day by people often regarded as smart, which gives them the perfect balance of being able to write from the perspective of being able to see why ideas dumb people think are great…are in fact dumb. meaning they can lampoon dumb people, while also stealthily working in complex satirical commentary on present day dumb issues, without feeling like they’re preaching to the audience.

The writers for the early seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ are probably the best example of this, but Piro here has essentially done this with his script, but gone a bit more farcical as a result. At its core the film is an anti zealot, anti ‘moral panic’ film, and for about 75% of the runtime, that intention is soft baked in across the runtime. The folks who’d actually be offended by what this film had to say, would likely have stuck their nose up within the first 5 minutes when an old woman with comedically saggy breasts knocks out half the nudists. They likely would have swanned off before the titles even played.

Which is unfortunate, becuase the films a laugh riot, hitting the audience with dumb humour, smart humour, ultra catchy musical numbers and some decent subtext to chew over…especially in the year that is 2025. By the final 20 minutes of the film, we’ve shifted from a subtle but continuous jabbing, to just a flat out admission of the films intentions…with 5 minutes of that runtime being filled with a muscial number called ‘Kill All the Zealots’ Which…is kind of wonderful really.

The pacings absolutely breakneck, we career through 90(ish) minutes of a movie right here being unrelentingly bashed over the head with every type of comedy going, I dont think theres a 2 minute window in this whole movie where it isnt trying to do SOMETHING to make you laugh, and much like Piros previous films, there really is something for everyone.

The act structuring is a little bit on the sloppy side, this is, at the end of the day, still just ‘some folks running around in the woods’ for the most part. The first act is probably the most stable of the 3, it at least sets the premise up and gets things rolling. But the other 2 acts are kind of melted into each other and theres no clear shift up, or down, between the middle and final acts…mainly because its SO high energy, it would be stupid to ramp down…but they cant really ramp UP any higher than they are.

The characters are all farcical pastiches of horror archtypes, the ‘villains’ of the piece are equally bizarre and over the top. it can be a tad overwhelming at times. But in the right headspace all these characters are a hoot!

But! the praise does kind of have to end there, because of the aforementioned ‘tragic’ faults that this film has.

The first, simply put, is unfortunately the film dabbles inconsistently in racist language and stereotypes. Theres literally a character in this film called ‘Juan Tu’ who is supposed to be a half mexican, half japanese immigrant. he spends the entire runtime of the movie speaking in a racist asian accent, he’s portrayed doing stereotypical racist things like eating a hotdog with Chopsticks and just…knowing kung fu. and more aggregiously, he’s the butt of multiple hard slurs across the runtime, which were frankly winceworthy. I believe theres also some gay and other racial slurs used in the film too…which is a real shame and did pull the joy out of it a bit.

But the other tragic thing, that really hits this film hard is the technical issues with the production. According to the DVD release, large chunks (i’d say as much as 55-75% of the movie) were hit with technical issues that made the footage largely unwatchable, this ranges from shots being underlit to the point of darkness, crew members appearing in shots, the wrong frame rates being used…basically anything and everything you could think COULD go wrong while filming a movie DID seem to go wrong here. For the original release, it couldnt really be corrected. So folks just had to…accept that over half their movie was basically unwatchable.

But for the DVD release. Mark Piro decided to try and fix it. and the way he’s tried to do that is by splicing out the problematic film scenes and recreating them with behind the scenes footage shot on video tape when the ACTUAL takes were being done. In any other movie, this would have made the film as unwatchable, if not MORE unwatchable than just leaving in the problematic footage. Here, its a bit more accepted/understandable…But it still renders the film a bizarre viewing experience.

The VHS footage doesnt look anything like the film footage, its in a different aspect ratio to the film footage, Piro here has decided to crop the film footage into widescreen, despite it being pretty close to 4:3 orignally…but NOT to crop ALL the VHS footage into widescreen, meaning the film bounces around in different aspect ratios for the full runtime. sometimes on a cut by cut basis within a sequence.

The film footage appears to have been sourced from an original VHS copy of ‘Nudist colony of the dead’ and Piro appears to have had a go at re-grading it, leading to huge sections of crushed blacks, weird artifacting and heavy overcontrasting. and the behind the scenes replacement footage varies wildly in quality, from some replacements looking and feeling totally at home, with no sense of anything being amiss. To moments where its clear the camera was set up next to the crew, and Piro has had to heavily crop and zoom into the footage to remove people out of the frame.

This presentation is a real dogs dinner of a production, but Piro considers this the ‘Directors cut’ and in a message to the viewer at the start of the film, it notes that he considers this ‘the way the film should be seen.’ …So I dont know, I reckon with the revelations in modern digital editing, if the original film elements of this movie still exist, a proper restoration could probably be feasable with much less interference…As it stands, its incredibly distracting in my opinion as it is, and…while the films style lends itself to this weird bouncing around in the edit. I think i’d much prefer to see this get a 2k scan, some decent colour correction and an attempt to save the damaged footage if im honest.

Other than that the performances are goofy, over the top, cheesy, corny, the works. its a manic production and not one person fails the assingment. Couple that with a HELL of a cheap tinny synth soundtrack, with musical numbers that WILL get stuck in your head TILL YOU DIE. And I have to say I have a real soft spot for ‘Nudist Colony of the dead’ My hope is that at some point a proper restoration of this can be done. Because I think restoring it back to its original aspect ratio, in HD, and with the tools to attempt a proper grade on it. I could easily see this become my favourite Mark Piro film.

Definitely recommended, ESPECIALLY if you like Smart/dumb humour. Its been too long since I last watched this one…and I wont make that mistake again.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/nudist-colony-of-the-dead/1/

After recently watching ‘Insidious’ My partner decided for tonights movie night to check out the other jumpscare ‘hot property’ of the 2010s. ‘Sinister’ a film that, i’d heard some pretty good things about myself over the years, but hadnt really got around to checking out…and, for the most part, I was pretty pleasently surprised!

The plot follows true crime novellist Ellison Oswald, Ellison last had a hit 10 years ago, and after a string of failed releases has chanced one last roll of the dice, moving his family to Pennsylvania to explore the story of a missing child and her murdered family, hoping that he’ll be able to uncover some new information, or better yet; solve the crime, so that he can make it big, and spend the rest of his life financially secure with his family…the only hangup? Ellison didnt tell his family that the house they were moving into was in fact, the house that the murdered family lived in…and that the murder was fairly recently.

The only people who do know what Ellisons done, are the local law enforcement who think its a bit of a sick joke, and tell Ellison up front to watch himself because they dont want any trouble…and the locals who slowly tease information out to Ellisons family, and give them the evil eye on multiple occasions.

But Ellison presses on, setting up his office ready to start working on figuring out exactly what happened. But on taking some boxes up to the attic, he discovers theres already a box up there labelled ‘Home Movies’ on bringing them down, he finds an old 8mm home movie projector and a selection of 8mm films with names like ‘Pool Party’ and ‘Mowing the lawn’…He decides to play one to see whats on the reels, and after a few moments of family home movie type fodder, the film harshley cuts to a brutal act of murder. Ellison slowly begins to realise, that whatever he’s watching here may be tied to the murders he’s looking into, and so he decides to dig deeper into the footage to try and figure out exactly what he’s looking at.

Pairing up with the deputy of the local sheriffs office, he begins to piece together the murders, finding demonic links embedded into the film itself, and a cultish undercurrent that may (or may not) link all the murders to a single killer. But with his family life beginning to spiral as the town begin to open up more about exactly WHAT Ellisons gotten them into. Ellison begins to come under increasing stress and pressure. and when a mysterious presence begins to make itself known in the house, things go from bad to downright horrifying.

Going into this one, I’d heard good things, but I wasnt exactly excited. at an hour and 51 minutes long, I thought this one may have me ‘clock watching’ before too long, and the fact that this is often lumped in with ‘Insidious’ as a bit of a ‘jumpscare’ centric production had me internally groaning a bit, as I figured the long runtime and jumpscare obsession basically translated to a bum numbing experience punctuated by cheap scares.

But theres actually a bit more going on with ‘Sinister’ than I expected. It still didnt quite astound me or anything, but I came away from it actually kind of glad I checked it out. The scripts VERY slow burn, but unlike a lot of films from this era, the slow burn nature in combination with the direction really helped create a slow mounting sense of tension and dread. its an incredibly atmospheric film in places and the plotting, while slow, didnt feel painful to me…I fully believe this film would have been higher rated had it been 90 minutes rather than 112, but whats here, for the most part, is pretty good!

The tone is a wonderful malevolence all the way through, steeping the audience in claustrophobic and analogue horror scenery, that I really found quite engaging. The characters are all pretty nicely multi layered (something that I think is missing from a lot of films from this era) its as much a psycho-thriller about an author slowly losing his mind to the stresses of potential failure, as it is a straight paranormal horror film. and the mixture of psychological horror, paranormal horror, thriller elements and the aforementioned jumpscares, actually mixes together into a rather solid work all things considered.

The act structuring is pretty solid, establishing all the tools the audience needs in the first act to crack on, it revs up in the second act, leading to a 3rd act thats maybe a little too high on tension/low on scares. But (and this is the crucial thing) for me, it ended actually pretty solidly. So many films from the late 2000s and early 2010s could do temporary horror or tension and then bomb on the landing…So this one just about managing to hold it together and deliver something (mostly) satisfying? I think is a really good job.

Direction wise. Im going to keep it simple here, its a studio picture, so it already meets the absolute base standards needed to be an acceptable viewing experience. My problem with this is that the directional style falls into two silos. Its a 33% mesh of shots that look very aesthetically pleasing, are well coloured and…while maybe not the most adventurous direction in the world, is still enagaging and pretty well handled…to 66% DEEPLY underlit to almost pitch black footage. Seriously, I dont know how anyone could watch the DVD version of this film, as for the vast majority of it you’ll either be watching a black screen, or at most about 20% of the screen will be dimly lit with the cast feintly framed…We watched a HD copy and even then we were struggling with the murkey darkness. I think a 4k copy may ACTUALLY be the only way to SEE this damn movie.

On the cine front, Again, its good! shots are fairly well compsed (when you can see whats going on) they dont shy away from experimentation with composition and scene layout, as I mention, they arnt exactly pushing any boundaries here. But it was a comfy watch to just sit and get immersed into. Lighting was a bit of an issue, and Im still not a champion of that terrible mid 2000’s onwards trend of desaturating the whole film to give it a washed out ‘murky water’ colour grade. I like my horror vibrant and visually pleasing!

Sequences are well cut together, theres some nice effects work that I think is handled really well, the edit is razor tight. Im honestly surprised this film doesnt get held up more often from that perspective, as there were genuinely some fun horror moments through this film, that I feel get a bit overlooked honestly.

Performance wise, Ethan Hawke gives a great turn as Ellison, he comes across as genuine, sincere and for the most part I thought he played it quite naturalistically…Though I do think he struggled a bit with more anger driven moments. he went big during those scenes, when I think a quieter approach may have served him better. But otherwise? I thought he was a solid lead.

The rest of the supporting cast are all pretty solid as well…No notes really, I just kind of sort of enjoyed hanging around with the people in this story, I dont think any of them performed particualrly badly, and on the whole I think the cast got the assignment and nailed more or less all of it.

And the soundtrack? A little unremarkable if im honest, its the era of drone and sampling older corny tunes, twisting them into horror pieces. What I really liked about Sinister is the fact they utilise silence so well, its rare to see a mainstream film do it so often, but here. They really do use silence and drone well to help keep things feeling extra spooky!

All in all, I liked Sinister. But thats not to say it doesnt have its problems. its a long LONG movie that I feel DESPERATELY needed a shorter cut to fully win me over, throw in a couple of plot beats that I felt didnt quite play true to how real people would behave and the questionable lighting choices, and you have a film that I think i’d absolutely watch again…But maybe not with my full attention. I’d say its definitely worth checking out at least once. But temper your expectations, and I think you’ll enjoy it more for it.

All I can say is, its got me curious to check out the sequel…So it must have done something right!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/sinister/

So…we’re now at the point where we’re asking the question ‘What if Hellraiser, But ACTUALLY ‘Carnival of Souls’ by way of ‘Fight Club’…And about halfway into this film I lamented to my partner that only a week or so ago we were enjoying ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser 2’ and all the wonderful mysterious etherialness that came with it.

And now here we are, crashing through the world of DTV, where originality is beyond the attention of the morgue and the absolute BEST we can hope for is a couple of half decent performances and the feint FEINT hope that the tribute act this film is trying to make will at least stick the landing…and by the barest of threads, I think this film manages it.

‘Hellraiser: Hellseeker’ is the 6th entry in the Hellraiser series, and we’ve now pretty much settled into the ‘Freddys Nightmares’ approach to the cenobites…I.E, that 90% of the story is a standalone tale of a persons excesses leading them down a dark and dangerous path, ultimately leading to the final 10% of the story, which is a handful of shots of pinhead scattered across the runtime, leading to a final confrontation where the great spikey git appears through the mists of a creaking set in the style of a reveal from ‘Stars in their Eyes’, to essentially tell the victim EXCATLY why they’ve ended up in front of Pinhead, in such a way that reveals that there was in fact VERY little way anyone could have really guessed what was going on.

‘Hellseeker’ specifically has a fundamental flaw that i’ll get to shortly…But the plot is the first film Since ‘Hellbound’ to try and tie things back to our first ‘Final Girl’ of the series, Kirsty Cotton. As we open with Kirsty fooling around with her husband of 5 years ‘Trevor’ when…after getting a little TOO hot and heavy on the highway, their car careers off a bridge into the fridgid lake below, killing Kirsty and putting Trevor in the hospital with severe amneisa and memory loss.

Released from the hospital, the detectives want to know EXACTLY whats gone on, but Trevor has no idea…Kirsty’s body hasnt been recovered from the wreckage and the best Trevor can muster up is some vague flashbacks to their 5th anniversairy celebrations, and an encounter with a mysterious man offering him a mysterious box that could lead to both his AND Kirstys life vastly improving…

As Trevor tries to work his way back to normality, he quickly finds that his intepretation of reality may not be entirely accurate, he keeps bouncing around multiple different scenarios and moments. One minute he’s riding the night bus home, next he’s being grinded on by his boss in lengerie, next the girl from down the hall is trying to have sex with him…then his accupuntural therapist…and mixed in all amongst this, we have scenes of cenobites tormenting and torturing both Trevor and some of his close friends, feint memories of him and Kirsty together that dont always quite align. and a constant feeling like he’s forgotten something critical…Something that would make all of this make sense…something ominous…that may in fact be better left in the darkest recesses of his mind…something terrible thats about to turn Trevors world completely upside down and give him revelations he could have never conceived.

I’ll get my biggest gripe out of the way here, and its the script. It. drags. ASS. it is SO slow, painfully slow, glacially slow. its slow, and because they’re trying to play with the ‘Fight Club’ mechanism of showing the audience scenes which may be real, may only be happening in Trevors head, or may be the Cenobites screwing with Trevor. it means that everything we see happen MAY be real…or may be totally false…which, on paper may read like an intreaguing process…Until you realise that if you dont ground your unreliable narrator into at least SOME basic world lore…you end up with a film where I as the viewer dont feel like ANY of it matters…because it could ALL be a false narrative, just as much as it could all be true.

They dont clarify anything until about 10 minutes off the end of the film when they put all their cards on the table finally, and just…flat out tell the audience what was real, and what wasnt. And thats a problem for me, because…This isnt a film trying to get the audience to figure out whats going on. It isnt trying to tease the narrative, it isnt even really breadcrumbing. Its just showing us a load of random scenes and then at the end going ‘Ah! THESE scenes were REAL!!!’ before cutting to black. and thats awful storytelling, because why would I want to invest 89 minutes of my time into a film where realistically, the only stuff that ACTUALLY matters is the opening 10 minutes or so, and the final 10 minutes or so.

It creates a film thats pretty much ‘Burn after reading’ because once you’ve seen it once from start to finish and understand what they’re ACTUALLY trying to do, I can say confidently that you might get ONE more watch out of this thing, just to see if you can notice the things you missed the first time…and then its basically unwatchable for how much of the audiences time it wastes.

The films INCREDIBLY horny. But not in a ‘Hellraiser’ 1 or 2 way…a classy way…No. this is ‘Skinimax’ terratory, with fully clothed dry humping and blink and you’ll miss it boob shots…and thats about it. Their must be at least 4 or 5 sex scenes in this film. and again, it just reminded me of the sex scenes in the first couple of movies, where they were delicately peppered in to give the audience an idea of the intensity of the relationship between Frank and Julia…here, it feels cheap and seedy. Basically just here because otherwise the film quite literally WOULD be sedentary and incoherent.

The characters are all fairly one note for most of the runtime. Trevor probably gets the meatiest character development…But he essentially has 3 moods, bewildered, sad…and later in the film, when he finds out whats ACTUALLY going on…angry. and thats about it. the rest of the cast are horny inserts…or corporate inserts…and thats all their is. Even the dialogues just awkward and stilted. Reading like what a teenager would imagine ‘angsty’ and ‘edgey’ would ACTUALLY be like.

The act structurings a mess, again, the first and last 10 minutes of the movie. No notes, they’re pretty solid…but the remaining 69 minutes? incoherent ramblings that ride pretty much the same level across the runtime. In fact, this almost feels like a beat for beat reworking of ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ to some extent…Only, instead of the lead character being an out and out ass. Instead we here have a character whos sad, confused and looking for meaning…while the implications lead to a darker past.

Direction wise, it again feels like ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ we have David Fincher inspired moody lighting and tribute style framing and directional choices within the edit and performance choices. Nothing offensively bad, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Again, it hurts me to see this series nosedive so hard, so quickly.

The cine again…is fine. I dont feel they quite manage to do the cenobites justice here, they cut around them quite frequently and the lighting doenst really compliment their presence…I assume they just…Didnt think the costumes were very good and decided to hide them by keeping them in low lighting and showing as little of them as possible.

Sequences are built fine enough for DTV, but theres a definite whiff of phoning it in across the board, it doesnt have heart, it doesnt have that creative flow…It feels like someone went to the movies over a long weekend, saw a load of cop dramas and psychothrillers and just…decided to borrow some of the best bits for this movie…with mixed to poor results.

Performance wise, We’re pretty much with Dean Winters as Trevor for the full runtime…and he’s fine. Not outstanding, not remarkable…he does a fine enough job as the lead in a cop infused horror thriller DTV, he gets through his lines fine enough, his physical presence is fine enough. He’s watchable.

To be completely honest, I was happier to see Ashley Laurence back as Kirsty, and although she only appears in the movie via flashbacks. She did end up having a meatier role than I expected, and again, she’s pretty decent. Honestly, the best parts of the movie are scenes with her and scenes with her and Winters. Its such a shame this is only really a cameo for the most part…

Doug Bradley is in this movie in a duel role for approximately 10-15 minutes of screentime. He’s clearly bored by this point, they arnt really giving him any good material to work with, he doesnt really do much…I know he’s capable of great things, but…to excuse my language. He’s dealing with a case of ‘Shit in, Shit out’, and this kind of marks the beginning of him really firmly trying to leave the franchise, but then being dragged back in for one reason or another.

The musics ‘MiDi-fied’ orchestral gumpf, with a little bit of rock and drone thrown in for good measure. its nowhere near as good as the first two films score…But its SO much better than ‘Hellraiser III’ or ‘Inferno’…

All in all, Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a frustrating watch, because it opens strong and the ending is probably the strongest the series has been since ‘Hellbound’, but you have to wade through over 60 minutes of absolute drivel and garbage to get there. This could have been an incredibly good short film, something for the fans to get a bite of. But instead, its an overly bloated, underfunded and badly managed waste of time for the most part. Not the worst that the series has spit up yet…I COULD actually see myself rewatching this one. But we are NOT in Kansas anymore Toto…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-hellseeker/

An interesting experiment, ‘Phantasmatapes’ is a special effort from Bleeding Skull to recreate the vibe and feel of the old 80s ‘late night horror’ slots on TV, presented in ‘Warm Fuzzy Glow’ VHS vision. The idea is simple enough, take two public domain movies (In this case; ‘The Revenge of Dr. X’ and ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’) and recut, remix, rescore and represent these films using mixed media and experimental feedback techniques. and, I think the end result is both charming, interesting…But also not quite what i’d hoped for.

Based on the pitch for this film, I went in expecting a bumper length feature totalling around 90-110 minutes that tried to recreate the late night horror show vibe, with maybe a few modern twists and turns thrown into the mix to keep me on my toes…Instead, the entire feature runs to 72 minutes long (shorter than the shortest film featured on this set by 10 minutes) and realistically, probably isnt the best way to experience these movies.

I had seen ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’ multiple times before watching this, but I hadnt seen ‘Dr. X’ before. and the way this film handles the features is to heavily HEAVILY truncate them down to about a third of their original feature running length, and using feedback experimentation and the scoring, they attempt to bridge large gaps in the narrative.

As a result, I found myself really struggling to follow ‘Dr. X’ as I feel they chopped WAY too much out to really make it make much sense, and the experimentation at times overrides all the visuals onscreen. meaning by the end of it, I felt like I had a vague idea of what the plot was, but really; it felt like I hadnt been shown enough to know what was going on. Luckily with ‘Brain’, because I HAD seen it plenty of times before, I was able to fill in the gaps, and as a result I had a much more pleasent time with that one.

4 or 5 times across the runtime, we also get treated to some commercial breaks, which again is nice…but does yield some mixed results. their were ads I really liked, that felt bizarre and hit the right tone of what I was looking for, there were some ones that felt a bit dull. on the whole I think it was okay, but that kind of leads me to my biggest problem with this release.

Having the entire feature run to 72 minutes (including commercials) results in it feeling more like a ‘vibe’ watch than anything I could actually see myself sitting down to watch again…It felt like the kind of movie that runs quietly in the background of a party to help create a sense of atmosphere…While not actually being something I think i’d conciously choose to sit and watch again.

I feel like the films really should have been 45 minutes a piece, with maybe 10-15 minutes of commercials/bumpers/station IDs and other goodies intercut. I feel like the films were cut down too threadbare and needed just a bit more narrative tipping back in to steady the ship, and I feel like the commercial sections needed more consistency in their utilisation, and maybe even a bit more variety. I enjoyed the goofy ads, but what makes the ads feel distinct and weird is when they’re contrasted with just fairly normal commercials. It kind of broke the illusion that this was supposed to be a ‘late night off air recording’ because everything was way too lean and concentrated.

I didnt hate ‘Phantasmatapes’ But I dont think it’ll be one that I put in regular rotation, I could in fact see myself being more likely to pull this off my shelf for the extras (including clean full length VHS versions of ‘Brain’ and ‘Dr.X’ alongside upscaled VHS oddities like ‘The Max Headroom Incident’) than for the main feature itself.

That being said, I believe they are planning a volume 2 in this set, and I feel if they let this thing breath just a little more and paced out the commercials a little better. This could become a firm favourite series for me. So…this one’ll probably go on the shelf for now…but i’ll be keeping an eye on it.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/phantasmatapes/

Over a somewhat divided room, we made the decision tonight to check out the sequel to ‘Insidious’, quite decently titled ‘Insidious: Chapter 2’ I wasnt a huge fan of the first one, I didnt hate it, but I felt like it basically did the legwork so that ‘The Conjuring’ could pretty much perfect the format ‘Insidious’ was trying to work up. My partner on the other hand had a real soft spot for the first one, and today was her day to pick a movie, so; we carried on.

This entry picks up maybe a couple of days to a week after the events of the first film. Elise is dead, Josh is a prime suspect in a murder case and Renai, who has every faith in her husband, is starting to have some doubts. Josh hasnt been quite right since the events of the last film, and its pretty much confirmed more or less straight away that the being inhabiting Josh’s body ISNT Josh…

Meanwhile, the Lambert family move AGAIN into ANOTHER new house, Joshes mothers place, and ghosts and demons once again begin to plague the place. Josh tries his best to convince Renai that its all in her head, but soon it becomes to much to ignore.

Meanwhile Elises assistants from the first film visit her former home and stumble on an archive of VHS tapes covering most of her time as a paranormalist medium. and by a chance accident they stumble on a tape from the mid 80s featuring one Josh Lambert. THIS is footage of the visit Elise had to the Lambert house back in the 80s that Josh is told he had his memories wiped of in the first film…the pair start taking a closer look and find something shocking.

Enter ‘Carl’, Elises former paranormal partner in crime, who holds ‘dice seance’ basically he has a load of dice with letter on them, he asks a question, rolls the dice and the answer will be spelled out if theres a presence there. Carl gets summoned to Elises place urgently with dire news. On Carls arrival the assistants sit him down and play the tape of Josh, only its been slightly enhanced…Why is the tape a concern? Because standing in the background of the shot, too dim to see on the original footage, but visible when enhanced, is the future version of Josh watching his past self.

Carl consults the dice that give him a clue, which is transcribed by Joshes mother Lorraine to mean an abandoned hospital that Lorrain used to work at, and a terrifying mystery surrounding the story of a man named ‘Parker Crane’ comes to light…that could have dire consiquences for all involved, both living…and dead.

Quick caption review of this one; I liked it marginally more than the last one. Its literally more of the same across the board, my original reviews points pretty much stand once again for the entirity of this film, so rather than rehash them, i’ll just point you to my original review, but my thoughts there, were more or less the same here; and if your up for ‘more or less more of the same’ then your quids in here pal!

The reason I actually like this one a tiny bit more is 3 specific reasons:

1 – The pacings a little bit quicker, it still has a lot of moments of glacial pacing, but its quicker to get going with the monster show, it really revs up a lot sooner than the first film, and I found most of the resolutions to be fairly satisfying.

2 – Theres a significantly lower reliance on Jumpscares. The first film I felt really ONLY had jumpscares to work with, this film draws a bit closer to a supernatural slasher film, which gave it a lot more to work with in terms of styles and types of horror. Which endeared me to it quite a bit more. Its still a LOT of jumpscares for one movie, which is a bit of a shame, but at least we have some variety here…

and 3 – Despite the plot of this film going off to crazy and strange places, I actually felt that it was a bit more coherent than the first film. It actually wants to tell a more in depth story than just ‘people being kind of haunted sort of…or are they?’ Here its essentially a paranormal slasher for the vast majority of the runtime with a hint of science fiction thrown into boot. I find aesthetically its much more pleasing. and the tone is more consistant.

Once again, I cant say I out and out loved this film, but I appreciated the fact it tried to do something a bit more interesting in this entry. and I almost certainly think it’s better than the first film for it. Unfortunately you would likely have to watch the first film to fully understand and appreciated everything that happens int his entry. But! If they continue on this path, then i’ll be REALLY excited for ‘Chapter 15!’

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/insidious-chapter-2/

The first ‘Hellraiser’ film to not involve Clive Barker (the studio actually BANNED him from having any input on this film), the first ‘Hellraiser’ film NOT to be released in theaters, and from here on in, im on ‘first time viewings’ till the end of this franchise. All I knew about ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ was that it featured cops trailing some ‘bizzare murders’ I figured; ‘Well; that cant be all bad!’…By the way, have you seen any of David Finchers movies between 1995 and 2000?…just checking…

‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ is the first (but certainly NOT the last) entry into this franchise to be heavily rumoured to be a retroactive ‘refit’ of a script stuck in development hell. The rumour goes that the Weinsteins hired a writer, who took an old rejected supernatural cop script HEAVILY inspired by ‘Se7en’, but changed…whatever supernatural element was supposed to be in THAT script to Cenobites and the lament configuration, and…they threw in a good dose of ‘Fight Club’ to the mix as well because…hey why not? its the year 2000 baybeeeeee

The result is a film that comes across like a poor mans attempt at Fincher with an uncanny vally degree of ‘Freddys Nightmares’ thrown into the mix. and I absolutely did NOT gel with it one bit.

The plot centers around Joseph, a dirty DIRTY cop. Josephs charming, charismatic, good at magic tricks and one of the forces best and brightest. But Joseph is also both a coke user and a dealer, he’s totally open to framing people to make himself look good and get himself out of trouble, and he’s addicted to cheating on his Wife (whome he has a daughter with) with sex workers…largely for the buzz, playing it off as him working late at the station and paying them in cash and crack stolen from crime scenes. Joseph thinks he’s too smart to get caught, as he balances the line between excess and debauchery, while not going SO far as to go full on overt and get caught.

But things are about to change for Joseph, as; when attending a gory and gruesome crime scene, he stumbles across two things, a mysterious puzzlebox, and a candle with a childs finger encased in it.

The case stays with him through the night…But doesnt bother him so much that he wont head out to spend the night getting coked up with a sex worker. After ‘finishing’, he hits the bathroom and starts messing around with the puzzle box, which opens, and briefly transports him to a world of nightmarish visions. After which he awakens on the bathroom floor, heads to bed, and the next day heads into the station.

But while warming up for the day, Joseph recieves a call from the motel he stayed at last night, its the sex worker pleading for him to come and save her because someones after her. At which point she gives a blood curdling scream and the phone goes dead. Both Joseph and his partner Tony head to the motel, where they find the woman carved up and bolted onto the bathroom wall. Joseph begs Tony to cover with him, and confesses that he was there that night.

Tony reluctantly agrees. But this sends Joseph down a deep and dark path. As a suspect known only as ‘The Engineer’ makes his presence known. At first, Joseph is warned off pusuing this, with a warning that, if he ‘hunts for The Engineer, The Engineer will hunt for you’ But Joseph is the best cop in town! he’ll crack the case lickety split surely!…surley not…as the bodycount rises and Joseph ends up way in over his head. he’s led into a realm of demons, torture and debauchery as he tries to get to the bottom of the killers motive, without finding himself on the hit list.

Its heavily refuted that this is a recycled rejected script retrofitted to be a Hellraiser vehical…But in many ways, i’d be more forgiving of it if it was. Because, this quite literally does just feel like a direct to video knock off of ‘Se7en’ with a dash of ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Freddys Nightmares’ thrown in for good measure.

Probably one of the biggest complaints I see regularly is that ‘Pinhead’ is barely even in this movie. And I think thats a fair critique, but thats the least of this films worries really, honestly; I thought it was kind of refreshing and interesting to reframe the series in this way, having a cop stumble onto the site of one of the Cenobites victims and then slowly, they piece together whats happening from various crime scenes, before being compelled into hunting the box down for themselves. That sounds like it could have been fun!

This movie though…is NOT fun. its very VERY cheap for the most part and I feel largely focusses on the wrong things. Rather than a horror cop drama with subtext and coded messaging. We instead get a character piece, where we’re stuck with a deeply unlikable character getting more and more unlikable as the runtime goes on, barely even really dealing with the cenobites or the nature of the crime scenes, until the final 10 or so minutes (with notable exception) when the Cenobites just randomly turn up, explain the whole movie, and then leave again.

Theres way too much focus on Josephs personal life, on the world he’s built for himself and his own ostracization. To the point that, when the Cenobites DO turn up in dribs and drabs, it feels like i’ve accidentally swapped movies for a couple of minutes. They feel SO out of place in this movie, i’d have rather it just been ghosts or non descript demons than trying to ‘square peg in a round hole’ it as they’ve tried here.

The pacings glacial, it moves at a crawl, with the plot largely just being Joseph plus 1-2 other people standing or sitting in a room lore dropping till we can get to a Cenobite scene or a change of location…But you better no be interested in HEARING any of this script, because other than Doug Bradley, who actually DOES ennunciate his lines here, the rest of the cast are TERRIBLE mumblers…and as my bluray for this one didnt contain a subtitle track…I pretty much have NO idea what was said for about 70% of the runtime.

Tonally, it wants to be a dark and gritty cop drama, but the budget wont stretch to decent effects and heavy gore, which means all the gore shots have to either be heavily distorted or obscured. They also seemingly couldnt find an actress with a ‘nudity’ exception in her contract, because the one sex scene in the film is fully clothed and heavily filtered. Basically, it feels like someone commissioned a ‘Hellraiser’ film, and then ACTUALLY WATCHED a ‘Hellraiser’ film and realised that they ABSOLUTELY DID NOT want to make a new Hellraiser film, because it was a sin. So they then moved heaven and earth to SOMEHOW create a ‘sanitized’ take on ‘Hellraiser’…and its bizarre. I’ve never seen a film so desperate to fight against what its supposed to be.

The characters are poorly structured, they dont feel naturalistic at all, and some of their decisions in this script are just downright stupid; probably the most glaring example is Joseph reciving the call from the sex worker being murdered, visiting the motel and THEN realising that it looks like he killed her…despite the fact that…even in the year 2000, most police stations recorded incoming calls, and that CCTV was INCREDIBLY prominant even then, so he would have had MORE than an alibi to prove he didnt kill her…but he acts in this film like he’d be getting the death penalty for all this…and thats just one glaring example out of dozens I spotted across the runtime that just…made me think the movie was kind of stupid and rushed script wise.

The directions fine enough, Scott Derrikson was clearly a Fincher fan as this film reeks of ‘Se7en’ on a directoral standpoint. It looks nice enough, even if the CGI is creaky as hell in the year of our lord 2025…I’ll take a poor mans take on Fincher over uncoordinated any day. But its still kind of poor show that the best the director can do with a picture is just ape a VERY popular film makers style and hope enough people get on board with it.

Cast directions taken a page from Fincher too, but here I think its very well handled…arguably the best aspect of this production…if only they’d got the cast to read their lines at a volume that I could actually HEAR what was being said, i’d probably have an even greater appreciation for it.

The cine is fine, it looks cheap. it looks REALLY cheap…but its fine. I think my only big hangup with this one is the design of the Cenobites. we have 4 new Cenobites in this film, and all of them have pretty much the same facial design…basically a tweak on ‘Chatterers’ design, but with different body shapes. It also looks like they managed to find the old ‘Chatterer’ makeup prosthetics, becuase his head is back on a legless body for a few scenes, and its all kind of iffy. Now, I will say they mercifully only use CG sparingly to enhance the practical effects. My rating would have been even lower had they gone for purely CG cenobites. But the lack of diversity in design is just really kind of a bummer…

Other than that though, its shot to look like a TV movie/direct to video feature. You can clearly see the inspriations behind the compositional choices, but the fact remains that the budget is REALLY struggling to match the vision here, and there are several moments that really made me just feel like this film was coasting on fumes.

The edit is a bit of a mixed bag too, It was the age where horror films relied on ‘flash cuts’ to create a sense of horror and jumpscares. and when they do that, the film curdles like sour milk. the 2000s style horror editing here is rancid. it looks and feels terrible…but when its not trying to do that. I think its pretty passable for the most part. Plenty of B-roll, good enough pacing, and sequences breath…maybe a little too much for their own good, but I’d rather something have stretch room than feel like its been chopped to within and inch of its life.

The performances are…not the best, Craig Sheffer as Joseph is probably the strongest character here, but he’s essentially jsut playing a charicature of the charismatic, wise cracking cop trope thats now commonplace in series like ‘CSI’ and ‘Law and order’. He gives it a good crack and his ‘fear’ moments are genuinely impressive…Its just a shame that he gets so little in the way of range, and that I cant tell a bloody word he’s saying.

Doug Bradly is probably second best here, returning as ‘Pinhead’ for all of 5 minutes, his makeup once again takes a hit, after they just about ‘nailed’ it in ‘Bloodline’…they dont really modify his voice either. But they do give him an intimidating presence, and the time he’s on screen is arguably some of the best.

But good lord, the soundtrack. is. HORRENDOUS. at times it feels like Sterling entertainment and full moon offcuts…the kind of music they wouldnt use in THEIR movies. GONE is the orchestral ‘real’ instrument pieces and instead its midi samples and stock music…and it utterly throws the vibe of the movie entirely, I hated it. With a more impactful score, this probably could have been somewhat salvagable…but as it is? it sucks SO bad…

‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ had promise…as mentioned, I could see the core premise of this movie ACTUALLY being kind of fun. But it feels like they really lost their way on this one at some point in pre-production and what should have been a ‘Hellraiser’ film from a Cops perspective, became a ‘Cop’ film that just so happened to have demons in it…I really didnt care for this one, it’ll likely be a while before I revisit it. Cant recommend it, its cheap, boring and lacking all the bite, vibe and aesthetic that made the series great in the first place. ‘Hellbound’ is now but a distant memory…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-inferno/