‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ Review – A Haunting Spiral of Guilt and Damnation!
Dimension Films were at it again at the turn of the new century, only this time without the master of horror, Clive Barker, at the helm. That said, Hellraiser: Inferno still has Clive Barker familiars Doug Bradley (Hellraiser, Hellraiser 2-8), playing the Hell Priest himself, as the epic “Pinhead” character and Craig Sheffer (Night Breed, Code of Honor) as Detective Joseph Thorn. Both turn in exceptional performances for a Hellraiser film, especially Sheffer as the morally corrupt, rationalizing, crooked cop who cheats on his wife and forsakes his family and his own innocence with the relentless carelessness of a demon force himself.
The Director is Scott Derrickson (Black Phone, Sinister, The Exorcism of Emily Rose). For context, many people had doubts about the Hellraiser franchise after Clive’s involvement in the prior film in the series, Hellraiser Bloodlines (1996), where the internal and box office perception was that this film was going off the rails to the point where even the director decided to take his name off the film, using the derogatory, joke name “Alan Smithee” instead. I think it was a bit of an overreaction as Bloodlines was an excellent edition to the series, in my humble opinion. (I once did an editing exercise to combine Bloodlines with Event Horizon and it worked pretty well with Hellraiser being in the unconscious head of Dr. Weir, played by the excellent as usual, Sam Neill, back when still had edge, i.e. before he hadn’t been beaten down with decades of dinosaur fantasyland heroism. But I will re-route my GPS back to Hellraiser Inferno.)
Note those signing onto this film are indeed appropriately Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Apparently, there were disputes for money with Clive, for which Clive got the short end of that stick. Just like in this movie, ironically, karma can be Hell, indeed.
Hellraiser: Inferno opens with a lovely opening score, sophisticated, chill, and powerfully revealing, as befits the previously iconic scores from composer Christopher Young. This time the music is from Walter Werzowa. I like this soundtrack and the hip vibe he brings to it. Modern, temporal, and cunning.
We snap into a ticking timer of a chess match where Detective Jospeh Thorn is playing against German (Jewish?) Einstein stand-in “the Professor?” He wins some quick cash, winning the chess game, during a basketball game where he coaches. He stares at the professor intently, like he knows he’s winning. “You’ve fallen right into my game, professor.” He’s smart. Got it.
In the change room he casually flashes his gun and snoots a vile of cocaine to sharpen himself up. He’s above the law. He reveals his thinking in a voice over “I was always one to examine things closely. I learned early I had a gift for solving problems. I learned careful examination of how and what and why could lead to understanding, even to control. What I didn’t know was that my own life would someday be the most challenging puzzle of all.”
This movie has several NYPD Blue regulars, starting with the detective’s partners, Detective Tony Nenonen, played by Nicholas Turturro (not to be confused with John Turturro of Coen Brothers fame). He is a likeable, straight shooter in this film. Loyal, moral, and an excellent contrast to the corruption of Det. Thorn.
Then the famous joke/riddle in Hellraiser fan club and internet circles for this film comes “What’s a 10-letter word for your name?” Thorn asks of Nenonen. “For my name?” Nenonen asks. “My name has 7 letters.” Thorn replies “Yeah, but it’s a 10-Letter word.” The punch line comes later.
Next, they arrive at Jay Chow’s place. We never meet Jay, only through a pictured ID card. “Here’s what he looks like with a face.” says a cop on the scene. Jay was of Asian descent. He lives in a mansion, with a familiar square of candles burning, placed in ritualistic fashion. Only a small smattering of blood entrails resides on the floor.
“What the hell is this?” asks Nenonen.
Small world time, as Det. Thorn knew Jay Chow back in high school. It was then he sadistically smiles when recalling how Jay wanted to be on the basketball team, and they ‘tortured the shit out of him’ and confesses “we gave him Hell.”
While snooping around Jay’s mansion he finds a vile of coke. He does a little magic hand action and poof, it disappears.
Thorn then notices a candle and inside it is a child’s finger (which for the record seriously looks like an old hobo’s finger and not child-like at all).
Back at the evidence room, Det. Thorn casually steals $300 from Jay Chow’s wallet and crosses out the evidence figure of $400 and replaces it with $100. He copped that money for sure! That’s what I call a death tax!
He then notices an item in an evidence bag. It is The Lament Configuration (a.k.a. in your best memory of Doug Bradley’s deep, altered voice, “…the Box”). He snags it as well in his coat pocket.
The music pre-laps over the Hellraiser box getting lifted from evidence into Det. Thorn driving home to his beleaguered family. Again, I really like the music in this film. It gets real chill and sultry, laying a little sax down. Love it!
Then we get a little more of Det. Thorn’s rationalization for his corrupt lifestyle in film noir voice overs. After we see him lay his head upside down on his lovely daughters’ sleeping head. Touching. Meanwhile, his wife caught a flu, while he caught a new case. He seems reluctant to get too close to her. Emotionally detached from her.
“I believe in loyalty. Fidelity. I understand the concept. My parents were married for 40 years. But I live in a different world. Most marriages fail. Most men just leave. I know that would kill her. But if she doesn’t know. And if this keeps me coming back (as he picks up a hooker, likely about to pay her with the money from a the deceased Jay Chow) then who is to say what’s right?”
Lovely contemporary adult, easy listening music plays as Thorn undresses and offers the hooker Jay Chow’s money and blow which he reveals to her using magician’s hand trickery, each in turn until the negotiation is complete. He withholds the blow till the hooker says what he wants to hear. The hooker wants that blow bad. “I’ll do whatever you want, as many times as you want.” The song’s female singer repeats the line “We’re living in the best of all possible worlds.” as Thorn sleazily takes his prost from behind, both in ecstasy. We fade from red to white and back to red. Beauty of a moment. Completely corrupt and venal!
While in the washroom he then starts to tinker with The Lament Configuration Box. It opens. Not in Leviathan mode. Just traditional music box mode then Black Sun mode and back to the cube. He enters a room and he’s back in his childhood room in fluorescent light. Then to another room where the lights flicker where out of a hole in the wall the twin wire sisters appear. Two grotesque, Silent Hill looking sisters who have their eyes wired shut and chins wired to their chests. They both start to make out with him, and with their hands enter his chest under the skin, smudging the blood all over him, as Det. Thorn sensually enjoys it.
Coming to his senses he runs away only to be met at the bottom of the stairs by another Silent Hill looking torso creature, no legs or lower body with chattering teeth and no eyes and moves with his arms. Allow me to do a little dream analysis whereby the woman is twice as much as he can handle or something about the duality or guilt of cheating between the good wife and bad hooker while that chattering torso creature is probably that coke is leaving his teeth chattering and numb while his dick isn’t working because of the cocaine, but enough from Doctor Sigmund Fraud.
Thorn narrowly escapes these Cenobites until he reaches the front door where an innocent child’s voice beckons “help me!” Instead, Thorn tries to get away, and opens the front door where the Hellpriest, Pinhead himself, appears, and duly rips his face off. Removing his ‘mask’ metaphorically.
Det. Thorn awakens to find himself next to ‘the box.’ The hooker is asleep in bed. He just leaves for work. The lab confirms Jay Chow was torn apart by hooks large enough to snag a great white. Soon Nenonen confronts Joseph over the 10-letter word for his name. His brain hurts already! Just give him the god damned answer!
“Palindrome.”
“Palindrome? What’s that? Are you making fun of me?”
“N-E-N-O-N-E-N. Spelled the same way forward and backwards.”
“Oh, I get it. It’s like the name ‘Bob.’ That’s one too.”
“Yeah, that’s good Tony.” (Funny, but another clear contrast of intelligence levels).
Then the hooker calls Detective Thorn AT THE POLICE STATION (who gives a hooker their work number?) only to be drowned in her own blood hideously; being dismembered over the phone by someone or something.
Thorn returns to the Motel he was at with the hooker and gets Tony “Palindrome” Nenonen to check the body himself. Out of sheer machiavellian self-preservation he gets his dim-witted partner to investigate the body while also littering the crime scene with personal objects from Tony’s car (to implicate Tony into the crime).
Thorn confesses he was with the Hooker and had drugs and sex with her but did not kill her. Trust me bro!
Back at the lab, the unamused crime lab attendant, a funny little side character in his own right, is running the prints from the box. Thorn says limit search for body tattoos and finds a match. Thorn goes to the matchee’s location, at a tasty tattoo shop, where a skinhead looking sex freak tattoo artist, Leon, thinks Thorn is a thug of Jay Chows searching for the box. Leon tells him about “The Engineer” wants his money and his box. Thorn turns the tables by revealing he’s a cop and proceeds to rough up the tattoo artist.
Thorn catches his first wind of “The Engineer” and asks, “Why does he want the box so bad? Why did Jay Chow want it? The Tattoo Artist offers no answers. He’s just a middleman. Thorn says if this Engineer guy threatens him, to give him a call. The tattoo artist says the detective can take him downtown, beat the shit out of him, rape him, that he’ll never talk about The Engineer.”
“That’s okay Leon. I’ll find him whether you talk to me or not.” replies Thorn.
Then the famous adage/retort from Leon “Hunt for the Engineer and the Engineer will hunt you.”
In Hellraiser mythos, there is some debate about who “The Engineer” truly is. One theory was he is that scorpion/aborted fetus from the first Hellraiser. I never really understood why as it looked too animalistic to be a cerebral brain trust from hell. Just some chomper with a bad attitude (a metaphor for Kristy’s aborted rape-child with Frank? That’s sheer conspiracy on my part as I have zero guess as to what that thing was truly, The Engineer or otherwise). But The Engineer I think was supposed to be Henry D’Amour, if you’re literary minded. Or could it just be another guise of the original Hell Priest himself? Or is it just whomever is in charge in any given scenario of one’s self-destruction?
Leon turns his back as Thorn is about to leave but the wire sisters are tattooed on his back and start to move around in trippy fashion. Thorn braces him against the wall like he’s about to fuck him from behind but then doubletakes his back tattoo as just a giant stigmata tat. Bewildered, Thorn leaves.
Creepy pedophile, drug dealer, Bernie, is selling ice cream to kids. He of course is one of the good detective’s info sources. He hits him up for drugs and info about “The Engineer.” Pathetically he denies “I don’t know no Engineer.” Righteously albeit ironically, he beats the shit out of Bernie until he tells him what he knows about The Engineer. He recounts a story about human trafficking and a trafficker fell in love with one of his hookers, and stole her away from The Engineer, only for her to be beheaded. “The Engineer” left a note telling her boyfriend he “took what was his” (the body) and left the rest for him.
Joseph then has lunch with his partner Tony where he tells him he set him up to be blamed for the death of the hooker in the motel from earlier. Tony is furious. Joseph tells him he will smooth it out with the crime lab after finding all his personal items at the crime scene that he planted there to frame him. He says he only did this to buy himself time to find out who the true criminal is. Who indeed?
A little child enters this dive of a bar only to give Thorn a video cassette tape (yep, we were still there back in 2000, barely). He pops it into the VCR at the bar where a video of an unseen man with hooks is ripping into the back of what sounds like Bernie. Making him indeed his ‘whipping boy.’ Another child screaming is heard, and another child’s finger is held by “The Engineer” who has skin over his eyes, and only a mouth with a tongue that burns like a hot coal, the fingerprints off the child’s finger. Again, the image is Silent Hill like, making me suspect creature design crossover.
Hellraiser is famous for inspiring many cultural touchstones in terms of looks and design. Everything from influencing Silent Hill itself, to Mankind from WWF fame (see Kirsty getting the mandible claw from the Chatterer in the original Hellraiser), to The Borg in Star Trek the Next Generation, to the cool leather stylings of The Matrix, to recently Stranger Things, and much, much more.
Joseph tries to show his lab the tape, but it has been magically erased. Making him seem guilty as fuck like he is the killer. He knows Bernie and knew the dead Jay Chow. It’s not adding up well in Thorn’s favour.
Thorn’s boss isn’t buying it. He tells him to see the police physiatrist played warmly and unnervingly by James Remar (Tales from the Darkside, Django Unchained, Dexter). He is such a diamond in the rough. So instantly personable and yet consequential in everything he is in. Anyway, Thorn stonewalls Remar’s attempts to talk openly. He doesn’t tell him anything, and just distracts him with some ‘up close magic.’
Thorn and Tony end up at Bernie’s murder scene. Suspiciously Thorn knows where the child’s finger is, in the cash register. He saw it on the damn video tape (which was erased!). So convincingly like a criminal, angry he failed to cover his tracks properly. Craig Sheffer nails the narcissistic, obsessive anger of this character. Perhaps interactions with Bob & Harvey helped his stagecraft in that respect. Nah, he’s just a very good actor.
Det. Thorn plays a message on the deceased Bernie’s phone where he tells him where he can find The Engineer. And it’s a stereotypical, straight out of central casting, Texas Hold’em, wild west card table room. Filled with cowboy hats and shadowy eyes and poker faces everywhere.
Thorn wants to buy into a game of poker but a familiar character actor, appropriately from Fight Club (the bar tender with the enhanced neck brace, if I recall) confronts Joseph. He’s dressed in full cowboy outfit with 2 six-shooters by his side. “I remember all the faces, but I can’t say I remember yours.” Obviously, he is involved in some shady underground shit!
“Are you The Engineer?” Thorn asks.
“You flatter me, sir.”
“I’m not going away; you can tell him that.”
“You like to play games. The Engineer likes to play games too. And it appears you’re playing one of his games right now. He doesn’t want you to stop. He wants you to play the game!”
The man with skin over his eyes pops up and runs away out the back. Thorn follows him and falls down a hill. Two Japanese cowboys tag team him and kick the shit out of him. Later Tony finds him again, post-beat down. This really pisses Thorn off and now he’s determined to find this engineer asshole!
He runs right back to James Remar, the police psychiatrist, who is still on call late at night (now that’s dedication!) to find out what HE knows about ‘The Engineer’? James relents and pulls out a long file concerning this “Engineer.” Self-doubting cops turn to paranoia and then commit suicide soon after they encounter this person. One picture is that of The Lament Configuration. Det. Thorn one ups him by clunking the box from his pocket down on the table over the picture.
The psychiatrist tells him a brief history of the box and that it is a window or gateway. You open it. They come for you and tear you apart. Some call them Cenobites. Bottom line, you fucked up detective.
Doing a quick search. “Ceno” is Slovenian for “Price” In Latin it means to dine, eat, meal and mud. It also has a meaning in Greek of “New or recent.” “Cenobites” were members of a monastic community, like monks, nuns, living in a religious order. Bite means biting something with your teeth, to eat or devour. “New Consumer” or “Newly Devoured.” All interesting etymology.
“Am I going crazy?”
“The history is consistent. If you say you’re still seeing them, maybe they’re still here.”
This third act descends into a blender of paranoia all themed around Detective Joseph Thorn forsaking his partner, his family, including his elderly mother and father at the hospital, his wife and child who die out in the cold, everything is abandoned for his obsessive carnal desires.
In the end, he is condemned by his own childhood self as he is his own “Engineer” and is judged by his own innocent child self. A tortured metaphor but I liked the execution, as he stands alongside the Hell Priest who proclaims “Welcome…to Hell!”
Hellraiser: Inferno Uppers:
As mentioned, the music and soundtrack are particularly enjoyable and appropriate despite the loss of Christopher Young from the production. Walter Werzowa does a terrific job with the music.
The performances from Craig Sheffer and Nicholas Turturro are pitch perfect. Making it like an NYPD Blue episode from Hell. And this definitely helped cement James Remar as Dexter’s Dad, casting wise, years later, I bet.
The makeup effects from Gary J. Tunnicliffe are excellent and function very well, even standing up for early 2000’s effects.
Hellraiser: Inferno Downers:
The limited number of scenes with Doug Bradley was disappointing. He is so good when you give him dialogue and unfortunately, we only really got the scene at the end with him. Still a great and satisfying ending for a hackneyed Fight Club style ending, which you know I love, but more Doug Bradley is my perennial desire with any Hellraiser film. Although a Benedict Cumberbatch Hell Priest would be an intriguing passing of the torch and the only conceivable actor, I can picture getting that voice and that presence anywhere close to Doug. And even then, why do it?
The weird overhype of The Engineer as a concept has me on the fence. I like it as a fanboy but as an objective viewer, it is kind of over relied on when really, why not just make Pinhead part of the damn story already?! (Interrobang?!)
Overall, Hellraiser: Inferno was a very good entry into the Hellraiser series despite Clive Barker’s protests. I get it. But it’s a good movie. I recommend it. Not as highly as Clive’s first three in the series, but I definitely rewatch it more than Bloodlines, so, there is that.
Where does it stand in the series of original 8 Hellraiser films? Always a hotly debatable subject. 1st is 1st. 2nd is 2nd. 3rd is 3rd. All in my own, subjective opinion, of course. I think Inferno is a hot 4th (and sometimes switches for 3rd). Then Bloodlines, then Deader, then I don’t care (although I love the idea of Dean Winters fucking Kirsty, that script and direction was lacking). The newest ones after Doug Bradley, blah! Forget it!
But this movie reminds me of my other self, that other guy we forget as we just do whatever we feel in the moment. That other guy who is accountable and accumulates all your human garbage as you ‘live your best life.’ Enjoy suckers. The bill is coming soon. Heaven can bill me!
AKA: Hellraiser 5: Inferno
Directed by: Scott Derrickson
Written by: Clive Barker, Paul Harris Boardman, Scott Derrickson
Produced by: W.K. Border, Joel Soisson, Jesse Berdinka, David Matthew Jordan
Cinematography by: Walter Werzowa
Edited by: Kirk M. Morri
Music by: Walter Werzowa
Special Effects by:
Cast: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro, James Remar, Doug Bradley, Nicholas Sadler, Noelle Evans
Year: 2000
Country: USA
Language: English
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 1h 39 min
Studio: Dimension Films, Neo Art & Logic, Miramax
Distribution: Dimension Home Video, StudioCanal