Main cast: Odessa A’zion (Riley McKendry), Jamie Clayton (The Priest), Adam Faison (Colin), Drew Starkey (Trevor), Brandon Flynn (Matt McKendry), Aoife Hinds (Nora), Jason Liles (The Chatterer), Yinka Olorunnife (The Weeper), Selina Lo (The Gasp), Zachary Hing (The Asphyx), Kit Clarke (Joey), Goran Višnjić (Roland Voight), and Hiam Abbass (Serena Menaker)
Director: David Bruckner

It’s easy to cringe at the thought of Hellraiser getting a reboot. There are so many of them, and the fact that this one is made for a streaming channel, all don’t give me the confidence that this one is going to be any good.

Also, as per the norm these days, they made a big fuss about Pinhead now being a woman, and we also have a diverse cast, “diverse” in Hollywood-speak being the short hand for “The members of the cast are mostly nobodies or whatever-bodies that we hired for cheap, but look, they have brown skin so clap like seal for us, people!”

That kind of marketing is never a good sign. After all, the last few years have demonstrated that things that use so-called “diversity” and “inclusiveness” as their main or only selling point are far more likely to be mediocre at best or just awful beyond belief at worst.

Then again, I remember that the sequels for this franchise beyond the second movie hadn’t exactly been great either. The third one is meh, the fourth one is okay but feels more like a film from a completely different franchise, and the rest are all flavors of putrid.

So, maybe this one can be better than the last one. I mean, the bar has been set so slow that there is really nowhere lower that this franchise can go, surely. Maybe a reboot is indeed in order.

Pinhead is now the Priest, which I don’t mind at all as I always find Pinhead a dumb name for someone as cool as the High Priest of Hell, and I actually like how this movie makes the Priest an official designation.

I don’t mind the Priest being feminine, as I personally think it’s silly to designate human concepts of gender onto something that is clearly inhuman. Even if the Priest has genitalia, they would likely mutilate that part just for the fun of it, and it’s likely they present as either male or female just to lure their victims into their clutches.

Oh, and the Lament Configuration is no longer simply a Rubic cube. When solved, it adopts the shape of the Leviathan itself—again, another change I like, as I will always lament how the whole setting and premise of Hellbound: Hellraiser II was abandoned in subsequent film sequels. It’s nice to see this movie pivot back to that.

Anyway, our protagonist is Riley McKendry. She’s been sober for half a year, but she’s still trying to pull the rest of her life back together. Her brother is still paying her rent, but he tells her that he can’t keep doing that anymore, and she therefore needs some money fast as the first of next month is just around the corner.

Her boyfriend Trevor, whom she hooks up with after meeting him at her twelve-step program, has a suggestion. He makes deliveries around town, and there is one spot that intrigues him. It’s all hushed up, deliveries to that place, but he notices that the items that go in and out of that warehouse are very expensive, probably priceless. So, if Riley wants money, she can get a cut if she would join him in pilfering a few items that surely the owner of the place wouldn’t notice.

Riley’s brother, Matt, warns her about Trevor being a potential bad influence, and guess what, he’s right.

There’s no prize for guessing what they find, because I’m sure everyone can guess. Trevor is disappointed that they come across what seems like a cube, so he lets Riley hold on to it. The owner of the place, Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić is still hot, woo-hoo), naturally wants it back.

Meanwhile, her brother has had enough of her nonsense and kicks her out of the apartment they are all sharing with his boyfriend and another roommate, so she pops some pills, solves the Lament Configuration (I suppose being high is the best and only way to do it), but it is Matt’s blood that ends up on the cube so he gets taken instead of her.

This sets a tedious pattern in this movie: Riley whines and mopes around, and other people die because of her. Yikes.

I suppose the screenwriters want me to empathize with this character, but seriously, it’s hard to do it when other people get tortured for eternity by the Cenobites because of her. Save that for some teen romantic drama, because this kind of movie is not a place to get me to want to pat the junkie in the head, especially when other people are collateral damage when it comes to her crap.

Aside from bringing back Leviathan, there isn’t anything interesting that is done to the lore. Yeah, yeah, the Priest is female now, but sadly, she has none of the charisma of Doug Bradley’s Pinhead. She’s just sort of there.

This brings me to another thing that makes me roll up my eyes: the appearance of the Cenobites. Maybe it’s because of some decency guidelines imposed by the streaming service, I don’t know, but there is nothing darkly erotic or disturbing about the appearance of these reboot versions of those things. While I’m sure the folks involved may have worked hard on these things, all I see are just people in rubber suits and some stuff glued to their faces.

Quite a few have distinct Chinese or Japanese faces. I wonder why Cenobites need to have human racial features now. Maybe there was a special “Hire one, get two for free!” discount at some talent agency a few doors away from wherever they were filming this thing.

I actually watch again the first and second Hellraiser movies after this one, just to compare the looks of the Cenobites in there and in this film, and yikes. How is it that movies that are a few decades old manage to create Cenobites that capture beautifully the darker, erotic essences of these creatures, while the latest one somehow makes the Priest look like a woman wearing that cheap Halloween “I have all my outer skin peeled off” costume that shows up on social media every year?

The kills have all been done before in previous Hellraiser movies, and in far more imaginative and even graphic detail. In fact, there are far fewer kills here than a typical movie in this franchise, with a heavier focus on Riley screaming or just pouting at the camera. Oh, I’m sure this helps to keep the cost of special effects and props down, but it also keeps the entertainment down.

So, this movie has basic plot, basic characters, and subpar kills and Cenobite looks. Of course it’s much better than the last few sequels, but that is like saying swallowing dried dung is more appetizing than eating fresh ones.

In the end, my initial concern turns out to be sadly right. Here’s one more mediocre reboot shelled out by modern-day Hollywood that seems to be far more vested in taking good ideas from old movies and giving the worst treatment to these ideas. Ugh.