Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) While most people associate the Hellraiser series with the grotesque Cenobites (including the pinheaded series icon), the first film doesn’t have them on-screen for long—it’s mostly about the teenage protagonist’s creepy uncle being resurrected from the dead by blood sacrifice. Sequel Hellbound tries to have more of the Cenobites and develop the series’ hellish mythology without losing track of the first film’s overall plot. Here, our teenage protagonist (Clare Higgins, as cute as in the first film) does her best to reunite with her dead father, and gets the means to literally go to (a) hell in order to pursue him, despite the efforts of her murderous stepmother, reborn through the series’ usual blood sacrifices. In trying to play with a mythology invented by someone else (Clive Baker only being peripherally involved in this instalment), director Tony Randel manages to deliver a thoroughly average horror film—while there are a few effective moments, especially in the first half of the film when the evil stepmother makes a skinless entrance, Hellbound is watchable without being particularly compelling… which counts as a failure given the fascinating untapped possibility of its premise. The moment-to-moment cohesion of the film is also frequently dodgy, given how it seems to skip from one visual set piece to another. Compared to other late-1980s horror movies, Hellbound is not bad—but the expansive nature of its premise means that the special effects limitations of the time do prevent the film from reaching its fullest potential. There are at least half a dozen supernatural horror movies of that era that are simply better in every respect. Although, after watching the subsequent instalment in the series, I’m surprised to note how much material introduced in Hellbound pays off in the next movie.