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An 18th-century toymaker is commissioned to build a puzzle box only to find that its owners have used it to open a pathway to hell.
What I find especially amazing (or is that amusing?) about Hellraiser: Bloodline is that everyone likes to make a big deal about how the Friday the 13th series really went off the rails and ran out of ideas when its tenth installment centred on Jason ending up on a futuristic spaceship, yet here is the Hellraiser franchise managing to make the jump to space in the...time it took to make a mere four installments (and also makes referring to Event Horizon as "Hellraiser in space" a little redundant). I guess that says a lot about the sheer malleability of the Hellraiser franchise - when your villains come from another dimension, they can manifest pretty much anytime and anywhere. That certainly seems to be the conceit behind Bloodline, which spans hundreds of years as it follows three different men (all played by Bruce Ramsay) from the same, well, bloodline. While the last couple of entries delved into the backstory of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and Hell itself (or at least a dimension that passes for it), Bloodline opts to explore the origins of the arcane puzzle box that is used to summon the Cenobites to the human world. It begins as the work of a French toymaker (Ramsay) whose discovery of its true purpose prompts him to start work on designing another box that will cancel out the effects of the original; predictably, he doesn't succeed for a variety of reasons and it ultimately falls to his descendants (also played by Ramsay) to figure out how to make the box a reality and stop Pinhead once and for all.
In my review for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, I remarked on how the franchise was already struggling to sustain itself after only three installments and Bloodline shows that a fourth one fares no better. While the concept of the Cenobites feuding with an entire family over the course of centuries is a promising one, it's too often wrapped in stilted dramatics (especially when it shifts to the dullness of the present day) and some rather underwhelming variations on the usual displays of leather-bound body horror. That being said, it's still a pleasure to see Bradley savouring each ornate line of dialogue in a severe baritone, especially when he's given a foil in the form of the demonic princess Angelique (Valentina Vargas) as they both represent different sides of Hell - the ascetic versus the decadent. Things pick up enough during its space-bound third act that sort of make me think that that should've been the whole movie (then again, that's sort of what we got with Event Horizon after all), but I do grant that said third act relies on the build-up of the preceding centuries in order to have any sense of impact. As such, I find Bloodline a seriously mixed bag. It creates a compact narrative that also expands the scope of the franchise even as it provides diminishing returns on all that made its predecessors ever-so-slightly superior. As such, it proves a shining example of the contradiction at the heart of the Hellraiser franchise - the constant attempts to blur the line between pain and pleasure within the film bleed out into an audience who can quite understandably question whether the film's good points are enough to compensate for the bad
#30 - Hellraiser: Bloodline
Joe Chappelle and Kevin Yagher, 1996
Joe Chappelle and Kevin Yagher, 1996
An 18th-century toymaker is commissioned to build a puzzle box only to find that its owners have used it to open a pathway to hell.
What I find especially amazing (or is that amusing?) about Hellraiser: Bloodline is that everyone likes to make a big deal about how the Friday the 13th series really went off the rails and ran out of ideas when its tenth installment centred on Jason ending up on a futuristic spaceship, yet here is the Hellraiser franchise managing to make the jump to space in the...time it took to make a mere four installments (and also makes referring to Event Horizon as "Hellraiser in space" a little redundant). I guess that says a lot about the sheer malleability of the Hellraiser franchise - when your villains come from another dimension, they can manifest pretty much anytime and anywhere. That certainly seems to be the conceit behind Bloodline, which spans hundreds of years as it follows three different men (all played by Bruce Ramsay) from the same, well, bloodline. While the last couple of entries delved into the backstory of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and Hell itself (or at least a dimension that passes for it), Bloodline opts to explore the origins of the arcane puzzle box that is used to summon the Cenobites to the human world. It begins as the work of a French toymaker (Ramsay) whose discovery of its true purpose prompts him to start work on designing another box that will cancel out the effects of the original; predictably, he doesn't succeed for a variety of reasons and it ultimately falls to his descendants (also played by Ramsay) to figure out how to make the box a reality and stop Pinhead once and for all.
In my review for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, I remarked on how the franchise was already struggling to sustain itself after only three installments and Bloodline shows that a fourth one fares no better. While the concept of the Cenobites feuding with an entire family over the course of centuries is a promising one, it's too often wrapped in stilted dramatics (especially when it shifts to the dullness of the present day) and some rather underwhelming variations on the usual displays of leather-bound body horror. That being said, it's still a pleasure to see Bradley savouring each ornate line of dialogue in a severe baritone, especially when he's given a foil in the form of the demonic princess Angelique (Valentina Vargas) as they both represent different sides of Hell - the ascetic versus the decadent. Things pick up enough during its space-bound third act that sort of make me think that that should've been the whole movie (then again, that's sort of what we got with Event Horizon after all), but I do grant that said third act relies on the build-up of the preceding centuries in order to have any sense of impact. As such, I find Bloodline a seriously mixed bag. It creates a compact narrative that also expands the scope of the franchise even as it provides diminishing returns on all that made its predecessors ever-so-slightly superior. As such, it proves a shining example of the contradiction at the heart of the Hellraiser franchise - the constant attempts to blur the line between pain and pleasure within the film bleed out into an audience who can quite understandably question whether the film's good points are enough to compensate for the bad