Halloween Blogging: Predator 2 (1990)

The opening shot of Predator 2 (1990) is a remarkable one.

Director Stephen Hopkins’ camera rockets over a dense jungle landscape, thus reminding audiences of the 1987 John McTiernan film and its Central American locale. 

Then -- as the camera continues to speed over myriad tree tops -- it pans up to reveal…modern Los Angeles, the urban jungle, on the horizon.

This composition is a great visual way to connect the two films in the franchise, and a sure sign that Hopkins boasts an active intellect and more to the point, a great eye.

It’s as if the last moments of Predator have become, literally, the first moments of Predator 2. 

Predator 2 is also appreciated by many horror movie fans because it provides the first cinematic evidence of a “shared” universe with another beloved franchise: Alien (1979). 

During the climax of this sequel cop/warrior Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) finds his way aboard a grounded Predator spaceship and sees a trophy room that boasts a Giger-style alien skull.

At first blush this might seem like a throwaway moment, but, certainly, it paves the way for the Alien vs. Predator movies of the 2000s. Already, Dark Horse had seen success by pairing the two monsters in a comic series, but Predator 2 is the first such evidence of a shared universe on the silver screen.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll leave up to you, the reader, but Predator 2 intimates a shared history between two great movie monsters in a way that isn’t entirely obvious or craven (like, say, Freddy’s finger knives dragging Jason’s hockey mask down to Hell.)

Instead, the reveal of the alien skull in Predator 2 is an awesome moment that expands significantly both franchises.We now know that Predators have defeated the acid-dripping, silver-jawed monstrosities, and likewise that those monstrosities have been around since well before Ripley’s first encounter with them. This moment in the film thus succeeds in the manner that was intended.  It tantalizes us with possibilities, and with a history/relationship we don’t fully understand...but can imagine.

 

This sequel also shares much with another science fiction film of 1990: RoboCop 2.

For example, both Predator 2 and RoboCop 2 feature moments that suggest the tabloidization of American news, the rise of such fare as Inside Edition or A Current Affair. Both films also worry about runaway crime rates in America at the time, and obsess on the notion of our streets becoming the battleground for drug and gang wars. 

And both films -- truly -- are anarchic in visualization, graphic violence and tone, suggesting that the near future will be a time of visceral, bloody horror, sensational news and beleaguered infrastructure. 

In both films, the cops can barely hold their own.

Predator 2 never quite reaches the provocative and anarchic highs or lows of RoboCop 2 but -- to its ever-lasting credit -- the Hopkins sequel is more than willing to acknowledge the humor inherent in its central scenario.

At one point, the hulking Predator ends up in the bathroom of a cranky old woman, and at another juncture attacks a busload of commuters (including a Bernard Goetz character…) simply because they are all armed. 

This scene may represent the best argument for gun control ever put to genre film: Don’t carry a weapon on your way to work, because the Predator -- while on safari -- interprets all gun-owners as “soldiers” and wipes them out with extreme prejudice. Seriously, this film imagines Bernard Goetz-vigilantism as the norm of 1997, and it's a commentary right in line with the imaginings of the RoboCop films.

I admire many aspects of Predator 2 and consider it a worthwhile sequel overall, yet I don’t see it necessarily as an equal to its predecessor in terms of suspense and storytelling. The movie occasionally suffers a bad case of Alien-itis too: cribbing too liberally from 20^th Century Fox’s other space monster franchise.

That tendency doesn’t help the film to cement its own individual identity, and works against the director's best efforts.

“Shit happens.”

In the near-future year of 1997, Los Angeles is choking under perpetual smog, and its streets are a war-zone. 

There, rival gangs -- the Jamaicans and the Colombians -- duke it out for superiority. One of the city’s best cops, Mike Harrigan (Glover) attempts to bring order to the streets, but soon finds that a third, chaotic element has been added to the summertime bloodshed.

In particular, a stealthy alien hunter or predator has arrived in L.A. and begun picking off gang members, as well as cops like Harrigan’s trusted friend, Danny (Ruben Blades).

When a federal agent, Keyes (Gary Busey) begins interfering in his investigation, Harrigan suspects a dark secret. 

He soon comes face to face with the intimidating alien hunter, and learns that Keyes and his men are planning to capture it…

“There’s a new king in the streets.”

When I think back on Predator, which I reviewed last week on the blog, the images that stay with me, in particular, come from the last third of the picture. There, Arnold’s character, Dutch went up against the Predator with no advanced technology in a primordial jungle, and won.  

The battle could have occurred in prehistoric times.

Obviously, a sequel to Predator couldn’t plumb the identical imagery or locale, or even concept, and so Predator 2 tries hard to carve an original space for itself.  The sequel notes, for example, that in the 1990s, “cops” are the warriors of civilization, fighting back criminals on the streets and protecting an endangered populace. 

This is a valid concept, and also feels very much of the epoch. If you gaze at the 1990s, and consider series such as Law and Order (1990 – 2010), or movies such as The First Power (1990), Fallen (1998), Resurrection (1999) or End of Days (1999) it’s not difficult to see how the police procedural format became incredibly popular, and dominated genre entertainment.

Predator 2 fits in with that trend, and Danny Glover makes for a very different kind of “soldier” than Arnie did. Both men are fiercely protective of their teams, but Harrigan is -- living up to his name: “harried” -- forced to accommodate multiple levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy in a fashion that Dutch simply did not.  Dutch eventually had to deal with Dillon’s duplicity (as Harrigan deals with Keyes’ secrecy and cover story), but Harrigan is more constrained from the get-go based on his job, his heavily populated “arena” of battle, and other factors of late 20th century human civilization.. 

One way to gaze at the Predator franchise is simply as a study of soldiers, an examination of the qualities that go into the making of a good one. Predator, Predator 2, and Predators (2010) have different things to tell audiences on that topic, and all the observations are intriguing. Certainly, Predator suggests that  good or advanced weapons don’t make for the best soldiers.  

Predator 2 seems to suggest that a good soldier succeeds by overcoming not his enemy, but those unofficial enemies who make his task more difficult. Harrigan must contend with the presence of innocent civilians, bureaucrats, and infrastructural impediments on his mission to stop the alien hunter. Meanwhile, Predators seems to suggest that real soldiers are a breed apart, and that breed seems to span all cultures.

The downside to Predator 2’s approach is simply that as soon as you have a rampaging alien creature in familiar, city environs, some moments there are going to read as…funny. You can’t play on the feelings of isolation that you might in the jungle setting.  

So when a Predator crashes through a bathroom wall here and nearly runs into an old woman brandishing a broom, you’re in a whole different kind of territory. The last act of the film suffers from a tonal ping-pong between action, comedy, and horror. I prefer the back-to-basics, straight-on approach of Predator’s finale in the jungle. It’s more pure, somehow; more consistent.

Predator 2, at times, seems to verge on camp. If the film featured a more pronounced, consistent social commentary (as is clearly the case in the gonzo-crazy RoboCop 2), the tone-changes in Predator 2 might have tracked better. I like Gary Busey just fine, but his presence -- and line readings -- ratchet up the tongue-in-cheek aspects of the film.

Lions, and tigers and bears. Oh my.

In the introduction, I also noted creeping Alien clichés in this film. There’s one scene here in which right-thinking Harrigan watches on a row of high-tech monitors as wrong-thinking Keyes leads an ill-fated attack against the Predator. The Predator decimates the team, and Harrigan -- tired of being on the sidelines -- steps up to save the day, or win the battle.  

This scene is an exact mirror of a scene in Cameron’s Aliens (1986).  There, Ripley watches on a row of monitors as the Colonial Marines get their asses kicked on Sub Level 3. She must take action herself, because she is right, and Lt. Gorman is so clearly wrong.  

There's even a similar deer-in-the-headlights moment in Predator 2 for  one Gorman surrogate, Garber (Adam Baldwin).

Similarly, Harrigan appropriates a Ripley-ish line from Alien, while talking to Keyes. “You admire the son of a bitch,” he realizes. 

This is also what Ripley realized vis-à-vis Ash and the xenomorph in the Ridley Scott 1979 original

It’s just baffling that a film seeking so aggressively to artistically break free from its successful predecessor would mindlessly ape another film series at the same. These moments are transparently derivative, and undo some of the creative success Hopkins achieves with this sequel.

Still, I appreciate the final revelations of Predator 2. These moments prove chilling. One of the final scenes, inside the spaceship, features not only an alien skull, but evidence that the Predators have been interacting with humans for a very, very long time indeed. They have been here, are here now, and will return soon.  

That’s a creepy thought, and I love how the old Predator leader demonstrates grudging respect for Harrigan, his prey, by gifting him a gun from the 1700s…a souvenir emblematic of their differences, and shared history.

Writing for The Washington Post, review Rita Kempley wrote persuasively of Predator 2’s “dismal irony” and “brooding fatalism” (November 21, 1990). 

I like those qualities too, and I enjoy this sequel quite a bit. I’ll take it over AVP: Requiem (2007) or Alien Resurrection (1997) any day. Predator 2 doesn’t scuttle its franchise, and in some ways it expands the cycle's reach in a wonderful, creative way.   

And yet the tonal lapses into comedy and rip-off territory prevent Predator 2 from being a truly great sequel to one of the best action-horror films of the eighties.

Halloween Blogging: Predator (1987)

Back in 1987, the conventional wisdom about John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) was that it started out like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and ended up like Alien (1979) or, perhaps, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).

By framing the film in this simplistic fashion, Predator could be viewed as a simple or derivative swipe at two separate genre inspirations. 

It was part action movie and part sci-fi/horror movie. 

And that, the critics declared, passed for originality in Hollywood.

That’s a left-handed compliment if I ever read one!

The truth about Predator, contrarily, is that it is all of a piece, and thematically consistent throughout. 

Indeed, the intense film forges a debate about warriors or soldiers, and asks, specifically, what the best soldiers are made of. 

Do soldiers succeed because of their technology? 

Or do the best soldiers succeed because of some combination of instinct, experience, and a tactical understanding of their enemy?

McTiernan’s film sets up this debate in the film's visualizations.

Specifically, a squad of American soldiers, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, rain down death and destruction on Third World, Central American soldiers, literally coming down to a village from a point on high to do so. 

This action occurs in the first act, and establishes, per the dialogue that Schwarzenegger’s team is “the best.” We see that adjective vividly demonstrated in a siege set-piece of extreme violence and bloodshed.

The next act of the film, however, deliberately reverses that equation. It positions Schwarzenegger’s team on the ground, and puts an alien hunter at an even higher position -- in the tree-tops -- to rain down death on his “primitive” Earthbound counter-parts. 

The soldiers who were the predators are now the prey.

In both cases, the technologically-superior force wins, and the perceived primitive or lesser opponent is knocked down and defeated. 

In both cases, McTiernan vividly and explicitly associates that sense of superiority with a sense of geographical height; a high physical vantage point, captured by the camera's position.

The winner can, literally, reach heights that the loser can’t, and this is one important reason for his victory.

However, in the third and final act of Predator, Arnold and the alien hunter go head to head -- on equal footing -- and it is only on that terrain, one not involving technology, but rather instincts and know-how, that the best soldier is identified, and a victor is crowned.

So where many 1987 critics choose to see a film that is half Rambo and half Alien, I see a film that develops logically and consistently act to act. You can’t get to that final, almost primordial reckoning in the jungle between the Predator and Dutch unless you frame the debate in precisely the way the screenplay does, and in the way McTiernan does. 

In short, the film depicts the best soldiers in the world demonstrating their ability to defeat all comers, only to be defeated by an enemy better than them; one not of this world.  

The first and second act are two sides of the same coin, the idea -- with apologies to Star Wars Episode I (1999) -- that there is always a bigger fish out there waiting to demonstrate superior technology.

Predator’s third act -- a glorious back-to-basics conflict that looks like it was authentically staged in a prehistoric setting -- makes the point that the greatest hunter or soldier is actually the one who understands his enemy, and trusts his instincts. 

Why make a movie in this fashion? 

Well, in a sense, Predator might be read as a subversive response to the militarization of action films in the mid-1980s, and the kind of shallow, rah-rah patriotism that gave rise to efforts like Heartbreak Ridge (1986), which celebrated an American military victory over…Grenada.

Grenada? 

Was Grenada really a challenge to American domination, given our military budget and might? 

Contrarily, Predator takes a group of tough-talking “ultimate warriors” and puts them in a situation where they aren’t merely shooting fish in a barrel. 

They are the fish in the barrel.

In reckoning with this sudden and total change in fortunes, we begin to glean a true idea of courage and heroism.

All of the Earthly politics in the movie -- illegal border crossings, a false cover story, documentation about a possible invasion, and so forth -- add up to precisely nothing here, and there's a reason why. Those details are immaterial to the real story of soldiers who reckon with an enemy that goes beyond the limits of Earthly knowledge.

Ironically, to be the best soldier in a situation like that, it isn’t the big Gatling gun that matters. It’s the ability to adapt to and understand the kind of menace encountered.

Predator features a lot of macho talk and clichés about war (“I ain’t got time to bleed,”) but it succeeds because it cuts right through this surface, hackneyed vision of military might and suggests a different truth underneath.

There’s always a bigger fish.

“You got us here to do your dirty work!”

An elite squad of American soldiers, led by Dutch Schaefer (Schwarzenegger), is dropped into a Central American jungle to rescue a cabinet minister being held by enemy rebels. 

Going along with Dutch’s team is the mission commander, the not-entirely trustworthy Dillon (Carl Weathers).

Once in the jungle, Dutch and his men launch an attack on a rebel village, and find that Dillon has manipulated his team so as to acquire military intelligence about a possible Russian invasion. The group soon takes a captive, Anna, (Elipidia Carillo).

But before the soldiers can be air-lifted out of the jungle, an extra-terrestrial hunter -- a Predator – sets his sights on the group, killing Dutch’s team one man at a time. 

Anna reports a local legend: about a demon who makes trophies of humans and is often reported in the hottest summers.

And this year, it grows very, very hot…

Losing his men rapidly, Dutch must come to understand his enemy’s weaknesses and strengths, and makes a final stand in the jungle, using every resource available…

“Payback time!”

John McTiernan’s camera in Predator rarely stops moving. It tracks, it pans, and it tilts, but is seldom quiescent. 

The constantly-on-the-move camera conveys a few important qualities about the film. The first idea it transmits is that the soldiers inhabit a changing and changeable world, one that only instinct and experience can help them navigate.  

The always-in-motion camera reveals the soldiers -- sometimes violently -- intruding into new space, new frames, and new aspects of their world.  The camera’s movement -- a kind of visual aggression -- suggests the force that the soldiers carry with them.  

This movement, this force, is then balanced by McTiernan against the still-ness of the Predator’s vision or perspective. A contrast is quickly developed and then sustained.

Throughout the film, we see through the Predator’s eyes, or in Predator-vision. These shots, from high above the landscape (in the tree-tops) tend to be still, un-moving. They thereby capture a sense of the whole world unfolding before the Predator, a complete panorama or landscape.

This is an important conceit. The soldiers are  always moving through a changing, shifting world that they, through their actions, impact.  

But they don’t get the whole picture, so-to-speak.  

By contrast, the Predator vision gives us long-shots, and shows the entire jungle terrain around the soldiers.  This viewpoint suggests omnipotence and power.  

The Predator, quite simply, is able to see more of the world, and see it better. He is able to strike from the tree tops with his shoulder-mounted laser cannon, and target with laser sighting his distant foes.  

His sight is superior, until -- importantly -- Dutch manages to “see” through it; recognizing the flaw in the Predator’s infrared vision.

Again, this is an argument against relying too heavily on technology. Dutch’s soldiers rely on big guns, and get decimated.  

The Predator relies on his mask’s vision system (infrared), and Dutch -- smearing himself in mud -- negates the advantage it provides.  

But again, what’s important is the way that all this material is visualized.

The soldiers, on ground level, cut through and move through the frame, violently interacting with the world on a tactile, aggressive level.  

The Predator, like some great vulture, sits still in the trees (until he strikes), silently hanging back and taking in the lay of the land. He has the luxury to operate from a distance, from up on high, unobserved.

The film sets up a battle between these two perspectives, and one might even argue that the Predator ultimately loses because he abandons his best perspective -- the tree tops -- in order to get down to (and enjoy combat on…) Dutch’s level.

Over and over again, however, McTiernan’s gorgeous, moving compositions suggest that the soldiers don’t have the full picture. Not only is the Predator cloaked, but he has access to the world above the soldiers, the world that they can’t see. A brilliantly-orchestrated shot mid-way through the film sees Dutch hunting for Hawkin’s missing body. He can’t find it. After capturing imagery of Dutch trudging through the brush, McTiernan’s camera suddenly moves upwards, and keeps doing so.

It goes up and up, past a bloody fern frond, and then continues its ascent, until we see Hawkins’ naked, bloodied corpse dangling from the tree top.  The Predator is operating in, metaphorically a more fully three dimensional environment, this shot reveals. 

Dwight and the other soldiers can’t compete on that level. They literally can't even see to that level. 

Those who don’t appreciate Predator tend to watch the film, listen to the macho tough talk, and consider the film a kind of stupid, macho action/horror movie. 

Yet in its own way, Predator glides right past such clichéd dialogue and situations. In doing so, it comments on them.  These cliches are not points of strength, the movie informs us, but points of weakness.  When the Predator uses his duck call device, for example, he apes the men at their most verbally simplistic.  “Any time…”  Or “Over here.”  

Then he is able to trick them using their own words. Their mode of expression becomes a tool to use against them.

As a whole, Predator sort of tricks the audience with its appearance too -- as a macho war movie -- and then treads deeper to examine our conceits about the military, and military might. 

When Arnold finally defeats the Predator, he does so not as a twentieth century soldier with high-tech weapons, but as a mud-camouflaged cave-man, relying on his instinct, his knowledge of the land, and hard-gleaned information about his enemy.

Even then, Arnold barely wins.  

The Predator sacrifices his superior technology, comes to the ground, and takes off his mask because he wants to fight like Arnie; he wants to experience battle like a human would. That desire proves to be the alien's undoing, a sense of vanity about himself, and an unearned sense of superiority to his nemesis.  

And again, this quality reflects dynamically on the first act of the film. Everyone keeps calling Dutch's team "the best,: and the team itself wipes out the Central American rebels while hardly breaking a sweat.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, right?

Dutch, by contrast, demonstrates qualities that our culture doesn’t always value, especially in terms of our military men. He shows compassion and decency with Anna, a prisoner.  He trusts her when the situation changes instead of continuing to treat her like a foe.  

He also rejects Dillon’s approach to war (that the ends justify the means), and does his best to get his men out of a situation in which they are not really fighting for their country, but acting as pawns in someone’s illegal agenda.  

Finally, Dutch is curious -- intensely curious -- and flexible enough to understand that he is being hunted by something inhuman. He doesn’t reject the possibility that this could be true, and instead contends with the facts. 

 “If it bleeds, we can kill it” Dutch concludes, and that is a perfectly logical and sensible argument in the face of what seems an irrational conflict: a battle with an invisible alien.

Dutch is lucky, of course, too. He discovers the secret of defeating Predator-vision by accident, by ending up in the mud. But he also makes the most of his opportunities by demonstrating flexibility rather than rigidity. He changes his very identity to win.  He goes from 20th century high-tech soldier to primitive cave man, to carry the day.

Predator still dazzles, in part because of McTiernan’s often-moving camera and approach to visuals, but also because of that incredible final sequence in the jungle.  

Arnold and the colossal, frightening alien duke it out on a little parcel of land, surrounded by water.  The setting is picturesque, but more than that, it seems to evoke some kind of genetic memory, a feeling for the day when humans didn’t understand the world and were prey to saber tooth tigers or bears, or anything else that might find us when we ventured out of our caves. 

The film’s final battle -- shorn of high-tech military hardware -- gets down to the bloody basics and is incredibly satisfying on a human level.

Today, we have military drones, smart-bombs, and other incredible technology to help us win when we wage war, but Predator is a remarkable reminder from another movie age that the biggest, best guns don’t necessarily make great soldiers.   

If they did, the Predator would have won his battle with Arnie, right?

Halloween Blogging: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)

Upon viewing Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) again recently, I was struck with an illuminating thought. 

There are two kinds of horror movies in 1970s and 1980s franchises.

The first kind of movie is an artistic masterpiece, one that thrives on visual imagery, on symbolism, and on subtext. In this category, I land movies such as Halloween (1978), Phantasm (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street and Clive Barker’s original masterpiece, Hellraiser (1987).  These films operate on both a literal level and a metaphorical one.

And then there’s the second kind of horror movie in these franchises, which viewers will often detect in the first sequel.

This second brand of franchise horror film eschews the overt, careful artistry of the first film and doubles down instead on internal mythology.  In other words, the details of the world are hammered out, and character motivations are more deeply explained. A sketch is colored in, essentially, but in terms of symbolism some things get lost, forgotten, or over-written.

Why do horror franchises from this era operate in this fashion?

Well, perhaps because symbolic imagery and sub-text may be limited to a specific, singular narrative or set of characters. That imagery may be beautiful, canny and informative, yet when time comes for a sequel with a new story, new characters, and even a new setting, it is hard to sustain it. The zeitgeist has changed, for one thing, and so symbols change. 

Therefore, intrepid filmmakers turn to the internal consistencies of the world where they work. Like the idea that Michael Myers must have a concrete motivation for his murders, and is thus the sibling of Laurie Strode.

Perhaps this is why sequels so rarely live up to the originals. They don’t pinpoint an adequate new sub-text or deep imagery to sustain the series. So instead, additional concrete details are provided.

Yet, inescapably, familiarity is the enemy of horror. The more we know, the less scared we become. We are scared not when we know more, but when we no less.  The more vague the details, the better chance that we will be unsettled by the film.

Hellbound is the second kind of movie in terms of this paradigm.

Specifically, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a mythology-based, world-building sequel to Clive Barker’s brilliant horror film, Hellraiser (1987). It’s a good mythology-based horror film on it own terms, but I miss the sheer artistic inspiration of Clive Barker’s inaugural film in the franchise.

Hellbound opens with a recap of Hellraiser’s scary ending, and then shows us the origins of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) himself. It also finishes off any personal business left lingering between Julia (Clare Higgins) and Frank (Sean Chapman), before settling down in Hell itself.  The details of Hell, and even an evil Deity (Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth) are all explored.

The focus, as that description suggests, is on deepening and broadening the Hellraiser universe. The focus is on providing more details, and revealing a consistent “universe.”

I can’t complain too much, however since the solid 1988 sequel shows audiences how Cenobites are manufactured, takes us to Hell for a grand tour, features the great Ashley Laurence in a starring role, and reveals to us precisely the kind of torment in Hell that Frank deserves.  There’s an overall reflection of literary mythology too -- an Orphean descent into the Underworld to retrieve a loved one -- but even that is broadly applied.

So by my estimation, Hellbound is a good horror film, of the second type.

It’s just that traveling from Hellraiser to Hellbound is roughly akin to going from Phantasm (1979) to Phantasm II (1988).

The first film in each series is richly symbolic and reveals something about the human condition, whether the fear of mortality, or mankind’s sexual obsessions. 

Then the ambitious sequel comes along, and it’s big and world-building and totally impressive as a straight-up horror flick, but it exists almost purely on a literal level, not a symbolic one. 

Therefore, in comparison to the original, I can’t help but register the sequel as a bit of a disappointment, or at least a come down. I admire so much the rarefied, symbolic level of Hellraiser and Phantasm. 

This is about me, as much as the film, a reader might conclude. I want my horror movies to do more than just scare me a little, like I’m on a roller coaster ride. I want the movie to concern or reflect something important; something that makes me think about the world, myself, and my relationships.

So I miss Clive Barker’s facility for visual symbolism in Tony Randel’s Hellbound, but I still like the sequel for what it is (a rip-roaring, gory horror movie), even if, at times, the movie looks to be held together by little more than spit and polish.

“The mind is a labyrinth…a puzzle.”

Following the ghoulish events with Julia and Frank, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is remanded to the Channard Institute, an insane asylum.

There, she talks about the box, and doorways to Hell being opened and closed.

Listening intently to her strange tale is Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham), a man who has devoted his life to the study of the Lament Configuration. 

Another patient in his custody, young Tiffany (Imogen Boorman) is mute, but is an expert at solving puzzles. Presumably, he has in mind for this ward to solve one particular puzzle box.

Even as Dr. Channard takes gruesome steps to revive Julia (Clare Higgins), Kirsty receives a message that she believes is from her dead father.  “I am in Hell. Help me,” it reads, written in blood.

Kirsty determines to go with Tiffany, into Hell, and rescue her father.

After Tiffany opens the box, Channard meets his fate as a Cenobite, and engineers a coup of the Labyrinth.  Kirsty helps Pinhead (Doug Bradley) finds his humanity for one battle against this new cenobite, but it does not go well.

After an encounter with Frank, Kirsty must summon all her resourcefulness to escape Hell, and more than that, stop Channard.

“What tales will she tell us from the other side?”

In a significant fashion, Hellbound really is about tales from the “other side.”

The other world that we saw only briefly in Hellraiser, Hell itself, is depicted for long stretches of the film. Some of the visuals are generally amazing, while others prove a letdown.

The matte painting, for instance, of the labyrinth, looks astonishingly good. There are several shots which reveal Kirsty and Tiffany walking a long, narrow pathway across that Escher-like maze. The maze extends to the horizon, but also stretches downwards, across multiple levels. 

Also successfully depicted is Frank Cotton’s personal hell.  He lives in a room where ghostly women “promise” sex but never “deliver.”To Frank, this is a punishment on the scale of Tantalus, and quite appropriate. He lives, essentially, in a trap that will drive him mad for all eternity.  And that’s the reason he summoned Kirsty. He believes she’s a girl who keeps her “promises,” and wants to test that theory.

Unfortunately, when we don’t see the big matte shots, or visit Frank in his personal Hell, the underworld is depicted in less than inspiring fashion.

In fact it appears to consist of one hallway that branches off, and is filmed again and again. At one point, we get a P.O.V. shot with the camera hurtling through the corridor, and before the editor can cut away, it looks like there are some boards or lumber balanced against one wall.

This section of Hell: under construction.

When one couples shots like this one with the fact that Chatterer’s make-up design completely changes at one point, with no explanation, one gets the feeling that the film was made in a tearing hurry, and suffered from a lot of tinkering with.

Tiffany’s weird hall-of-mirrors/carnival scene is similarly crude in visualization, and doesn’t really add anything to the proceedings. Did she lose her Mom at a carnival? The sequence never makes us understand why this circus-like place is Tiffany’s personal Hell, or why she is permitted to escape it.

On the plus side, the Cenobite-making chamber is radically evil and neat, though it proves a stumbling block in future entries since it isn’t, apparently, required to make Cenobites after all. 

And though I wonder about the rationale of making Leviathan a huge puzzle box, I nonetheless love the deeply creepy black light it periodically shines across the realm. Instead of a lighthouse, Leviathan is a dark-house, shining darkness throughout every corner of Hell.

To get back to my treatise on mythology, Hellbound feels duty-bound to give us a lot of information.  It provides background on Pinhead, revealing his pre-Cenobite life. We learn he was a British soldier in World War I, and Hell on Earth, the next installment, even tells us his name.

We also get to reconnect in the film, powerfully, with Clare Higgins’ Julia. Once more, she gives voice to the film’s intermittent motif about literary mythology (seen in the Orpheus-like story and in the damnations of Hell being like the torments of Tantalus or Sisyphus). Here, Julia relevantly notes her role in the myth; that she is both the “wicked stepmother” and “evil queen” in Kirstie’s fairy tale. I love that Julia, formerly repressed and frigid, internalizes this role and emerges from Hell as a siren, a seductress.

Again, however, one has to wonder about the discontinuities between the two films, vis-à-vis revival via human blood. Frank had new skin after three strangers and Larry were killed in the first film. Julia in Hellbound kills a room full of prostitutes, and still doesn’t have all her new skin yet.

Another scene in the film is also incongruous. It shows a hospital ward of insane patients being tortured by many copies of the Lament Configuration, even after Pinhead has verbally confirmed that desire, not hands, call him. The scene doesn’t make any sense, in light of that remark.

Yet Hellbound’s heights of imagination generally tend to overcome such deficits. A movie would really have to go some distance to prove itself bloodier and gorier than Hellraiser was.  Hellbound manages that feat with ease. The scene involving a straight razor, a bloody mattress, and a very sick man, is one for the record books.

The Channard Cenobite is hugely creative too, for example. Who in his or her right mind devised an individual who is carried around by a giant worm that has burrowed into that individual’s head? The conception and imagery of the character is remarkable.

If the final battle between Channard and Pinhead’s team had featured a little more punch, a little more suspense, I’d rate the film even higher.  I very much enjoy the scenes of Kirsty and Pinhead teaming up, as it were, but I wish Pinhead put up a better fight before getting his throat slit.

As it stands, Hellbound is a perfectly satisfying mythology-based horror sequel. For those who “have to see, have to know…” -- like Channard -- the movie both promises and delivers.

For those audiences seeking a film functioning at at the same artistic apex as Hellraiser does, however, this first sequel may not exactly qualify as a “pleasure.”