Hellraiser: Judgment is not the pile of steaming horse shit you would expect a latter-day, VOD, Doug Bradley-less Hellraiser sequel to be — it’s actually fucking worse. A case of too much and not enough information all at once, Judgment ostensibly expands the franchise’s mythology, but you’d be well advised to read the corresponding Wikipedia article to get the full backstory (you know you’re in deep shit when Wiki-fucking-pedia is a dependable source).
The most kick-ass entries in the Hellraiser series — and indeed the best horror stories — always rely on the ‘less is more’ approach (cf. the original, Hellraiser: Inferno); Judgment is more of the ‘throw shit at the wall and see what sticks’ variety — and what does stick is precisely that: shit.
The movie begins with Pinhead (Paul T. Taylor) and the Auditor (Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who also writes and directs) “discussing how to adapt their methods of harvesting souls in the face of advancing human technology that is making the Configurations—gateways to hell—obsolete” (Wikipedia). Their solution is to set up shop in an abandoned house and lure sinners there by way of what appears to be some sort of telegram. So much for the “advanced technology” angle. Fucking idiots.
Heaven is usually depicted as a bureaucracy in the movies, and here so is Hell — which sounds hellish enough but is not particularly frightening. When a sinner comes to the house, the Auditor takes a deposition, then “the assessor … will look over your pages, pass on his findings to the jury, and we’ll go from there.” If the sinner is found guilty, he is “taken from here to be cleaned, and then to the Surgeon.” So. Much. Fucking. Red. Tape.
Once more according to Wikipedia, all of these entities are members of the the Stygian Inquisition, which is a so-called faction of hell “separate from the Order of the Gash” to which the Cenobites like Pinhead belong.
Here’s an idea: why not make a fucking movie about the Stygian Inquisition and leave Hellraiser the hell alone? I mean it, too; based on what little we see of them, these characters are not entirely without potential, and are certainly possessed of an intriguing visual presentation. As it is, tough, the film, with its scant 80-minute running time, has no time for either the Cenobites or the Stygians — in fact, it has to make room for several human characters, and even a fucking angel —, so they both get the shit end of the stick (the dreaded double-ended shit stick).
The plot, such as it is, is lifted directly from the superior Hellraiser: Inferno (with a little Se7en thrown in for good measure); instead of Craig Sheffer and Nick Turturro as police detectives hunting a serial killer known as The Engineer, we have three police detectives — two of whom are brothers — hunting a serial killer known as The Preceptor whose m.o. is Ten Commandment- themed murders — or at least that’s what they keep telling us; his latest killing involves a young woman who “worships” her little dog. Figurative worship, that is; hardly on par with the biblical golden calf.
The crime scene is so underwhelming that Detective Christine Egerton (Alexandra Harris), newly assigned to the case, even wonder whether it’s “just a bit basic for the Preceptor? I mean, I was under the impression that he liked to shock, appall, teach.” Correct though her observation is, nothing is made of it, so why the fuck bring it up at all?
Another good question is why the killer shoved the victim’s cellphone down her throat only to later exclaim “That bitch’s cell phone fucked things up!”. Uh, if you didn’t want the phone to be found, why put it there in the first place, you dumbfuck?
But anyway, one of the detectives eventually stumbles upon a Lemarchand Box, which affects his ability to discern between what’s real and what’s not, and exerts additional strain on his already rocky marriage — all of which happens to Sheffer’s character in Inferno; the difference is that this time the character has apparently watched the first Hellraiser film, so he knows what the Box is and what it does — and yet he’s stupid enough to think he might be able to cut a deal with the Cenobites.
The reason Kirsty Cotton is able to strike a bargain, however precarious it may be, with Pinhead & Co. is that the Cenobites are, or at least were (and, I think, should always be), too sophisticated to take sides in petty human affairs — that is, they don’t give two shits that Kirsty is the heroine or that her uncle Frank is the villain; they themselves aren’t any more ‘bad’ than the shark in Jaws or the Xenomorph in Alien are (the Cenobites’ raison d’être is beautifully summed up in the original film: “The box. You opened it. We came.”), and are ‘good’ only at what they do, regardless of whether they are “Demons to some” or “Angels to others.”
In Judgment, however, Pinhead is not so much morally ambiguous as theologically inclined, way too concerned with sin and its various degrees; “pitiful adultery,” for example, is “beneath him,” but “sin ordained by Heaven,” on the other hand, inflames him to the point that he pretty much declares fucking war on God himself — in other words, not content with branching Hell out, Tunnicliffe decides to not only bring Abraham’s God into the equation, but also make Him a sort of evil genius (except for the ‘genius’ part), because who’s ever heard of heroic demons and villainous angels? Other than Todd McFarlane, natch.
90% of Everything is Crap 