HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH (1992) Review
To be fair, the promise was that our suffering would be ‘legendary’, and if so, then Anthony Hickox’s 1992 threequel, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, certainly threatens to make good on that statement. It isn’t awful, but in terms of consistency, Hellraiser III is a fair few rungs down the ladder from Clive Barker’s incredible 1987 original or, indeed, Tony Randel’s 1988 direct follow-up. Truth be told, I’ve never fully understood why people actually like this one, and while there are some moments that stand out as enjoyably silly horror-movie nonsense, most of the film is so preoccupied with being slick and edgy in that mainstream, studio-produced horror kinda way that was oh so prevalent around this time that it winds up losing sight of what Hellraiser is actually supposed to be. As a film, Hellraiser III positions itself far closer to the slew of interchangeable slashers of the era, something that many a horror fan I have spoken to seem to find a welcome addition, but in doing so it loses that glorious sense of twisted imagination that the franchise had delivered in spades the last two times around; gone is the wonderful, complex lore created by Barker — and expanded on by Randel — and gone are the familial relationships and melodramatic soapiness, replaced with a shiny but empty coat of generic genre beats and a sickening desperation to appear (then) contemporary and… ugh… cool.
As a director, Hickox is perhaps best known for his 1988 feature debut, the horror/comedy Waxwork — starring Zack Galligan from Gremlins! — and the movie’s sequel, Waxwork II: Lost in Time. But while both of those films poke fun at a lot of the genre’s sillier tropes in a way that feels somehow knowing and loving at the same time, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth seems to actively play into them with a self-serious quality that only heightens their ridiculousness and absurdity. Of course, the franchise is hardly a staple of believable storytelling — even Barker’s original has some questionable narrative contrivances — but the problem comes from the fact that, while in both the original and its follow-up the wild visions and mad imaginings made up for any eye-rolling plot turns, here all we’re left with is some fun but wholly unoriginal gory set-pieces and some frustratingly on-the-nose imagery that simply doesn’t offer enough to gloss over the glaring holes in everything else. It’s hard to accept, for example, that Terry Farrell’s budding reporter Joey, having witnessed an undeniably supernatural event involving the gruesome murder of a young clubgoer, would so willingly dive head-first into investigating the Lament Configuration and the Cenobites — including inviting a tearaway teen to live with her after one meeting — when the film is essentially going to withhold much of the Hellish nightmare in favor of watching her, um… er… stare at TV screens, playing tapes of Ashley Laurence.
A subplot involving Kevin Bernhardt’s villainous toxic male J. P. Monroe at least keeps things from being wholly uninteresting, but the shift from Barker’s ambiguous, weird, nightmarish-original to this more teen-centric, mainstream-minded entry is jarring, and despite the film’s efforts to delve into some thematically interesting places — trauma, grief, lust, desire, greed, etc. — the film can’t help but collapse under its own genericness and unoriginality. I sometimes wonder how much of my opinion of this film has been shaped by my experiences when viewing it; while I watched the original and its sequel back-to-back, excited but uncertain about what to expect, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was viewed a week later, after seven days of passionate speculation and excitable imaginings of just what might feature!
An argument could be made that the film was simply never going to live up to the hype, but I’ve tried watching it a multitude of different ways — including as part of a big binge, which doesn’t work because, while one and two feel tonally and aesthetically connected, Hellraiser III looks, sounds, and feels entirely different — and nothing really helps it land any better for me. Barker reportedly wanted the franchise to focus on Clare Higgins’ character Julia moving forward, but Higgins declined to reprise the role and so fan-favorite Pinhead was promoted to primary antagonist, and that certainly doesn’t help matters, since the move away from established continuity and into the realms of simple monster movie territory also means that Hell on Earth doesn’t quite flow in line with the previous two.
That’s not to say that it’s all bad, mind you — and as we get into the bulk of the franchise from here on out I assure you, we’ll remember Hell on Earth quite fondly — it’s just not all that good. A sequence involving a young girl being skinned alive is delightfully horrific, while chunks of the final act — which features a whole host of brand new Cenobites all as goofy and hilarious as each other (there’s a camera Cenobite, a CD Cenobite, and a DJ Cenobite… like they’re Gremlins or something) — is as stupid as it is entertaining in an almost ‘so-bad-its-good’ kinda way, so I can’t honestly sit here and claim that I don’t actually enjoy watching it! It’s just that, well… the nature of that enjoyment has definitely changed. I love Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II unironically, but I enjoy Hell on Earth in a sort of ‘this is crap, and it’s hilarious’ kinda way. And, look, while that’s all well and good for a laugh and a fun time, when it comes to actually viewing it as part of a wider franchise, it’s undeniable that this is where we start to go off the rails. The franchise won’t ever quite be the same again after this, and I have to admit that there’s a big part of me that sort of hates the movie for that. In my mind, without Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, there’s a chance the series would have moved forward in a way far more in keeping with Barker’s vision than in the God awful, clusterfuck of a direction things ultimately wound up taking. And that… well, that sucks! Things are definitely about to get much, much worse, and while Hellraiser III can hardly be considered great cinema, as Pinhead himself would put it, “down the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of Heaven”! 3/5.
