HELLRAISER: JUDGMENT (2018)

Studio:       Dimension Films
Director:    Gary J. Tunnicliffe
Writer:       Gary J. Tunnicliffe
Producer:  Michael Leahy
Stars:     Damon Carney, Randy Wayne, Alexandra Harris, Heather Langenkamp, Paul T. Taylor, Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Jeff Fenter, Rheagan Wallace, Helena Grace Donald, Grace Montie, John Gulager

Review Score:

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Summary:

The hunt for a sadistic serial killer leads three detectives into a confrontation with otherworldly horror.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Pinhead muses that Lemarchand’s puzzle box is obsolete given the mortal world’s technological sophistication, even though sin remains unchanged. The Auditor tells Pinhead that they can adapt their methods, as his torture house for evaluating candidates is now ready to use.

Pedophile Karl Watkins receives a letter summoning him to an abandoned house at 55 Ludovico Place. There, The Auditor restrains Watkins to a chair and compels him to confess to a child murder with the promise of a reward. After typing his report, The Auditor turns over his pages to The Assessor.

The Assessor pours children’s tears on the pages, eats them, and then vomits into a nearby tube. The Assessor’s vomit funnels into a trough in another room where three naked women with skinned faces known as ‘The Jury’ await. The women put their hands in the vomit and declare Watkins “guilty.”

With Watkins chained to a table, naked women referred to as ‘cleaners’ torturously lick at and gnaw on his body. The Butcher unleashes The Surgeon, who brutally slashes Watkins with blades before pulling off his flesh. The Jury bathes in Watkins’ blood.

Crystal Lanning drunkenly stumbles home to her apartment. A hooded man violently murders Crystal.

Detectives David and Sean Carter, who are brothers as well as partners, investigate the crime scene at Crystal’s apartment. They conclude that Crystal is the latest victim of ‘The Preceptor,’ a serial killer murdering people who violate the Ten Commandments.

Having been added to the ongoing case to speed its resolution, Detective Christine Egerton joins the brothers. The three detectives discover Crystal’s dog, still alive, sewn inside Crystal’s stomach.

Sean rushes home from the office when he realizes he forgot his wife Alison’s birthday. Discord brews between the couple as Alison tearfully confronts Sean about missing the occasion.

The detectives discover severed hands arranged around jars of blood in a children’s park. They learn that the victims were accused thieves, as “thou shall not steal” was one of two remaining commandments that The Preceptor had not yet used as a theme. David realizes that one of the murdered girls was also a molestation victim of Karl Watkins. The detectives additionally connect Watkins to the school Crystal Lanning once attended.

Watkins’ landlady allows the three detectives into Watkins’ apartment. There, the detectives recover the envelope that contained The Auditor’s letter. Sean later returns to Watkins’ apartment alone and finds the 55 Ludovico Place address saved on a map on a laptop.

Sean goes to the address and falls unconscious on the doorstep. When he recovers, Sean finds himself restrained to a chair seated in front of The Auditor. Sean asks about the puzzle boxes lining a nearby mantle. The Auditor cryptically explains that they are a linking mechanism between his world and Sean’s.

The Auditor compels Sean to detail his sins. However, when The Assessor eats the resulting pages, he violently vomits black blood that infects The Jury. While the cleaners attend to Sean, a bell summons The Auditor to a bright room where he meets the angel Jophiel. Jophiel instructs The Auditor to release Sean.

Confused by Jophiel’s unusual demand, The Auditor consults Pinhead, who is flanked by the cenobites Chatterer and Stitch Twins, for guidance on handling the current candidate. The Auditor and Pinhead discover that Sean escaped with one of the puzzle boxes. Pinhead promises that Sean will return.

Sean has David meet him in the middle of the night. Sean brings David back to the house only to find it abandoned. Sean refuses to answer David’s questions regarding what is going on.

At home, Sean has a nightmare of Chatterer and the Stitch Twins torturing him. Alison comforts Sean when he wakes, which leads to sex. However, Sean recoils from Alison when he experiences another vision of the Stitch Twins. Sean goes on a bender in the city and collapses when he encounters a skinless vagrant.

The next day, David and Christine discuss how the stress of the case seems to be affecting Sean’s mental stability. Christine admits that a secondary reason she was assigned to the Preceptor case was to evaluate Sean’s behavior.

Alison calls David to pick up Sean. David finds his brother bloody and disheveled. After getting Sean inside his house, David finds suspicious quotes underlined in Sean’s copy of ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ Sean connects the text to a Preceptor clue. After consulting Christine about his discovery, Christine asks David to look into his brother as a possible suspect.

Medical examiner Hodges summons Sean and Christine to the morgue to turn over a cellphone recovered from inside Crystal Lanning’s body. GPS data found on the phone reveals that Crystal was killed at a location other than her apartment.

Sean and Christine go to the address, which turns out to be an old warehouse. Inside, the two detectives discover The Preceptor’s secret lair. After revealing enlarged photo evidence of a “thou shall not covet” affair between David and Alison, Sean beats Christine unconscious.

David arrives at the warehouse. Sean holds his brother at gunpoint. David reveals that he learned Sean was The Preceptor by connecting Bible-related clues. David reveals that he called Alison to the warehouse. When Alison enters, Sean confronts her and David about their affair.

Sean forces David and Alison to open the puzzle box together. The warehouse morphs into a hellish room of chains as Pinhead enters through a portal. Knowing that Pinhead would come to take him, Sean offers to trade David and Alison for himself. Pinhead explains that a second faction wants Sean, so there is no bargaining to be done.

The Auditor enters and deems that Sean has been found guilty. Hooks and chains rip into Sean’s flesh as he is restrained. Pinhead promises that when The Butcher and The Surgeon are done with him, Sean will be reborn into an eternity of agony. Chains impale David and Alison and pull them away.

Jophiel enters. She demands that Sean be released, claiming he is part of a bigger plan. Pinhead realizes that God wants Sean free so that His flock will turn to the light for salvation from the wolf. Pinhead acquiesces to Jophiel’s demand to send Sean back to the mortal world.

When Sean returns to reality, Christine recovers and shoots him dead. Jophiel angrily accuses Pinhead of knowingly allowing Sean to die. Jophiel vows retaliation. Pinhead summons chains to restrain Jophiel. He then removes nails from his head and puts them in hers. Jophiel’s taunts prompt Pinhead to have the chains tear her apart.

The Auditor warns that Jophiel was the angel who banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and destroying her could result in banishment back to the mortal world. Pinhead scoffs at the notion until a bright light freezes him. Pinhead transforms into a scarred human condemned to live as a common vagrant.

Hanover, Germany – The Auditor welcomes two Mormon solicitors into a new torture house.

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Review:

“Hellraiser: Judgment” writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe created a little confusion in 2016 when he assured Fangoria that “the film isn’t a re-hashing of an old script (as some lesser informed sites are assuming) nor was it rushed into production.  It’s a completely original piece…”  A cancelled Kickstarter project however, didn’t fully align with Tunnicliffe’s claim.

In 2013, Tunnicliffe sought crowdfunding for a feature titled “Judgement” (sic).  The movie was meant to be “an uncensored, extreme horror film” that producer Joel Soisson described as “Se7en meets Hellraiser.”  The proposal included pictures and pitches for characters called ‘The Auditor,’ ‘The Assessor,’ ‘The Jury,’ and more, all of whom appear in “Hellraiser: Judgment” exactly as depicted for “Judgement.”  So the inference, at least the way I read it, that “Hellraiser: Judgment” wasn’t rising from the ashes of this previous project seemed curious to say the least.

In a later 2016 interview, Tunnicliffe clarified that “Hellraiser: Judgment” began life as a Hellraiser concept, but became an original project before boomeranging back into a Hellraiser sequel.  Essentially, “Judgement” went into the cooler after raising only $8,714 of its $195k goal, then returned to life three years later when Dimension green-lighted it as a Hellraiser follow-up.  So calling it a “re-hashing of an old script” was misleading because “Judgement” always intended to be Hellraiser canon anyway.  Or something like that.

While we have The Wayback Machine fired up, it’s worth noting that at a 2013 Beyond Fest screening of “Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut” (review here), the subject of “Hellraiser” came up during a Q&A with Clive Barker.  When the series’ much-maligned sequels were mentioned, Barker took a sincere moment to call them, and I quote, “absolute abominations.”  Barker added that he hadn’t seen “the last three” movies, which for the record would have been “Deader,” “Hellworld,” and “Revelations.”

Although “Hellraiser: Judgment” shows all the DTV signs of a bankbook starving for another nickel, and has a spotty story stitched from stolen tropes and stereotypes, it doesn’t deserve to be added to the “absolute abomination” category.  Clive Barker can safely include it on his “no need to bother with” list though.  While “Judgment” duplicates some of the surface appeal that made “Hellraiser” distinct, substance and style are separate stories.

The non-cenobite side of the plot, which you realize in hindsight links so loosely to the cenobite side that it’s a wonder the script feels connected at all, concerns a couple of sibling detectives fresh from the copy machine tray.  Sean is an unshaven alcoholic in a leather jacket who forgets his wife’s birthday.  His brother David provides the clean-cut pretty boy in a tie counterpart.  Christine completes the cop trio as a plucky, unwelcome woman assigned to shake up the tandem team.

The detectives are trying to find a serial killer called ‘The Preceptor,’ who chooses victims according to Ten Commandments violations.  This mystery never gains any meaningful traction.  The cenobite stuff makes so much noise, you regularly forget there is an ongoing multiple murder investigation to be solved in the mortal world.

Plus, there are only five actors in the title credits and a scant few additional characters beyond that.  So unless you have suspicions about the medical examiner, random vagrant, or other single scene bit player, the list of people the killer could be is a scandalously short one.

Two of the things “Hellraiser” is predominantly known for, Pinhead and the puzzle box, as well as one thing “Judgment” loudly trumpets, “A Nightmare on Elm Street’s” Heather Langenkamp in the cast, irrelevantly combine for maybe five minutes of content.  Langenkamp’s inconsequential cameo as ‘Landlady’ occupies one brief clip of an unimportant scene.  I don’t know why anyone bothered to include the character, much less why Langenkamp agreed to speak only six sentences.

Although it comes into play in the climax, the puzzle box mostly sits on a shelf (literally).  Meanwhile, Pinhead largely lounges in a chair.  All this fuss over getting Pinhead to look “right” after the doughy disappointment of “Hellraiser: Revelations” and it doesn’t even matter all that much.  Paul T. Taylor sounds fine, and Pinhead’s presentation is about 80% of the way there.  His silhouette lines stand too straight, though a standard lighting scheme takes more blame for showcasing awkwardness in Pinhead’s appearance.  Instead of blue fog and shadow, bright lights practically blind the cenobite priest, highlighting every hiccup in his design.  Still, he never looks as poorly costumed as the angel outfitted in a midriff-baring white pantsuit.

Newcomer The Auditor steals Pinhead’s usual spotlight.  Normally, I would wag a finger at writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe for casting himself in what might be the movie’s meatiest role.  Except his performance as a demonic accountant might also be the movie’s highlight.  Tunnicliffe’s deliciously campy take on the ghoulishly goofy character captures some throwback Full Moon charm, even if The Auditor leans too far into an Andre Toulon meets The Invisible Man mash-up.

Other dubious casting choices don’t hold up as well.  “Feast” director and Tunnicliffe friend John Gulager, whose other auspicious acting credits include ‘Man on Bridge,’ ‘Man in Elevator,’ and ‘Driver #1,’ really isn’t right for the role of The Assessor, which in turn isn’t really right for “Hellraiser.”  Channeling Laurence R. Harvey from “The Human Centipede” series, a sweaty, shirtless, grinning Gulager pours “tears of children” on papers before eating them with a knife and fork in slow-motion.  It’s a moment meant to be unnerving that instead reads as silly.

The Assessor goes on to have his vomit funneled into a trough where three nude women with skinless faces run their hands through his upchuck.  This is indicative of how the movie’s misguided idea of manufacturing the macabre focuses on being disgustingly sick when it should be hauntingly unsettling.

Some setups come close to clever.  A live dog sewn inside a dead woman’s stomach has novelty value.  Severed hands arranged as fists around jars of blood capture similarly sinister sparks of creativity.  Tunnicliffe has Hellraiser-ish ideas in the form of imagery, but the themes aren’t on a Barker-esque wavelength.

Clive Barker’s work weaves sexuality with slaughter for S&M sensuality.  Simply spraying blood on bare breasted women, something “Hellraiser: Judgment” does, isn’t in that same spirit of lust fused with horror.  Nudity and gore are just smashing together instead of feeding each other in complementary fashion.

“Hellraiser: Judgment” never has true hope of fleshing its fantasy because the boundaries of its budget are visible everywhere.  Tight, simply dressed locations seem even smaller due to a close-up camera consistently jammed into headshots.  Lighting amplifies staging, like when the killer butchers a victim in a room with one bulb burning bright red and one flickering like a strobe for another tenuously-motivated effect.  “Hellraiser: Judgment” tries its best.  Slim production value only allows it to go so far.

Given the violently fluctuating quality levels of the series to date, I’m not sure what the standards even are for grading a “Hellraiser” movie anymore.  “Judgment” wears more warts than Pinhead has nails, yet it probably features enough weirdness to be worth a curious look for franchise fans who’d settle for anything remotely resembling mediocrity at this point.  Does that equal a thumbs up or a thumbs down?  I don’t really know.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score:  55

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