Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992, Anthony Hickox)

October 27th, 2009 · No Comments

Hellraiser III is one of the first "horror" movies I've seen where they seemed concerned with action figure tie-ins, with the Cenobites having gimmicks (they shoot CDs, blow fire and so on). It's also one of those absurd movies set in New York but clearly filmed somewhere else, in this case North Carolina. It gets more absurd than some, with protagonist Terry Farrell driving an SUV around "New York." There also aren't any black people in Hickox's New York (well, there was one), so it's kind of like an early Dark Knight.

It's hard to believe anyone associated with the previous film had something to do with this one, but it's the same screenwriter--this time he seems to be trying to infer a lesbian attraction between Farrell and Paula Marshall, but the film's never really willing to commit to it. The big plot twist too, in regards to that relationship, is never explained.

Hickox is a bad director--sure, he's charged with directing Borg-looking demons on the streets of North Carolina--sorry, New York--so it isn't going to be an easy task for anyone, but he does a really lousy job of it. Hellraiser III, in a horror franchise without much scare factor (at least the first two had some uneasy gross moments), is kind of like a gory PG-13 sequel to an R-rated movie. It's actually a lot like Robocop 3.

The worst performance is from Kevin Bernhardt, who, frighteningly, now writes screenplays.

0/4

CREDITS

Directed by Anthony Hickox; screenplay by Peter Atkins, based on a story by Atkins and Tony Randel and on characters created by Clive Barker; director of photography, Gerry Lively; edited by Christopher Cibelli and James D.R. Hickox; music by Randy Miller; production designer, Steve Hardie; produced by Christopher Figg and Lawrence Mortorff; released by Dimension Films.

Starring Terry Farrell (Joey Summerskill), Paula Marshall (Terri), Kevin Bernhardt (J.P. Monroe), Ken Carpenter (Doc) and Doug Bradley (Lead Cenobite/Captain Elliott Spencer).

Tagged: Anthony Hickox· Clive Barker· Dimension Films· Peter Atkins· Tony Randel· ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

No Comments so far ↓

There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.

Leave a Comment (Cancel)

Latest Episode

This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast we grab our pieces and visit two urban jungles of two different ethnicities. Who runs their little ethnic enclave better, the Little Italians or the Little Japanese? If either film is to be believed, crime is a huge problem in both areas. The big difference is whether the local mob is home grown or imported directly from Big Tokyo. This also determines the tone of the movie, since one of the films directors carries some childhood sympathies for the people and lifestyle, while the other cast a world famous white guy and dropped him into smack dab into yellow peril.

Mean Streets is the film that made Martin Scorcese famous. The story involves the mafia, a subject which his films helped make famous almost as much as another Italian American gentleman, Francis Ford Coppola, with The Godfather that very same year. Unlike that famous crime saga, this film focuses on the low levels of mob employment and a young man struggling to justify his future career with his Catholic fear of eternity in Hell, played by Harvey Keitel. As if this weren’t enough to worry about, his best friend — Robert DeNiro, in a star making turn — is a loose cannon with a big mouth and debts all over town.

Scorcese never really grew as a filmmaker: he was great from the start. His interests didn’t have to grow either, he would continue to make films about crime, Catholicism and urban alienation with or without DeNiro in the coming decades and has only recently seemed to choose projects based on books he picked up at the library, like a random biography or cheesy horror novel. Mean Streets is at the epicenter of personal connection to the things which mattered most to him, filmed in the part of New York he grew up in and scored to the pop songs he grew up listening to. A real Italian slice of life with extra parmesan.

If the filmmakers behind Showdown in Little Tokyo had made Mean Streets, someone probably would’ve been killed with a pizza. That is to say, director Mark L. Lester of Commando fame did not bring with him any personal cultural understanding of the Japanese culture. The biggest overtures to Japanese culture are the casting of two non-Japanese Asian-Americans, Tia Carrere of Wayne’s World fame and Bruce Lee’s belated son Brandon Lee in his first American film.

The real star is not just a white guy but one of the whitest guys you know: Dolph Lundgren, out to clean up the mean streets of Little Tokyo with the superior understanding of Asian martial arts that only a Swedish guy can engineer. He and Lee trade some gay banter, crack skulls, and unlike a lot of buddy actions movies we’ve seen here on An Alan Smithee Podcast, director Mark Lester truly does not mess around when it comes to flattering one’s short attention span with outrageous violence. A big dumb fun dose of brain damage from 1991, the year that action movies died inside.

NEXT WEEK: THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942, FRANK TUTTLE) & CONGO (1995, FRANK MARSHALL)

MP3 DOWNLOAD

iTUNES LINK

The Stop Button

distinct . . . diverse . . . divisive . . . snobby.