Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Stephen Abell Here's part three of the Hellraiser Saga... Once again this continues from where the last film ended, though it's a looser connection. The battle between Pinhead (Bradley) and his original human self, Captain Elliott Spencer, allowed him to break free of hells shackles. Entrapped in a monolith, he is awoken by Sandy (Leigh), when an accidental cut splashes blood on his stone features. Revealing himself to JP Monroe (Bernhardt), an unscrupulous womanising club owner, Pinhead makes a deal to free himself from his confines and to help JP to achieve his dreams...This leads to lots of twists and turns in the storyline as you know you can't trust a daemon. The only thing which stands in his way is an aspiring investigative reporter, Joanne "Joey" Summerskill (Farrell), who's investigating the gory and violent murders which are appearing in the city.The first thing that becomes evident is the amount of budget available for this film. Instead of being kept within the confines of a house or a hospital, now we're out in New York City. Penthouses, apartments, clubs, restaurants, ally's and streets. The locations are so much bigger. This is good, as it gives scope for a larger story with more hellish violence and gore... and it nearly delivers. Nearly, because the scene where the Cenobites finally take to the streets is actually underwhelming. What was required were a few more Cenobites and quite a few more victims, both pedestrians and police. It's nice to have explosions... I just wanted more.The acting is okay, Bradley still stands out and is excellent as Pinhead. Farrell does a good job as the reporter. However, it's Bernhardt and Marshall, who plays Terri, who have their bouts of woodenness. The direction too is quite different from the first two, gone are the artistic and atmospheric lighting for a more natural feel. This is okay, but the film does lose a little of its mood and spirit, which added strength to the first two movies. I can understand the need for doing this. If you expand the daemons universe to include a lot more of reality then it stands to reason to get that feeling across would be to lose the more imaginative aspects of the filmmaking. That said there are still quite a few iconic shots, such as the entrance of Pinhead at the club and later in the church, and nicely thought out camera shots and angles.Though I didn't find it as good as the first films it's still as enjoyable, though for different reasons... and as Pinhead would attain, variety is the spice of life.Another good thing is that this film actually works as a stand-alone, you only need a vague idea about the previous stories; whereas, Hellbound actually made you feel as though you should have watched the first film before viewing. So for that reason, I would recommend this to all horror fans and newbies alike. This is a well written, structured, and acted film... which has its fair share of tension, fear, and suspense.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki If one can overlook the needless steps toward mild comedy, and a more mainstream feel to this entry, it can be a gruesomely good time, with Doug Bradley in fine form as the s&m demon from Hell, now known as Pinhead. His entrance in the church, as well as his subsequent monologue, is chilling. A horrifying image of him, briefly losing his control, as he shoves the cross off the altar, before, arms outstretched, he then calmly, intensely declares, " I am the way " , immediately before the Gothic windows explode, is the film's most memorable scene. The movie veers off into action film explosions at one time, in a simultaneously out of place, and also fun, scene.If only the filmmakers would have dropped the cameraman's annoying attempts at humour ( every time he answers his brick-sized cell phone, he annoyed says, " Speak. " Seriously? How did that cringe-inducing line make it past the first draught of the script? )

lonchaney20 Of all the horror franchises to devolve into mindless slasher nonsense, I find the Hellraiser series to be the most depressing. Whereas there's only so much you can do with the simple set-ups of films like Halloween and Friday the 13th, there was something edgy and elegant about the first two Hellraiser films. While they were certainly as gory and titillating as their slasher counterparts, they had a little more going on under the surface, and were just as interested in their characters as they were in their violent set-pieces. This is mostly due to Clive Barker, the writer and director of the first Hellraiser, whose poetic and shocking horror novels remain benchmarks in the genre. Even starting from Hellraiser II, however, certain slasher tropes were starting to creep in, such as corny one-liners and gratuitous death scenes. Even so, they both never forgot their primary aim, which was to present a seriously disturbing horror film geared towards adults; even Hellraiser II doesn't showcase its few one-liners with winking irony. Starting with Hellraiser III, though, several things went horribly wrong: the studio began to meddle, Clive Barker found himself increasingly unwelcome as a creative consultant, the budgets grew smaller, and Pinhead became the primary antagonist of a series which increasingly lost its footing. It's difficult to say exactly where it all went wrong, but somehow the stars aligned to make a Hellraiser III so ludicrous that it seems to come from an entirely different planet than the first two.This entry, scripted by Barker's long-time friend Pete Atkins (also the screenwriter of Part II), finds Pinhead (again played by the brilliant Doug Bradley), still trapped in the Pillar of Souls after his battle with Dr. Channard. The Pillar is purchased by the gloriously reprehensible douche bag/club owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), who soon discovers that he can free Pinhead by feeding him souls. Meanwhile reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) stumbles onto the story of a lifetime when she witnesses a man torn apart in the E.R. by the power of the Lament Configuration (i.e. the box used to summon the Cenobites). Her investigation leads her to J.P.'s ex-girlfriend Terri (Paula Marshall), and the two try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on.It sounds okay on paper, but Hickox unintentionally turns it into a hilariously overwrought parody. Given Hickox's previous horror comedies such as Waxwork and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, I assumed this might be the intention, but Hickox insisted in interviews that he was attempting to make a serious psychological horror film in the vein of Jacob's Ladder or Angel Heart. Instead he directs his cast to deliver corny, unmistakably nineties dialogue in an alternately stilted or over-the-top fashion. Only Doug Bradley really escapes with his dignity intact (the man can make even the lousiest dialogue sound like Shakespeare), but I must it I enjoyed Bernhardt's absurdly sleazy turn as J.P. He looks like the sleazy American cousin of Rupert Everett, and I love how transparent his attempts to sweet talk women into his bed/into Pinhead's stomach(?) are. Only those two really help to sell the ridiculous goings on. Our two female leads are likable enough, but they're not nearly as convincing as Ashley Laurence is in the previous films, though it doesn't help that they're confronted by the most ridiculous Cenobites in the whole series. After the film's most ambitious set-piece (a massacre in a crowded nightclub), Pinhead mounts his attack on humanity with the following soldiers of Hell: there's Camera-Head, whose head has been fused with his news camera, and who spouts one-liners like "That's a wrap!" and "Are you ready for your close-up?"; CD-Head, a DJ whose head is pierced with CDs and who…throws CDs at people; and the Barbie Cenobite, a bartender whose head is wrapped in barbed wire, and who uses a cocktail mixer filled with gasoline to wreak havoc on some cops. It's jaw-droppingly stupid, and completely undermines the pain/pleasure dynamic of the first two entries. If Hickox was aiming to emulate Alan Parker or Adrian Lyne, he's way off the mark - instead think Sam Raimi, if Sam Raimi was a moron.To be fair, though, the movie looks very good, apart from the corny, early-nineties CGI, and some decent dialogue actually trickles through now and then. I particularly enjoyed several of Pinhead's lines, such as "Down the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of Heaven," and "I will enjoy making you bleed, and I will enjoy making you enjoy it," which briefly touches on Clive Barker's original intentions for the character. Unfortunately this film, by turning Pinhead into a Freddy Krueger-esque slasher front-man, set the series on the wrong path for good. Atkins and director Kevin Yagher attempted to put things right with the ambitious Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, but studio meddling would turn a potential masterpiece into a complete disaster.

deathadder-13878 Hellraiser 3 is one of those lame attempts at continuing a horror franchise that audiences were subjected to in the 90's. Child's play, Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc. These movies just got silly and poorly produced by the early 90's.As for the movie at hand, it's almost totally lacking in the relatively sophisticated mood and creativity of Hellraiser (1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988). These were movies about the dark aspects of the human condition, about authentic human beings falling prey to lust and temptation. Their misadventures opened the door to the Cenobites, those sinister BDSM icons. Besides punishing sinners, the more innocent also would end up drawn into the mess.In the 3rd film, we instead get unpleasant and shallow characters that we just don't care about. The compelling thing about the earlier movies was how seemingly ordinary and unpretentious people were seduced by their base impulses. We didn't hate or ridicule these people. The guy who brings the Cenobites back in this movie is a twenty-something L.A. club owner who looks, talks, and acts likes a total jackass. With his shaved and toned chest, he seems like some kind of G.Q. or Playgirl reject who inexplicably got cast in a series which had established a seriousness and maturity with the first two movies. The heroine of this movie is played by a fairly likable actress, but her character isn't interesting and her dialogue/character building scenes come off as flat, like the director couldn't wait to get to the "good" parts.Also, the first two movies had a kind of stately British vibe to them. Part 3, on the other hand, is very obviously a lowest common denominator L.A. B movie. It tries hard to be "hip" (e.g. now very dated) with it's locations, rock music, and young cast. Sure, some of the 80's hairstyles of the first two films haven't aged all that well, but besides that the first two movie were not about fashion, they were sincere and moody explorations of sinister things. In part 3, the excruciating club scenes are shot and edited frantically, like a music video complete with mediocre 90's hard rock. Not even scary, odd that a "horror" movie would have long stretches that are not even tense, let alone scary.Being "fashionable" is something that badly hurt 90's horror. Jamie Lee Curtis wore J.C. Penney in Halloween; Tommy Hilfiger got his logo in the credits of The Faculty (1998). Another element to this is the dialogue content and delivery in 90's horror; in 70's and 80's horror characters even when teenage were more low-key and unpretentious. By the 90's it seemed like every script writer and actor came off as trying way to hard to make characters "witty" or "clever". In practice this led to snarky and shallow characters that were hard to relate to.The movie climaxes with an orgy of mass-violence (shot and edited in an overactive way, just like almost everything else in the movie) that reinforces the notion that overuse leads to boredom. Pinhead and his new cast of Cenobites (that are more poorly designed and acted than the earlier Cenobites) murder more people at a faster rate than any other "slasher" villain ever did. I'm sure it seemed cool at the time, but it's not scary and it destroys the credibility of the villains who were more restrained in the first two movies. Also, having everything be on "Earth" (or at least a theatrically flamboyant early 90's version of Earth) means that we don't get the ambitious Hellscapes that were well-realized in the 2nd movie. The stop-motion wonders of that film's climax are gone too, as for this movie it's just Pinhead and his new boring crew giving the F/X crew opportunities to hone their make-up wound skills. After you see a neck slash or head gouge for the tenth time, who cares? So it's a three for me. It isn't as aggressively sloppy as some of the other "efforts" of it's period, so if for no other reason than that, I'll give it credit.