Director: Gary J. Tunnicliffe
81 minutes (18) 2018
Lions Gate DVD
Rating: 6/10
Review by Jeff Young
British special-effects make-up artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe was screen-writer of the previous Hellraiser: Revelations, and he continues the horror-movie franchise as writer-director of this, tenth movie, of a series begun 30 years earlier, with Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser.
Three detectives working on a serial-killer case, to catch the Preceptor, seems a bizarrely unlikely scenario, perhaps, when in most of closer-to-reality TV shows, whole FBI squads would be assigned. Two brothers Sean (Damon Carney) and David Carter (Randy Wayne) are joined by Christine Egerton (Alexandra Harris), working together in dingy little offices that immediately betray the low-budget production of this modest effort. Expectations hit a lower register, of course, but there are compensations in this atypical Hellraiser sequel.
If the Cenobites are twisted monks of pain and pleasure, acting like occult assassins, this drama concerns investigative clerk the Auditor (portrayed by director Tunnicliffe himself). He’s often centre-stage, as a weirdly scar-faced interrogator interviewing grotesque suspects with vile habits, like paedophile Watkins, before passing his typed notes to hyperactive paper-eater, the Assessor (John Gulagher, director of the fantastical and cult-worthy Feast trilogy). Angelic blonde Jophiel (Helena Grace Donald) intervenes during the mysterious Auditor’s testing of captured cop Sean. Likeable heroine Christine eventually breaks up the Carters' awkward dynamic, cracks the strange case, and finds the best solution (absolution?) to the otherworldly crimes.
Imagine a Hellraiser movie by Rob Zombie, all visceral impact or nightmarish surrealism, and a shameless black comedy with sickly puns, not a more grimly intelligent horror as usually favoured by Clive Barker. Curiously, it seems that the game-playing Saw franchise, Chris Carter’s conspiratorial The X-Files, and David Fincher’s memorable exploration of sadism in Se7en (1995), are vital influences on this hellish shocker. Reverential in-jokes include Heather Langenkamp, from A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), in a cameo as one suspect’s landlady.
Perhaps inevitably, if not exactly predictably, the reps of hell and heaven confront human morality before the sudden death-scenes of a happily bullet-riddled finale. Hellraiser: Judgement does overcome its foot-dragging pace, and various nods to other iconic horrors, with invaluable expansions beyond ‘Pinhead’ lore, despite a frequently stylistic slasher approach that relies upon comic-book conventions.
