I’m traipsing around the Carolinas the next two weeks helping my mother get ready to move. Rather than leave a blank space until I return, I’m going to offer up a few choice entries from UBHB’s first six months, some of which you newer readers may have missed. Enjoy, and I’ll be back at the end of the month with all-new tasty horror morsels!
Despite script and editing problems, “Hellbound: Hellraiser II” is a labyrinthine nightmare that ups the ante from Clive Barker’s original.
1987 was a watershed for the horror genre. From the gigglin’ ghouls of EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN to Alan Parker’s pitch-perfect voodoo nightmare ANGEL HEART or the grimy Brooklyn tenements of Jim Muro’s audacious STREET TRASH, the year raised the bar and eyebrows alike in the thick of the VHS boom.
They say good things never last, and holy shit did 1988 prove that. I nearly punched a wall after paying good money to see the latest Jason and Freddy outings that summer. The latest crop of cheap, direct-to-video shockers hadn’t helped matters, either.
That autumn, I had moved back to the Rust Belt from California. My family had gone broke after my single mother was caught in a 26-car pile-up on a Los Angeles freeway. The lack of friends, interests, and daylight as the year wound down injected an unshakable, sinking feeling in the stomach of yet another faceless American teenager living below the poverty line.
I had one hail mary left: the first sequel to Clive Barker’s low-budget debut hit, HELLRAISER. My choice to trudge through the post-Christmas slush to take in the continuing adventures of the Cenobites–Hell’s bounty hunters with a taste for S&M–turned out to be a revelation. Four decades on, HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II remains my favorite of the series, which has since imploded on itself in a orgy of subpar video-only releases.
As the final flash in the embers of 1988, HELLBOUND emerged as a deliciously vulgar and daring continuation that picks up where Barker’s original left off. With the help of a young mute girl with a penchant for puzzles, Kirsty Cotton must square off against the labyrinthine tricks of Hell to save her poor father’s soul.
The film suffered from typical editing and script wrinkles, a few of which are ironed out by the longer, ‘unrated’ version that now serves as the default edition in most countries. Reactions at the time from both critics and horror fans were mixed, as Barker had opted out of helming the sequel, working instead on the ill-fated screen adaptation of “Cabal”, later retitled NIGHTBREED.
Ultimately, the tantalizing mix of redemption and revenge from late director Anthony Hickox and his crack team of SFX wizards was enough to restore my faith in the genre after quite a rocky year. More importantly, HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II still serves as one of horror’s last gory hurrahs of the 1980s.
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