Dear Dimension films,
For the last few years you’ve been trying to get a Hellraiser remake made. You won over the doubtful fanbase with a couple of annoucements – ie. who would be directing, the fact that Clive Barker himself was on board and loved the script that the writing directing team Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Muary (who directed some flick called inside that everyone got a total boner for) had produced. But they walked out because of your ‘vision’ for the movie. Then Clive Barker washed his hands of the whole thing and you hired the writers of the most recent Saw sequels to write a new script. Then everyone stopped caring…
Forunately you can’t get your shit together, and have been far too busy running the Halloween franchise into the ground to similarly lay waste to the Hellraiser franchise. The sad thing is that, in the eyes of the majority, the Hellraiser franchise is already dead and consigned to DTV hell. Which is a shame, but we’ll get into that later.
These days you are having huge financial troubles, which threaten to destroy your company. You left Disney, you made a lot of bad decisions, gave a lot of shitty movies the greenlight. Everything is pretty bad for you at the moment.
You plan on solving these difficulties by making sequels to pretty much every major film property you own. We know Scream 4 is coming out… risky? Probably not. People came in droves to see the original trilogy, and to be honest it’s probably the only horror series with an ounce of public integrity left. Anyway, we’ll see…
This week you announced that you will be making Hellraiser: Revelations (a ninth movie in the original series) and thus put the kibosh on the remake. For now. You also announced yet another Children Of The Corn sequel, but I couldn’t care less about that. There hasn’t been a good Children Of The Corn film since… um, yeah.
The Hellraiser franchise went wrong pretty quickly. The first two films were great, like A Nightmare On Elm Street they were more than simple gore-drenched horror movies. There was something far more clever and much more disturbing at work in those movies. Then you got involved, Dimension Films. And you played a big part in creating what we all know and “love” as Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth.
That film went the slasher route… and it was actually a pretty good slasher movie. Entertaining, some good kill-gags in there, bBut the problem was that the series should have been so much more than that. It had the potential to go on being great – but this is the route you chose. No doubt you saw Dollar Signs when you decided to go down that path – unfortunately it didn’t give the people what they expected and it remains the least of the original three movies. Then you made Bloodlines, which was considered to be an excellent entry in the franchise. No really… test screenings went well. People apparentely loved it. Then you Studio Heads got involved, had another director reshoot a crap load of the film and in the end not one director wanted to stick his name on the bloody thing. Complete disaster, due to Studio Interference.
So you almost killed the series but you let it carry on as a Direct To Video franchise. The results were mixed – thankfully the low budget meant you had to go in a different direction, and I kinda like Inferno. Hellseeker is a lazy retread of the exact same thing with a returning face from Hellraiser 1 & 2 being the sole saving grace. Deader went in another new direction, one that I welcomed and thoroughly enjoyed. Hellworld was terrible – I have no clue what you were trying to do there, but it failed. Really, it was utterly bizzare and… why?
So today, news broke that Doug Bradley (Pinhead himself) will not be returning for this film. He’s seen the script, and he won’t be returning. The film is virtually no-budget, with shooting to commence in two weeks and be finished by the end of September. Rushed is not the word. He doesn’t feel that this film will do justice to the franchise. Given that this franchise includes both Bloodlines and Hellworld… that script must be pretty bad. So, as is now customary… here’s my list of do’s and don’t's for Hellraiser: Revelations.
1. Don’t fucking make it.
- It’ll suck.
Regards,
Douglas J.
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