This movie could have been great. After all, not only has the glorious Pinhead come back but he has stepped into the real world to hold dominion over all mortals. There are some shining moments here, but overall the movie doesn’t hold together well and marks the beginning of the slippery slope which this once-great movie franchise tumbled down in later years. Several of the actors and actresses look like they are acting (never a good thing), but it is the plot that dooms this third incarnation of Hellraiser to something of a cinematic disappointment. Joey, a frustrated female journalist, witnesses the death of a chain-mauled man in the emergency room of the local hospital. The witness who came with the tortured shell of a man insists she wants no involvement in events, yet she tells Joey her name and where she can be rather easily found. When her lecherous boyfriend J.P., rich owner of the Boiler Room—half wild bar and half fancy restaurant—throws her out, she comes to stay with Joey, then acts surprised when the journalist wants to ask her questions. The important thing is that she has the puzzle box. Out of nowhere, we start seeing Joey’s dreams of watching her father die in Vietnam; in the shakiest plot point of all, we find it is these dreams that allow the man who became Pinhead, Captain Elliott Spencer, to contact her and ask her to destroy the monster he became. Naturally, after a lot of nasty deaths, we come to a conclusion in which the seemingly helpless Joey tries to gain victory over the forces of hell.
It is a shame that a few of the best scenes in the series are buried in this lackluster production. Perhaps the most significant one involves Pinhead’s blasphemous reenactment of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Standing in the pulpit of a church he has torn apart, Pinhead stabs a needle through both of his palms, pantomimes Christ’s position on the cross, and states that “I am the way.” He then pulls a hunk of bloody flesh out of his own body and feeds it to the priest, making a blasphemy of the Lord’s Supper. That’s classic stuff there. Pinhead also gets some pretty good lines in this movie. For example, when told he will burn in hell, he sighs and says “Burn, oh such a limited imagination.” Here’s the part that bothers me, though. Pinhead goes on and on about making people suffer, telling Joey that he will torment her for decades and enjoy making her enjoy the suffering. Yet when he makes his grand appearance in reality, he just throws chains around will-nilly, killing everyone in sight. It’s all just senseless murder—no suffering and thus no pleasure to be taken in it. The new Cenobites also deserve a mention. I didn’t like them at all. In place of superb beings like Chattermouth, we get an ex-dj with compact discs thrust all in his head, a TV cameraman with a video lens for an eye, and two more who do little more than look stupid. The new guys seem to have been designed as a means for inserting silly, hackneyed comments; when the video-head guy says “that’s a wrap” after taking out some bystanders, I almost cringed.
We do get a reenactment of Pinhead’s original birth, and we also learn a little more about the man who became Pinhead. The manner in which that information is presented, though, is not that impressive. All told, this movie does hold a fairly important place in the Hellraiser saga, but it basically stands as a bridge between the excellent original two movies and the far from excellent sequels of later years.