SHOCK digs up 5 failed Frankenstein films that will blow your mind.
With the November 25th release of director Paul McGuigan’s Max Landis-scripted, ultra-revisionist take on the house that Mary Shelley built, VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, upon us, fright fans are wondering just what in the blue blazes to expect.
Certainly from the trailer, we can glean that Fox is trying to channel some the kinetic energy of Guy Ritchie’s overly stylized SHERLOCK HOLMES movies into their bouncy, multiplex-friendly riff on the FRANKENSTEIN tale, with pretty actors (Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy) making whatever bio-horrors happen easier to swallow.
But no matter how VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN fares, no matter how critics or audiences respond to its charms, it’s a safe bet that it will be BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN compared to the five Frankenstein films we’ve selected below.
Indeed readers, these are the worst FRANKENSTEIN movies we’ve ever seen, bastardized insults to ” The Modern Prometheus” of Shelley’s text and slipshod excuses to pervert it to suit their cash-grabbing ends.
Fun? Sure! Good? Well…you decide. Here we go…
FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER (1958)
Before he accepted the offer to sail to BLOOD ISLAND and become a major player in the emerging Filipino genre flick scene, John Ashley was being groomed by AIP to be a teen heartthrob. And to be honest, his James Dean-meets-Elvis-lite presence in Richard Cunha’s fun but dumb revisionist Frankenstein riff FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER, is one of its strengths. Donald Murphy plays Oliver Frankenstein, hiding out as an assistant to kindly professor and secretly turning his cutie pie niece (Sandra Knight) into a buck-toothed monster that runs around at night spooking kids. Meanwhile, he’s quietly stapling together a new monster from pieces of murdered men. He’s a bad dude. And this is most certainly a bad Frankenstein movie…
DR. FRANKENSTEIN ON CAMPUS (1970)
This bizarre Canadian film is a daft excuse for a horror movie and while it’s a flunk as a Frankenstein flick, it sure is a doozy of a head trip on its own terms. Originally titled FLICK (we know this because the word FLICK remains on the bottom corner of the screen for the entire opening of the picture), DR. FRANKENSTEIN ON CAMPUS stars future Canadian TV weatherman Robin Ward as a young Baron Frankenstein, blacklisted from his native Austria and hiding out as a student at the University of Toronto. There, he conducts brain experiments on cats and dogs and has weird psychedelic sex with his comely girlfriend before launching a reign of terror on his classmates and the faculty. Oddly, the similarities between this and RE-ANIMATOR are interesting (and almost certainly accidental). Totally obscure and truly fascinating, this is a super-silly Shelley stunt that stands alone.
DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1971)
Starting production as THE BLOOD SEEKERS, this turgid Al Adamson offering stars declining (rapidly) Hollywood star J. Carol Naish as a descendant of the original Frankenstein who reluctantly teams up with the worst Dracula in cinema history: a bearded, white-faced ponce who says all his dialogue through an echo-chamber and is played by a dude named Zandor Vorkov. Frankenstein’s assistant is played by a boozed-to-oblivion Lon Chaney Jr. and the great Angelo Rossito from FREAKS and MAD MAX 3 adds a dash of class to what is a typically tacky bit of Adamson oddness. But man, what a cast, including TWIN PEAKS vet and Adamson regular Russ Tamblyn and monster magazine legend Forry Ackerman.
FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE OF FREAKS (1974)
On the surface this Italian exploitation offering looks like it can’t lose. Oscar winner Michael Dunn is in it as a horny dwarf, the great Rosanno Brazzi operatically slums to play Dr. Frankenstein, Eurotrash legend Boris Lugosi (aka Salvatore Baccaro) plays a monstrous caveman and the entire pudding is stirred by international genre movie kingpin Dick Randall (LIVING DOLL, PIECES). But my God, is this flick dull. I’ve seen it a dozen times (because I have serious problems) and I cannot remember anything about it, save for a bit of topless hot springs frolicking and some reasonably handsome production design. Frankenfail supreme!
FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)
By the early 1980’s, Hollywood icon John Carradine would sign on to star in any piece of crap offered to him. FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND isn’t any piece of crap, however. It’s sub-atomic dump of the lowest order and it comes courtesy of Jerry Warren, the dude who gave the world another dead-things junkfest in 1960’s TEENAGE ZOMBIES. Carradine stars as the disembodied, floating head of the original Dr. Frankenstein who gives sage advice to his daughter, Sheila Frankenstein Von Helsing(!), a nutter who is up to no good on the titular island. Cameron Mitchell wanders around in a daze in what is honestly one of the most insane movies I have ever seen. Recommended as the ultimate F*** you to the Frankenstein mythos.
What are some of the worst Frankenstein films you’ve ever seen?
The post FRANKENSTEIN FAIL! The 5 Worst Frankenstein Flicks Ever! appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
Obscure and underrated 80’s horror satire ZOMBIE HIGH comes to Blu-ray.
I avoided ZOMBIE HIGH for years as it was clear from the (mostly terrible) reviews at the time that it was not really a “proper” zombie movie at all. No virus. No apocalypse. No flesh-eating. No thanks. And since, circa 1987, horror fans wanted these kind of “normal” zombie films, I wasn’t the only one who balked and the movie remained either unseen and unloved for decades.
But recent history has seen enough shambling Romero-riffs to last 10 lifetimes and now, ZOMBIE HIGH seems downright revolutionary. It’s a satirical amalgam of “dead teenager” flick, BODY SNATCHERS-esque paranoia parable and mad science melodrama, with rich production values, a decent score, a crackerjack script and a slew of solid performances. If it had been released a decade later, it would have been a minor classic.
But now, thanks to Scream Factory, you can rediscover (or, like I just did this morning, discover) ZOMBIE HIGH’s ample charms. The imprint will release a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack on December 15th and despite being bereft of extras of any kind save for a brief trailer, it’s a typically handsome SF presentation of a picture that was, until now, orbiting almost total obscurity.
Filmed under the more appropriate title THE SCHOOL THAT ATE MY BRAIN, ZOMBIE HIGH sees the bright-eyed Virginia Madsen (already a star but soon the achieve cult infamy with her role in CANDYMAN 5 years later) starring as Andrea, a brainy and beautiful student who is accepted into now-coed, previously all-male, elite prep school (NOT a high school, incidentally), much to her edgy boyfriend’s initially jealousy-steered dismay. As she and her newfound friends (including a pre-TWO MOON JUNCTION and pre-pre TWIN PEAKS Sherilyn Fenn and future FREAKS AND GEEKS creator and BRIDESMAIDS director Paul Feig) roll their eyes at their stiff classmates and weirdly ritual-obsessed teachers, Andrea begins to suspect all is not right at the school. She is, of course, correct. Turns out the faculty is actually a sect of youth-addicted quasi-vampires, that have been extracting parts of students brains for decades to consume and maintain their vitality while the kids are rendered pie-eyed, emotionless drones.
Shot in brightly lit rooms and exteriors, ZOMBIE HIGH isn’t particularly scary but it is ample weird, stylish and entertaining with many asides that would be more at home in a European drama rather than a lowbrow 80’s horror film. The satirical jabs at the education system are obvious, but never heavy-handed and never once do they overtake the thrust of the often surprisingly serious narrative. Credit director Ron Link for focusing not only on the arch tone of the picture but allowing his actors to, y’know, act (Madsen is really, really good here). Link (who passed away in 1999) was in fact an experimental theater director who worked with a slew of heavy hitting performers in his prime, including Robert De Niro. ZOMBIE HIGH was his only film and it’s a shame it wasn’t marketed better and didn’t find its audience upon release. With this classy new Blu-ray edition, let’s hope it finally does.
The post Blu-ray Review: ZOMBIE HIGH appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
SHOCK digs up more gold from the Siskel & Ebert anti-horror vaults.
After seeing a random Facebook post on writer/director Don Mancini’s Facebook page, a clip of late, sometimes great, film critics Siskel & Ebert tearing his CHILD’S PLAY 2 a new arsehole on their now defunct AT THE MOVIES TV show, SHOCK re-posted it and then started posting more clips of S&E – and their contemporary, Leonard Maltin – kicking around horror flicks for sport and cheap yucks.
The response has been strong enough that we’ve started combing YouTube for other vintage critiques. Some of them will make the hardcore horror film throw their laptops off the balcony or smash their SmartPhones to shite.
But in some cases, the verbal smackdown is deserved.
Witness this classic clip from 1983, wherein S&E warm up their spotlight on the Roger Moore James Bond flick OCTOPUSSY with a sneering review of director Harry Bromley Davenport’s 1982 British ALIEN rip-off XTRO.
First of all, it’s fun to see a greasy “Video Nasty” spoken about in the same breath as a blockbuster Bond flick.
Secondly, despite their smugness (“most monster movies aren’t any good” says Ebert), I can’t say I disagree with their review. XTRO never grabbed me. I always found it cheap, dull, dark and depressing with its highlight seeing a woman (Maryam D’Abo) have her belly expand and then give birth to a full size man.
But adult alien infants and stretched-to-the-max vaginas do not a good movie make.
Check out the lads flipping their birds to poor old XTRO. The audio is hissy and low, but put your ear close to your device of choice and you’ll be able to absorb their indifference.
The post Remember When Siskel & Ebert Reviewed XTRO? appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
This writer has been raving about the arthouse horror gem #HORROR for weeks both here and elsewhere with full knowledge that it won’t speak to all of our readers. Because #HORROR is not a conventional horror film. It’s strange, meandering, arch, often austere and restrained and relies heavily on a contemporary social trend to hammer home its points. Less a movie than a theatrical art installation designed to affect its audience in weird ways.
And we can credit visionary writer/director Tara Subkoff for the lion’s share of its awesomeness.
Subkoff started her professional life as an actress in such films as THE CELL and THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, but then deviated from her front-of-the-lens path by pursuing a myriad roles in the liberal arts. She’s a noted fashion designer (her celebrated line ‘Imitation of Christ’ – now called ‘Imitation’ was co-founded with #HORROR actress Chloe Sevigny), artist and now, filmmaker. Her immersion into the art world figures heavily into #HORROR’s singular aesthetic, one that turns a conventional narrative about mean pre-teens battering each other senseless into an unnerving work of designer terror.
SHOCK had the chance to sit down with the infectiously energetic Subkoff to discuss her influences and the art of making beautiful trash.
SHOCK: My first thought while watching #HORROR is that it recalls the great European genre filmmakers like Polanski and Argento and especially, in terms of design, the latter. Was Dario an influence at all?
SUBKOFF: Oh yes…yes. I’m a huge fan of SUSPIRIA and especially, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE, with that whodunit flare. I love all of Dario’s films but that one specifically comes to mind as an influence on #HORROR. And thanks for that because no one has made that connection before.
SHOCK: Well, again, it’s not just the giallo-esque plotting, but it’s the fact that every prop, all the mise-en-scene, all of it is there to serve a visual purpose. How hands-on were you in respect to the look of the film?
SUBKOFF: I was completely involved in all of it. I designed it with my brother Daniel Subkoff and a lot of the art in the film was from my husband, Urs Fischer. We also called on lots of our friends in the art world; people like Rob Pruitt, Julian Schnabel…all of these people were my friends and loaned me real art, not knock offs, which raised the production values. Having real art was integral to the story. Basically, the art is a character in the film; it witnesses, it watches the events in the film. That’s what art and objects do. They witness the passage of time, they hold energy. And my father is an antiques dealer so we borrowed all of the furniture from my father, some of the more eccentric strange pieces. I also used my own furniture; it was a very, very personal project.
SHOCK: Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn refers to movies like this as “fetish films”. Do you agree?
SUBKOFF: Absolutely! The fetish of objects but also our cultural fetish for wealth. Our culture is so obsessed with money and the richest people; we’re so obsessed with it. We’re a culture now of ‘seeming’ and not’ being’. There’s such a careful curation of image now, with selfies and instagram you never get a true feeling about who anyone really is, just how people want to perceive them.
SHOCK: Do you have kids?
SUBKOFF: I have a step daughter who is six.
SHOCK: So does that central point of the movie, that of children left alone with this overwhelming, potentially destructive technology, resonate with you?
SUBKOFF: Oh yeah. I wrote this 4 years ago and a lot of my friends kids were 12 and they were being severely cyber-bullied. It’s scary to see the platform of cruelty that exists now. I was badly bullied from about 10-12 on the bus, but then I could get off the bus and go home. But now, there’s no going home. You put it down, if follows you. It’s almost science fiction, it’s very VIDEODROME. You turn it off, it’s still happening. You can pretend it’s not happening but kids know that it is. This can follow them their entire lives and how does that affect their minds and future? That’s way scarier to me than a ghost…
SHOCK: You ‘re a horror movie fan, I presume…
SUBKOFF: Yes! I used to go out with Jonathan Craven so I was close with Wes and I love his movies. LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS are big ones. I love all serious horror movies with fully realized character arcs. THE EXORCIST. THE SHINING. My God…THE SHINING…I mean, does anyone really know anyone in THE SHINING?
SHOCK: So, how do people pronounce the title of the film? Is it “HASHTAG HORROR”?
What do you call it?
SUBKOFF: I call it “HASHTAG HORROR” because I feel that the world ‘hashtag’ is very important. I wrote the film as to take place in the not too distant future and, hey, we’re there now…
SHOCK: The sound design and the music is also an integral part of the film’s impact…
SUBKOFF: I love music but now, I’m half deaf (Subkoff had a brain tumor removed in 2009 that left her without hearing in one ear) and I hear smaller sounds a lot louder and more irritating than normal people do. So little sounds make you angry and frustrated and since I know that and work with that daily, I thought that would be an interesting experiment to use here. Like, the volume actually increases as the movie goes on. But I love music, I wanted it to be strong , to have a female voice and I found that voice in (composer) Erica (Anderson). You know, female movies are almost always about a man, but I tried to use women in as many departments as I could in this film. Hopefully that doesn’t alienate male audiences, but rather, makes them more intrigued. Women do make up more than half the population after all!
IFC MIDNIGHT begins rolling out #HORROR to select US theaters and VOD this Friday. Watch for it. And, if you can, see it on the big screen…it’s an experience.
The post Exclusive Interview: Tara Subkoff Talks Argento, Art and the Horror of #HORROR appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
EMPIRE Pictures fans haunting video stores in 1986 were more often than not looking for boundary-pushers along the lines of Stuart Gordon’s double shot of RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND so, when we stumbled upon TROLL, we were doomed to be disappointed. FX wizard John Carl Buechler’s PG rated monster flick isn’t a horror film at all; it’s a fantasy film, filled with amateur wizards, weird worlds, witches and derring-do and famously, the child hero’s name is even Harry Potter, leading to a lengthy controversy wherein producer Charles Band and writer Ed Naha have alluded to the possibility that writer J.K. Rowling may have stumbled upon the film and (ahem) borrowed certain elements for her juggernaut book and film series.
So no, TROLL was and is not a horror film and when viewed almost three decades ago, it was cited as a fairly inept bit of nonsense. Today however, TROLL is rather charming and, especially when viewed on the top half of the Blu-ray from retro-genre heroes Scream Factory, a lively bit of low-budget hokum.
The film stars the great Michael Moriarty (Q, THE STUFF, BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY) as Harry Potter Sr., the patriarch of a family that just moved into a low rise LA apartment (in realty, a set on the De Laurentiis/EMPIRE studios lot in Rome, the same one used for Band’s 1988 classic, CRAWLSPACE and many others), a modest tenement that is packed with eccentric neighbors (including the late Sonny Bono and, outrageously, Julia Louis-Dreyfus aka Elaine from SEINFELD!) and is home to a malevolent troll in the basement. Said beastie (played by Band regular Phil Fondacaro, who also appears sans makeup as kindly professor) takes possession of Potter’s daughter, who then runs around growling, biting and treating her milquetoast older brother, Harry Potter Jr. (Noah Hathaway), like shit.
Pretty soon the troll-in-girl’s clothing starts infiltrating apartments and turning the residents into plants; giant pea-pods that birth a whack of Buechler-sculpted GHOULIES leftovers that are both slimy and kinda cute. Like Boglins. Remember Boglins?
Meanwhile LOST IN SPACE vet June Lockhart plays a witch with a pet mushroom that is actually her husband and who trains Potter Jr. to awaken his inner wizard and send the nasty troll back to the netherworld. Which he does, but not before the troll (who was once the witch’s lover) turns Louis-Dreyfus into a nude, cloned nymph. And then the movie gets weird…
Anyway, TROLL is a totally unique bit of insanity, with bizarre scenes that go on forever (watch the ridiculous sequence where Moriarty does a mad dance to crunchy version of the chestnut rock tune “Summertime Blues”), nutty performances and rather lovely touches like an impromptu musical number wherein all the puppets start singing a sort of shanty. It’s aged really well and is great for kids. Mine loved it.
Then we have TROLL 2.
Which of course, as everyone knows, is not a legitimate TROLL sequel but rather a shockingly inept Italian horror film called GOBLINS, re-titled for its home video premiere (there are no trolls in it at all) and directed by frequent Bruno Mattei collaborator Claudio Fragasso (credited here under the nom-de-plume, Drake Floyd), produced by Europorn/horror king Joe D’Amato and starring a dentist.
What’s to say about TROLL 2 that hasn’t already been said? It is beyond a doubt one of the most dreadful, brain-dead, logic-defying genre movies ever made, with brutal special (d)effects and operatically awful performances by non-actors (including that dentist, a good old boy named George Hardy) that seem beamed in from other planets.
In it, a kid (Michael Stephenson) has a bedtime story read to him by the ghost of his dead grandfather, about a race of goblins who make idiots eat green food, turning them into veggie-meat and eating them alive. When the spooked kid’s dad (Hardy) enrolls his lucky brood in a family exchange program with the rural town of Nilbog, he ends up placing them all on the menu. See Nilbog spelled backwards is actually…wait for it…goblin!
So wildly pitiful is TROLL 2 that it has, over the years, locked a devoted cult following of folks who love to laugh at it, enough so that the now adult Stephenson made a documentary about the cult surrounding the film. That doc, amusingly titled BEST WORST MOVIE, played festivals worldwide to great acclaim and is included here in the limited edition version of this double-feature set. It’s an entertaining watch and, if nothing else, makes you fall in love with Hardy, who is a kind of oral surgeon/saint that stepped out once and made a movie that he thought no one would see and is now clearly enjoying his counter-culture infamy.
The set comes packed with extras, including a full-length doc on the making of TROLL with Buechler, Band, his brother, composer Richard Band (whose score is typically lush) and Naha. TROLL 2 features a charming, meandering commentary with Hardy and actress Deborah Reed. These two movies, linked only by some marketing stiff’s delusions of dollars, make for a fascinating double-feature: one knows exactly what kind of movie it is, the other…well…the other knows it’s a movie. We think.
The post Blu-ray Review: TROLL and TROLL 2 appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.
SHOCK scribe Owen Williams opens the box, The Scarlet Box that is, and give us a full report.
Arriving slightly early for the 30th anniversary (2016 for the original novella, 2017 for the first film), Arrow’s four-disc Blu-ray box-set is a lavish tribute to the first three films in the unexpectedly protracted franchise (otherwise known as the non-Miramax entries). THE SCARLET BOX is just that: a sturdy package with a lid, comprising newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx, four individual inner sleeves, and a hardback book by Clive Barker archivists Phil and Sarah Stokes. On the discs themselves are HELLRAISER, HELLBOUND and HELL ON EARTH given new 2k makeovers, and copious extra features including re-edits of the massive crowdfunded LEVIATHAN documentary and Barker’s two early short films SALOME and THE FORBIDDEN. Such sights to show you? Read on…
HELLRAISER
It’s hard to remember now just how different HELLRAISER was when it arrived in the late ‘80s. In a horror landscape of teens getting slashed, Clive Barker’s debut as a director was an adult domestic drama, albeit with supernatural underpinnings, violence, gore and glimpses of a fascinating larger universe, the rules of which arrived almost fully formed. The sequel would dive deep into that, but here, at core, we have a love triangle and a Faustian pact: a sort of weird mashup of Marlowe and Chekhov. Frank (Sean Chapman), on a personal crusade for ever more esoteric erotic experience, has come into possession of a puzzle box that opens up a gateway to Hell, the realm seemingly policed by Barker’s deadpan S&M demons the Cenobites. Larry (Andrew Robinson), Frank’s conservative brother, is married to Julia (Clare Higgins), who seems unhappy from the beginning and, as it turns out, has cheated on her husband with her brother-in-law on their wedding day. Moving into Frank and Larry’s family home, the site of Frank’s “death”, Frank’s remains are disturbed and reanimated: he returns to life, layer of flesh by layer, as the infatuated Julia brings him murder victims to feed on. But when Larry’s daughter Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence) stumbles upon the puzzle box herself, she does her own deal with the devil(s) to save her skin and send Frank back where he came from.
It’s a fascinating, involving tale, told with visual panache and excellent performances: although several are dubbed with jarring American accents. Post-production decisions tried to relocate the film to the US. Maybe it works for you guys, but for us in the UK it never looks like they’re anywhere but Cricklewood, making the vocal soundtrack sit oddly with the visuals. But what visuals they are. The Cenobites – and chiefly Doug Bradley’s Pinhead, obviously – though briefly featured, get all the attention, but surely the real triumph here is Skinless Frank (Oliver Smith), dripping disgustingly from his exposed muscle, or bleeding through an incongruous suit jacket as he smokes a cigarette. The less said about The Engineer and the Bone Dragon probably the better, but they do up the scale of the fantasy around the domestic elements, even if they make little apparent sense. Incredibly as old now as the original Hammer films were when HELLRAISER was new, it holds up incredibly well as a surreal, nightmarish, slightly off-kilter minor modern masterpiece.
HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II
Commissioned almost immediately after HELLRAISER’s release, if not during its actual production, HELLBOUND is a curious beast, failing completely on some levels but excelling on others. Plunging headfirst into the mythology set up by the first film, it takes us to Hell to explore the Cenobites’ realm, seizing on the popularity of Pinhead and company to give them slightly expanded screentime and hint at origin stories for the four principle Hell acolytes. But while all this is going on, it’s clear that no one is yet quite sure where the series is heading: Barker felt that Julia rather than Pinhead was the great potential ongoing villain of the nascent franchise, so the story of her, Frank and Kirsty is dragged out further. In fact, despite Barker’s hands-on involvement (his executive-producer and story credits were in this case not just about putting his name on the film to help sell it) HELLBOUND feels a lot like fan fiction. Everything that can feasibly be brought back from HELLRAISER is trotted out again in crazily overblown form, and the film is obsessed with having characters’ skin fall off. Skinless Julia (Deborah Joel) is, in her way, as impressive as Skinless Frank, but by the time Kirsty is disguising herself in Julia’s cast-off skin at the climax, the gag has worn extremely thin. Hell itself is, infamously, a series of dusty corridors, with the “Lord Of The Labyrinth”, bizarrely, a geometric shape something akin to the puzzlebox itself (the extra features reveal that Leviathan was envisaged by Barker as a Lovecraftian creature squatting at the maze’s centre. Screenwriter Pete Atkins, wisely, opted to change that). But newly created Cenobite Dr Channard is an extraordinary creation, given unforgettable life (and death) by British Shakespearean actor Kenneth Cranham. As with HELLRAISER, part of the pleasure of HELLBOUND is watching “serious” actors giving Barker’s mad visions their all.
HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH
And here’s what happens when you give the fans what they think they want, and make HELLRAISER flat-out The Pinhead Show. Running with the back-story hinted at in HELLBOUND, HELL ON EARTH sees the lead Cenobite divided against himself, running riot in his demon form while his human alter-ego, First World War captain Elliot Spencer (Bradley out of make-up) joins forces with journalist Joey (Terry Farrell) to stop his rampaging id. Someone does lose their skin early on, but this is otherwise a different entity altogether to its predecessors, giving in to more standard horror spectacle. It’s disheartening to see Pinhead turned into a cackling psychopath, and his new Cenobites (Camera-Head, CD-Head) are feeble. But there’s undeniable pleasure in seeing Bradley cut loose and centre stage, and as always there are unforgettable images. A Pinhead-centric sequel was probably inevitable, and as such, HELL ON EARTH is just about acceptable. But it’s telling that the rest of the HELLRAISERs to date – love them or loathe them – haven taken the less-is-more approach to the series’ signature villain, following the lead of the often excellent Epic comics from the ‘80s and ‘90s in which Pinhead didn’t generally even appear at all.
RESTORATION / EXTRA FEATURES
All three films have been restored in 2k – the fact that 4k wasn’t used perhaps gives us a clue as to the limited potential of the source materials. They look better than they ever have on a home release, but the results of the restoration are variable. Some scenes look incredible. Others, particularly the interiors of the first film’s house, look dull and remain extremely grainy. But to be fair, a boring suburban house was never supposed to visually pop. Sound-wise HELLRAISER AND HELLBOUND get expansive uncompressed PCM Stereo 2.0 and lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 mixes while HELL ON EARTH gets a clean lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. There’s also an unrated cut of HELL ON EARTH included, but the dropped-in “uncut” bits don’t match the rest of the restoration, and even switch ratio from 16:9 to 4:3.
Many of the special features have been ported from Anchor Bay’s 2004 release of the same three films: the commentaries, several featurettes including the interview with HELL ON EARTH’s director Anthony Hickox, some material with Bradley, and those experimental early Barker short films which you’ll either find mesmerizing or patience-testing – or both. The HELLBOUND disc contains the Holy Grail: the hospital scene with Pinhead and the Female Cenobite (Barbie Wilde) dressed in surgeon’s gowns, a still of which was used on the film’s VHS cover to the lasting intrigue of fans. Turns out it was cut because it was rubbish. If HELLRAISER teaches us anything it’s to be careful what you wish for…
Taking up the bulk of the extras’ running time are re-edits of John McDonagh and Gary Smart’s exhaustive – exhausting – documentary LEVIATHAN, already available separately from the documentary makers themselves. Some of those who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign have reportedly been annoyed that LEVIATHAN has been sold on to Arrow, but the version on this set, totaling four hours across the discs of the three films, is less than half the length of the full cut. So if you bought the three-disc LEVIATHAN set you’ve still got a lot more than you get here. That said, it’s a hardcore fan that would feel shortchanged by the SCARLET BOX version. HELLRAISER gets 90 minutes; HELLBOUND gets 120. Almost every player you can think of from in front of and behind the camera in the first two films contributes, with the only notable exceptions being Barker himself and Ashley Lawrence. HELL ON EARTH gets a 30-minute documentary that was an extra feature in the LEVIATHAN pack (the full LEVIATHAN’s 8 ½ hours cover only the first two films).
Disc Four, THE CLIVE BARKER LEGACY gives us Arrow’s own 50–minute documentary EVOLUTIONS: a broader look at the themes and tics of the franchise as a whole. It’s not bad, but some of its contributors sit oddly with the package they’re part of: Scott Derrickson (director of HELLRAISER: INFERNO – not in this set); Kari Wuhrer (star of HELLRAISER: DEADER – not in this set); Khary Payton (from HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD – not in this set); Stuart Gordon (nothing to do with HELLRAISER); author Del Howison (nothing to do with HELLRAISER but has an uncredited cameo in LORD OF ILLUSIONS)… You get the impression director Ryan Turek was just rather desperately calling in his buddies. Also on the fourth disc is BOOKS OF BLOOD AND BEYOND, a quick rattle through Barker’s novels and short stories by children’s author and fan David Gatward. There’s nothing here that most purchasers of this set wouldn’t already know, and Gatward seems to think that THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW is a novel all about Barker’s paranormal detective Harry D’Amour (it isn’t, although he does show up for a tiny cameo at the end). That’s a bad mistake, but Gatward may be a victim of brutal editing – appearing to say something he didn’t really. The final disc is finished off with A QUESTION OF FAITH, an amateur (and amateurish) hour-long short intended to represent the HELLRAISER fan film community.
Completing the set is the 200-page book, DAMNATION GAMES, perhaps a better evocation of the Clive Barker Legacy – although it’s completely HELLRAISER-centric – than the fourth disc. Another in-depth look at the three films in the box, it also covers Barker’s early work (including the short films presented here) and takes us up to Barker and Mark Miller’s recent novel THE SCARLET GOSPELS. It’s uncritical – if you don’t think Barker is a genius you’ll find nothing that agrees with you here – but benefits greatly from the subject expertise and appreciation of authors Phil and Sarah Stokes, and features a lot of interview material with Barker himself, culled from numerous sources. So he’s not much on the discs, but he’s plenty in the book. You also get the original press kits by Stephen Jones, Unit Publicist on HELLRAISERs I-III, production stills, design work, sketches and art cards. The book is currently exclusive to THE SCARLET BOX, but will be published separately and in expanded form in due course.
There’s some repetition across the extra material – the interview featurettes focusing on single actors like Bradley and Smith are the same interviews that are in the LEVIATHAN features, so if you want to hear anything new you have to sit through a lot you’ve seen already. Given the brief screen-time of the Cenobites in the first two films you’ll also get very sick of seeing their scenes over and over again (“We’ll tear your soul apart” must happen at least ten times). And there’s an annoying obsession with the bad reviews Barry Norman gave the films for the BBC. But that’s a minor quibble on what must be the most definitive presentation of the first three HELLRAISERs imaginable. At £50 for three films it’s costly (currently more so than it should be since the first run has sold out and the scalpers are out in force), but given the experience contained within THE SCARLET BOX, it’s a price – like Uncle Frank – you may well be prepared to pay.
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