Alas, no.

Hellraiser: Judgement is written and directed by Gary Tunnicliffe, the special effects maestro who’s worked on all the Hellraisers since Hell On Earth (the third film in the franchise, which I actually quite enjoyed). While it’s well known that Dimension Films put a Hellraiser film out every now and then in a bid to keep hold of the license, and that several of the film were originally unrelated scripts that were rewritten to crowbar the Hellraiser mythology into them, here Tunnicliffe set out to write a film that was always meant to be a Hellraiser film. And he succeeded, up to a point. This film feels like a Hellraiser-adjacent idea but with a by-the-numbers serial killer plot crowbarred into it. So… success? I guess?

The film ostensibly follows two detectives, Sean Carter (Damon Carney) and his brother David Carter (Randy Wayne) as they hunt a serial killer known as The Preceptor, a nasty piece of work whose schtick is to rip off Se7en’s John Doe by using gruesome murders as morality lessons. Sean is burnt out and suffers PTSD from his military service and he neglects his wife and is too close to the case, etc. David is… there? I guess? They’re joined by detective Christine Egerton (Alexandra Harris), who is mainly there to have exposition explained to her. They plod through the usual beats of a serial-killer-hunt in a story that’s as average as they come but with a couple of glaring issues that’ll have you waving your arms and shouting ‘why??’. 

You’ll notice I said ‘ostensibly’ up there. That’s because it takes a while for us to be introduced to our main characters. First, we have to sit through a long sequence of a paedophilic child murderer being judged and sentenced by our new demonic villains, The Stygian Inquisition. I know they’re called The Stygian Inquisition because I like to read the imdb trivia pages after I watch a film; I don’t recall them being referred to by that name in the film, as they were just called ‘another faction’. Rather then blurring the boundaries of extreme pain and pleasure as the Cenobites do, their deal is – you guessed it – judging and punishing sinners. This process is gross in a torture-porn-but-not-that-gratuitous-just-really-off-putting way. There’s skinning and blood pouring over sexy women’s breasts and also vomit for some reason. Perhaps this read well on paper, but it definitely didn’t translate to the screen.

The iconic Pinhead is back, and once again he’s not played by Doug Bradley; this time he’s played by Paul T. Taylor, who’s surprisingly good in the role. Pinhead is, of course, relegated to a minor cameo part for most of the film, but when he gets a chance to let loose towards the end he does a decently sinister job. The same can’t be said for The Auditor, who’s played by Tunnicliffe himself as a kind of stuffy bureaucrat who’s just too impeccably polite and nice to take seriously as a sinister force of ultimate evil. There’s no edge to him. It’s nice to see Mike Jay Regan return as The Chatterer (he was always my favourite Cenobite) and the new Butcher and Surgeon characters are interesting designs, even if they don’t hold up against the more outrageous Cenobites.

The acting in the detectives’ story is as phoned-in as the plot. In fact, outside of the Cenobites (and the more stabby Inquisitors), everyone is pretty stilted and wooden for most of it. They have extremely poor dialogue to contend with, though, including a lot of reused classic lines like ‘such sights to show you’ and ‘Jesus wept’ that were flesh-crawling in the first film but just awfully employed here. The worst performance is perhaps Helena Grace Donald as Jophiel, an angel who enters the plot for reasons I can’t say without spoiling it. Damon Carney is the best, until he gives in to the scenery-chewing urge in the climax; until then he’d given good ‘tortured silent type tough guy cliché’. Actually, no, I tell a lie: the best is Heather Langenkamp. Yes, THAT Heather Langenkamp, Nightmare On Elm Street’s Nancy herself, who turns up in… one scene. And delivers about two lines. But boy did she deliver em! Seriously, why waste an actor like her in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. Sigh.

Another big problem is just how cheap the film looks. It’s shot in that nauseating shaky-cam that tries to make everything intense in an effort to disguise lack of production value – this almost always falls down. A grimy yellow filter is slapped over the Inquisition scenes and everything just looks flat and grotty.

The special effects are good though, relying heavily on buckets of blood and lumps of flesh; this is Tunnicliffe’s bread and butter and it would be very surprising to see the film fail in that area. There is a dodgy moment with some obviously fake hands, but podoby’s nerfect. The set pieces are wisely kept low key and there’s very little overstretching or grandstanding. What lets them down in the main is the directing and editing. Tunnicliffe and Editor Michael Griffin shy away from showing us much of the action sometimes, cutting away too soon for comfort. Case in point (and squeamish animal-lovers should skip to the next paragraph now): one of the killer’s victims has her pet dog sewn into her corpse. A horrifyingly gruesome idea, and the sequence starts well but is over in a second with so few shots of the extraction that it feels jarring-- look, I know I sound sick here, but listen! If your gory horror film requires you to pull a dog out of a dead body, commit to the bit and chuck enough frames in that it doesn’t feel over-cut.

I wanted to like Hellraiser: Judgement. I really did. It’s written and directed by a fan who ought to know the series inside out by now and who approached it the correct way round, as a Hellraiser film first and not as a story to bend into a Hellraiser mold. It’s not overly-ambitious in making promises its effects budget can’t afford to keep, and some of the Inquisition stuff would be quite interesting if it weren’t so needlessly gratuitous. But with a boring plot, dull performances and a cheap aesthetic outside of the effects themselves, it just fails to live up to even the most lowered expectations. 

Give it a miss, or your disappointment will be legendary even in Hell.