(Waiting for Unrated Cut)

YEAR 1992 directed by anthony hickox

STARRING doug bradley, terry farrell, paula marshall

Qs: 9.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:07:01.  Men burst through doors at the hospital, hurrying along a gurney on which a man drags chains covered in redness, leaving a streak down the length of the hall.  When he’s wheeled in to the room, you know what breaks loose when the chains become electrically charged and gravitate toward the ceiling, pulling whatever flesh they were hooked to with them.  His head explodes in a rather poor prosthetic effect, but the idea’s clear.  C.O.D.: a visit from Pinhead.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:19:05.  After The Mummy Returns and Graveyard Shift I learned to get nervous when people stuck their hands in things.  J.P. does so into a hole in the marble statue and a rat digs in and holds on.  While he gyrates, trying to shake it, he slings blood on the statue, which soaks it up heartily.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:29:29.  J.P.’s latest thing backs up against the marble pillar while hurling blistering remarks that his ego single-handedly deflects.  Hooks deploy from the statue and stab into her skin on various places before a smaller chain casts from Pinhead’s mouth and lands in her forehead.  The chains then simultaneously retract and strip her skin off like removing a nightgown.  Her muscles all over are fully exposed and she no doubt is in new worlds of pain and fear.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:47:32.  Chains break from the statue and rip into J.P. before various implements, pipes and things, rip through his head.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:59:10.  The scene at the Boiler Room is, pardon the expression, off the hook.  A chain tears across the room, aiming for a club patron, but he catches it.  The hook merely twists upside-down and yanks all four of his fingers off, the nubs spurting red; a man gets a long, sharp blade of some type in his chest; a girl gets an icicle in the mouth; another girl has the skin around her right eye ripped away; the DJ gets it really wicked when seven or so discs become airborne and lodge directly in his face, five in the top of his head, two in his eyes and one through his mouth; a guy gets hooked in the lower lip; a girl’s thrown against a wall while two chains rip the skin on her neck apart; two people are linked together when a chain rips through his chest, out his back and into the girl’s jaw and finally a pool of you know what starts to flow under the doors.  A little later, still included in the same scene even though it’s after the JFF below, when Joey gets to the club, the scene is of severe loss of life on a titanic scale.  Bodies lie absolutely everywhere, dozens of them covering the floor, hanging from the ceiling, impaled through their mouths, heads or eyes; I can’t prove it but I think the guy slumped over the bar at 1:04:43 has a section of skin and hair missing from the top of his head; speaking of, a disembodied noggin lies not too far off; a joe on a pool table has the cue and the eight ball, possibly a third, shoved forcefully in his mouth.  The stairway down to the actual boiler doesn’t get any better: bodies virtually block the stairwell and cover the floor, just like upstairs.  People are chained to the ceiling, sections of their skin missing; a girl lies on a table, the skin between her eyes and around her mouth are badly lacerated; the CD man’s body is slumped backwards over a motorcycle, the discs still firmly planted at least halfway into his head; a man is chained to some sort of vertical surface, something indefinable really wrong with his face, not to mention the adorning strings of Christmas lights and finally her partner in journalistic crime sits not far, holding in his lap his own head, some sort of robotic thing where it used to be.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:01:32.  JFF: Freeze-frame to see a quick shot of director Anthony Hickox.

N       1:09:42.  Doug reappears with his camera equipment in his right eye, bulging the skin on that side of his head.  An unfortunate who happens to get between he and Joey gets the eye-lens shot clean through his head, Joey briefly visible through it.  The CD Cenobite (we know where he came from) chucks a ballistic disc through another joe’s left eye with a smash hit; a rather chunky sort bursts from a wall, barbwire wrapped all around his head and an officer gets a disc in the teeth.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:14:16.  When Pinhead arrives at a house of worship, he commands the cross the priest was holding to melt away in his hand, along with his hand.  He then continues the theme and pulls a pin from his head, around the end of which a worm of some kind is wound.  He then pierces his left hand therewith, running it through, due red produced; he then does the same with the other hand.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:16:57.  New Cenobites are popping out of the woodwork: J.D. emerges with several kinds of pistons sliding in and out of his head and Terry reappears with her throat opened with a strategically placed cigarette in the center.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:24:00.  Some kind of I have utterly no idea what comes up out of the floor in front of Joey while she’s just hanging around.  I’ll try to describe it: it looks like the inverted upper half of a skull, some sort of tentacle writhing around inside and it squeals exactly like a pig.  Again, what on earth or in hell it is, I can’t say.  It’s definitely gory and nasty.  What happens next doesn’t prettify things: Pinhead’s former self and he engage in a face-off (pardon) where their skin stretches and knots together, winding them up until they are the same entity.  With bloody fingers, Joey fusses with the box until it resembles the lozenge-type shape it had in Hellbound and jams it in Pinhead’s left pectoral.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1996 directed by alan smithee (mostly kevin yagher)

STARRING doug bradley, valentina vargas, bruce ramsay

Qs: 11.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:14:10.  In a scene taking us back to the very beginning of the horror at the mansion of Monsieur De L’isle and his assistant Jacques, we meet L’merchant, the toymaker who built the cube as a commission piece for De L’isle.  Jacques bursts on the scene with a young girl whom he proceeds to tie to a chair and strangle until her neck breaks.  Trussing her up in the laboratory, the sequence turns to a silhouette for a few moments as one of the men takes a large hook and opens her back up completely, cutting away a rectangle of skin.  Organs, presumably intestines though I really have no idea, plop to the floor in a blood pool.  Jacques scrubs the back skin clean in a bloody sink before he wrings out the red-soaked sponge and drags her off left frame, all we see being her skinned legs being drug through her blood.  She’s suspended in the center of the room with the series’ soon-to-be famous flying hooks, the show close to beginning.  Shots of her hollowed hand, merely a translucent glove of skin, follow as does a shot of her blood being poured from a gravy boat into the cracks between the floorboards.  After a much impassioned incantation sequence, the bodysuit of skin fills out and comes to new life.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:18:38.  Dr. Auguste cuts open the flesh of the right forearm of one of the recently deceased.  Later whisking the sheet off of the body, he reveals an incision made at the base of the neck and down the midline of the chest.  Placing a skin-spreading device on the chest, he parts the flaps of skin to reveal the underlying musculature.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:21:04.  Breaking into De L’isle’s house to steal back the box, Phillip comes upon a blood-soaked room and the body of De L’isle slumped in a chair, the box nearby.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:24:59.  Angelique appears to a John Merchant in a dream, taunting him by saying she knows what’s in his heart.  Can you guess what happens next?  Yep.  She holds up in her right hand what else but his bloody heart, fresh from his body.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:28:55.  Angelique throws Jacques on a table after clawing his cheek.  She slashes him up several times before sucking a hole in his face.  Later, tiring of his games, she puts her finger through the hole in his cheek before jamming her hand in his chest and pulling out his heart.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:45:39.  A security guard comes upon a nasty scene: the place is a bloody mess, painters’ plastic draped over everything, trails of blood leading down many of the sheets.  A pool of red is by the door as soon as one walks in, a rib and several other parts strewn about in the mess.  SR: SSSSS

N       “THE FACE OF PAIN” 0:47:13.  In a grotesque sequence of unimaginable pain and perversity, the two security guards who are revealed to be brothers are shown the face of pain, as promised, by Pinhead.  Hookless chains (yes, hookless) wrap around their wrists, ankles and around their heads through their mouths.  While they whimper for their lives, Pinhead tells them he knows their fear, that they don’t want to be separated from each other.  He assures that will never happen.  Two half-skull masks appear to each side of the pair and latch onto their heads, securing themselves to them with embedded spikes as blood runs and screams peal.  A brass cylinder deploys from a giant Lament Configuration that appears behind them.  Two nasty drill bits emerge from this, each boring into the sides of the men’s heads that aren’t covered by the half-skull masks.  Going in, the bits pull back out later with twists of flesh curled around them, the brass cylinder they were borne of twisting itself, knotting up the skin of the men’s faces around it.  Pumps hook into the men’s backs and swap out their blood for the same strange hitherto unidentified blue substance seen before in Hellbound.  The brass cylinder continues twisting until it has wound most of their faces around it, having pulled the men’s skin from the muscles around their skulls but not off of their heads, until the men resemble less security guards and more surreal, ungodly criminals who have donned ski masks made of flesh that are several sizes too big.  The sequence is nothing short of nightmarish and truly twisted.  But, that’s why we watch this sort of thing, isn’t it?  SR: ããããã

N       1:00:59.  Fed up with John’s fooling around, Pinhead commands a flying hook through his neck.  Once on the other side, the chain deploys a blade from either side, blades that look like wings on a satanic eagle.  When the chain pulls back through, it cuts his head off, but it doesn’t fall immediately.  John spits up blood while his neck breaks open in a gory separation before the head falls to the floor, joined shortly after by the body.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:07:03.  Searching Merchant’s cabin, Parker comes upon Pinhead.  Flying hooks deploy from the walls and snag the flesh of his face, pulling it in two clean halves completely off his skull, leaving his muscly, bloody face to scream in torment.  A chain burrows into the top of his head and twists, but we don’t see what it does.  At 1:08:26, Carducci comes upon his bloody, skinless body.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:10:26.  Angelique pulls Carducci through a mirror and somewhere along the way divests him of his head.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:13:27.  The twisty-faced guards unfurl and separate into two people again.  Flanking their victim, they twist the skin from his face, blood splattering his boots, until all of the skin on his entire body comes clean off, splashes of blood and segments of gore slopping to the ground.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2000 directed by scott derrickson

STARRING doug bradley, craig sheffer, nicholas turturro

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:05:27.  Remains of some sort of sacrifice, various random parts and a pool of gore sit at the center of some sort of ritualistic arrangement.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:16:02.  Two promiscuous Cenobites start getting familiar with him, quickly moving things up a notch and reaching under the skin of his chest, smearing his blood all over him.  During this sequence, also look for what are possibly the most disturbing tongues I’ve ever seen.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:24:20.  Daphne hangs from the showerhead, throat cut, blood running down her body.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:39:42.  Bernie, Joe’s snitch, is hunched over the steering wheel of his truck, his back ripped absolutely open, spine and ribs visible.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:16:58.  Coming upon the frozen bodies of his daughter and wife hanging from the infamous rotating pillar from the original, Joe attempts to take his daughter’s hand in his.  It snaps off at the wrist, the shock causing him to drop it and watch as it shatters further.  Both bodies later crumble, though we don’t see the pile.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:24:03.  Joe’s mother turns to reveal her eyes gouged out, blood running down her face.  His father holds him while his mother slashes at him.  He blows her away with his shotgun and we see his father has no eyes or ears, bloody trails marking where they used to be.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:25:25.  Joe pulls back the curtain and Daphne leaps out, her throat slit, blood running down her.  He tries to push her away and her head leans back, opening her neck wound further.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2001 directed by rick bota

STARRING doug bradley, dean winters, ashley laurence

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:05:53.  Shortly after the car accident, Trevor awakens in a hospital room with a nurse alongside, Allison.  She injects him with something to help him relax after which he slips into a dream sequence where brain surgery is being performed while he’s still very much conscious.  A rectangle of his skull is cut away with a bone saw and placed on a tray beside him.  The doctor pokes at Trevor’s brain before piercing his right hemisphere with a long pin, intent on helping him “remember.”  SR: SSSSS

N      0:41:55.  After waking from one of innumerable nightmares, Trevor stumbles into his kitchen to discover Gwen’s bound, gagged and bloodied body tied to one of his chairs.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:03:57.  Trying to make his way around Sage’s floor, Trevor comes upon her body, impaled through the head with the ice pick he imagined her trying to kill him with.  Blood is caked around the top of her head, making pulling it out later difficult, but he manages.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:11:06.  After locking Trevor in the part of the building with the morgue, Det. Lange and he discuss the duality of man’s nature – righteous, unrighteous, etc. – before he starts to exhibit indications of certain…problems.  After some squishing and shape shifting, the head of Det. Givens pulls out from the back of Lange’s, its worm-like neck extending from the base of his skull.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:12:50.  Walking about the morgue, Trevor comes upon a table of several random organs, seeing several others around the facility.  At exactly 1:13:00, we see a close-up of writhing maggots, squirming around amongst the gore, accompanied by the buzzing of flies.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:15:45.  Trevor, confronting Pinhead in the morgue, is pierced at least seven times with the series’ infamous flying hooks.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:20:08.  Kirsty, fed up with Trevor’s philandering, blows his brains out.  SR: SSSSS

N      JFF: Allison’s last name comes from a Latin root meaning sleep.  Apropos, no?

YEAR 2003 directed by rick bota

STARRING doug bradley, kari wuhrer, paul rhys

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:53:15.  In a sequence lasting close to three minutes, reporter Amy Klein lies down, attempting to catch some shuteye, but doesn’t stay long.  An ominous squish is heard, followed by a river of crimson down her right shoulder.  It forms a pool on the sheets and soaks into her nightshirt.  Obviously and rightfully scared, she runs into the bathroom whereupon looking in the mirror, she sees in the light, as do we, red running all down her chest.  Feeling at a suspicious protuberance from her chest, she verifies it as a knife tip.  Turning around, she sees the handle jutting from her back.  In a furious, frenzied episode of shock and desperation, she wheels around the room, contorting herself every way she knows how to withdraw it from her body.  All during the attempt, she gyrates about, turning the bathroom into a bloodbath room, leaving red handprints all over the walls and an ever-intensifying smear pattern of bloody footprints on the tile as she continues to bleed down herself and track it all over.  Starting to slide in places, unable to secure footing in the blood, Amy eventually decides to shut the handle in a cabinet door and pull herself away.  It drops out, as does more of her dark red blood.  She washes up in the shower, turning the once clear water an eerie pink.  This scene earns a point for the idea of a girl whirling around her bathroom, covering more and more of it each second in red as she attempts to pull a knife from her back.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:58:17.  After a chat with Pinhead, Amy ventures back into the bathroom to wash the fresh and caked dry blood from her back, chest, legs and arms.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:02:40.  In what looks like world-class slaughter, Amy instantaneously finds herself occupying, in place of a gathering of freakish but live sorts, a trainload of corpses, many bleeding all over themselves, several toward the end of the car naked and piled on each other in some kind of bloody refuse heap.  Limbs and bones hang about, looking as if they were recently removed.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:11:50.  In another such episode, Amy starts with the chest/back wound which, like before, soaks through the front and back of her shirt, running down her legs and pooling at her feet.  Like with the bathroom sequence, she flails about, smearing bloody handprints on the walls.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:18:17.  In a sequence reminiscent of II, Winter is snagged by the flying hooks, the first of them tearing into his back, causing him to cough up a mouthful of blood.  When it retracts and slams him against the wall, another mouthful comes up.  The second grabs him by his right hand and a third slashes into his side, squirting blood onto the walls.  While he reaches with his left hand toward his hooked one, a fourth snags that hand and draws his arms apart.  After an uncountable series of others which continue to spear him in various places, bloodying up his clothing and his immediate surroundings worse as they go, another hook catches him in the mouth and pulls his cheek as it starts to draw back.  After a full minute of flying hooks, Winter is left standing in a pool of his own blood.  At 1:19:38, eighty-one seconds after it started, the hook assault ends with a violent tearing asunder of his body in an explosion of blood and parts.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:12:06.  Vowing to finish what Winter started, Pinhead commands chains to shoot from the front wall and run through the guts of all eight of the observers standing in two lines, four on each side of the sacrificial bed, Amy excepted.  When they pull back, they leave grapefruit-sized holes in the victims’ bodies, blood dripping within the giant openings, the background visible through them.  SR: SSSSS

N      This isn’t the only film where Kari and Doug have starred together.  Cf. Prophecy 4: Uprising, 2005.

N worst movie #11 N

YEAR 2005 committed by rick bota

INFESTED WITH DOUG BRADLEY, KATHERYN WINNICK, LANCE HENRIKSEN

Qs: 14.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N      0:18:46.  The Hellworld host opens the doors to a morbid museum: heads and limbs encased in jars filled with preservatives.  We take a closer look at several of them, two of which are stillborn fetuses, one missing skin around its head just above its eyes.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:31:13.  The Sacrificer works its magic on Allison, tearing open her neck and causing her blood to come spouting out of her, soaking her clothes and making a general mess of things.  Crosscutting between her and Chelsea, we see subsequent shots of poor Allison as the blades continue slicing and the blood continues flowing.  At 0:32:24, Allison is unofficially pronounced bled dry.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:35:43.  A quintet of pins eject from Adam’s box, piercing Jake’s thumb in two places.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:39:21.  Confused and then frustrated by everyone’s manifest refusal to acknowledge his presence, Jake turns to leave, but an ominous gut feeling stops him.  He turns around and everyone who was previously partying is now hanging by their necks, bloodied about the face, some down their arms, all victims of an unspecified horror.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:44:38.  Pinhead lops Derrick’s head off, watching as it falls into a bowl of blood.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:57:37.  Jake comes upon Derrick’s body and thinks, somehow, that’s it’s just a prop.  Reasoning that it may actually be Derrick, Jake opens up his shirt to reveal that someone’s opened his chest, a number of his major organs visible: heart, lungs, stomach and intestines.  Shortly after, while he’s heaving, he finds the missing head in a jar.  While he’s flailing around in disgusted shock, his hand slaps into a puddle of blood, likely Derrick’s.  SR: SSSSS

N      0:58:53.  We were given enough clues this would happen: the hook Mike fiddles with in the beginning races across the room from where he dragged it to and plunges deep into his back, sweeping him off his feet and pouring blood like spilled paint across the floor.  While the choice Cenobite is hauling his body back to the beginning, an energetic spurt of blood splashes into his face and speckles the jars of nearby specimens.  Just before the Cenobite stops cranking, one last gush of blood falls out of his chest and splats to the floor.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:02:20.  It’s typical: the guy who takes the damsel in distress seriously gets killed.  The officer who dared believe her, having heard about the house, picks up his radio and gets a few words in before Pinhead spears him through his skull, out his mouth and through his hand.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:05:00.  Mike and Allison appear to Chelsea.  Mike’s face has been torn in places and stitched back up and he either has no left eye or it’s merely sewn shut.  Allison’s neck has been opened like the female Cenobite back in HR1, fresh blood showing.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:07:57.  Mike, in a frightened fit, accidentally stabs Chelsea.  Blood squirts from her shoulder while he takes time to realize what he’s done. SR: SSSSS

N      1:21:23.  Allison is shown in her coffin clawing away at her neck, spilling blood.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:23:32.  We see Allison’s clawed-up neck when the police find her body.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:28:29.  Things come apart for Adam’s father when Pinhead and his clan fall upon him.  A descendant of the Chatterer wields a mean blade at the end of a long chain that he uses to fly the blade through his body.  Falling to pieces on the floor, things are at a definite end for the vengeance-seeker.  Blood drips from his mouth and soaks through his clothing as his body falls apart.  At 1:28:44 we see the open end of his torso while he finally expires.  Now, the effects going through this film really weren’t all that hot, but when you can see the graphic of his internal organs and spouting blood shifting around within frame (check for it, it jiggles), that’s really bad.  SR: SSSSS

N      1:29:50.  Police break in to The Host’s room to find the walls, the floor and virtually everything inside splattered, streaked, spotted and stained with blood, making it look like someone went on a wild spree and left no trace but the sanguine décor and the signature puzzle cube.  SR: SSSSS

N      As I state elsewhere on the site, I usually hold reservations about calling judgment on films, quality being subjective, but films like this merit comments.  It’s not the best of the series.  In point of clarification, it’s the worst.  To examine it critically, it’s a budding filmmaker’s How Not to Make a Movie study: a narrative that only in the loosest sense holds to the mythology, few believable or empathy-worthy characters, very little of the B & G shock the series is know for, a dramatically lagging pace at which it pretends to spin a story, an ending you can barely buy and a horde of negatives in-between.  For those curious, no I don’t consider it a waste of time to have seen it because as one of my film professors in college said: “You can learn just as much from a bad film as you can from a great one.”  Through quality you can learn sophistication and through misery you can gain experience.  It’s the finest way to pay homage to the painful trip it was to sit through it.  Another point: I fast-forwarded through about half an hour, in total, mostly through the middle third.  It’s really only for the completists who want to say they own all of the series, but not much else.  The deaths aren’t very creative, Pinhead barely shows up and, again, the narrative holds only tenuously to the foregoing films.  Likely explains why they were able to release both Deader and this film in the same year – they applied themselves to Deader and gave this one the scraps that fell from the table.  When I got up to pee, a thought graced me: they had to have made these movies at the same time.  Had to.  In the spirit of Roger Corman and Bucket of Blood/Little Sho