Hellraiser 8: Hellworld
Jake: "It's this house. It's like it's playing with us."
Chelsea: "It's haunting us."
release year: 2005
genre: horror
viewing setting: home DVD 4/9/23
synopsis: A bunch of really stupid college-age kids head to a party themed around the popular "Hellworld" online game, but get more than they bargained for.
impressions: So now there's an online game based around the box, Cenobites, and such? So everyone knows all about them (albeit as a game, not real monsters.) Yeah...another attempt to harness the nascent internet as part of a plot device. As with the last few, this looked and smelled like a generic movie script that got shoehorned into the Hellraiser franchise. I suspect that originally it was a movie about some kids who were addicted to an online game and then bad things started to happen...and then someone revised that and presto! we have another low-budget Hellraiser movie. Notable elements: college (?) students who are wayyyyy too geeked-up about this big party based on their favorite game...multiple instances of stupidity where someone ignores blatant signs that something is amiss, including vivid hallucinations, sitting in an old torture chair, seeing a grave being dug, and ignoring a corpse that vanished while one's back was turned...an early appearance of Hendy Cavill and a late appearance of Lance Henriksen...inclusion of nudity once again...inability to even attempt to break a window to get help...the world's worst cops...Pinhead doing the dirty work himself...a couple of major twists at the end. I also want to share a general gripe about this entire DVD set (installments 3-8 inclusive): no subtitles plus poorly-mixed audio means frequent inability to hear what's being said.
acting: Katheryn Winnick and Christopher Jacot are the two kids who happen to live the longest despite their mistakes and poor decisions. Khary Payton is the highly irritating one, and a young Henry Cavill is around for a bit too. Lance Henriksen is the mysterious host of the party. Doug Bradley has limited screen time in his last appearance as Pinhead.
final word: And it's yet another smaller-scope tale involving the Cenobites but focused on some sort of human drama.
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