Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Tiresome sequel picks up shortly after the events in the first film as Kristy (Ashley Laurence) wants to journey to Hell to try and save her father. Unfortunately for her Julia (Clare Higgins) is back as well and after getting her skin back she sets out for Hell where we're going to have a battle. I know this film has a large group of fans but I'm certainly not one of them. I will admit that it's always a good idea to start a sequel soon after the events in the first film but to me everything that needed to be told was done so in the original and this film just comes off as something made in order to make more money. Again, I'm sure fans would say everything that happens here is logical and carries on the original story but I just don't see it that way. This "sequel" really doesn't start to nearly the forty-minute mark and that's because we get several recaps of the first film and we have to get all the characters from that film back in action. Once we get to Hell nothing really picks up as we get all sorts of bad special effects with fake looking zaps and lasers. I think the biggest problem with the film is its screenplay as you never really can tell where the movie is headed or what it's trying to do. It just seems like a film that shows us one ugly scene after another hoping that we take something from it but usually we never do. What the film does have going for it are the gore scenes, which there are plenty of and especially if you watch the unrated version. Gorehounds, such as myself, will at least be able to sit through everything for the gore as we get countless scenes of stabbings, cuttings, flesh ripping and various other forms of gore. The highlight of the film has to be the sequence where Julia comes back from the dead but even this here isn't nearly as good as the sequence in the original with Frank. The performances are decent if nothing overly great and the same can be said about the direction. This is far from one of the worst movies ever made as there's some decent stuff here and there but in the end I couldn't help but feel no one knew where this movie was headed and why we were even bothering to get there.