Hellraiser: Inferno

(2000) ***1/2

Five, five, five, five...let's sing a song about five.

Five is actually pretty darn good, as it gives you the Hellraiser experience from a completely different angle. Detective Joe Thorne is like Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, but more fun. He investigates a brutal homicide, boosting the deceased's coke stash and 300 bucks from his wallet, flits home for five minutes to see his wife and daughter, then heads out for a coke-fueled motel tryst with a young hooker. Did I mention the homicide involves a finger taken from a still-living child and one of those darn puzzleboxes? Well, it does.

The following morning, Joe's fiddling with the puzzlebox in the motel bathroom, and instead of the usual arrival of Pinhead and a bunch of pomposity and hooks, something different happens. He opens the door and the hotel room has been changed to his childhood bedroom. Then while investigating his old house he runs into a pair of sexy Cenobites and for a split second Pinhead himself, and then he wakes up on the bathroom floor. Hooker's asleep, everything's cool.

What's not cool is when he gets a call from the hooker at his office, just in time to hear her crying and screaming and being killed, wetly. It's a pretty effective scene. This begins a trail of murders, each involving another severed finger and making Joe look verrry suspicious. The gore is limited but deftly applied, and other nasty acts take place that are heard, not seen. Convinced that the kid losing the fingers is still alive, Joe chases doggedly after the mystery perp, viewed in a videotape (but only by Joe) as a ghoulish Cenobite with no facial features save its mouth. As the body count rises, Joe's nightmarish visions continue.

Well I'm sure you're all asking "Why? What's the significance?" But I'll leave the spoilage up to you. If you don't mind knowing the ending, which isn't a huge loss, read on past the picture. For those who do, know that it's a pretty good thriller with a nasty bite and this picture below, which is the first shot of the movie, is also the worst part of the movie.


In an unexpected moral theme, the kid with the missing fingers turns out to be Joe himself, his young corporeal form reperesenting his spirit, which is being damaged by his grown-up desires. Turns out Joe's in Hell, you see, and he's been there for most of the movie. It's unclear when he switches over -- the obvious point would be when he messes around with the box, except one kid finger has been uncovered by then, which implies the symbolic machinery was in place before he opened the box. Anyway, the ending seems like it's like Ground Hog's Day, implying that he'll be stuck in a loop of all the stuff we've seen in the movie. That piece of it I felt was sort of lame. It seems to me that you could find the advantages of being in a loop of your last day on Earth. Forget the murder investigation, go get some ice cream, go spend the day with your neglected family, that kind of thing. Joe isn't so convinced about the perks, and ends the flick with a big NOOOOO.