#hellraiser v

My ★★★★½ review of Hellraiser: Inferno on Letterboxd

Episode 5!  That's the fifth episode!  In "holding up your hand to show with your fingers that it is This Many" terms, it's just the entire hand.  That many.

(Want the direct link to the mp3? Here you are.)

And fingers and hands is the appropriate visual metaphor, because we talk for about two and a half hours about the fifth film in the franchise, Hellraiser: Inferno, which is (spoiler alert!) totally into fingers, although it doesn't seem to totally know what it wants to do with them all the time.

In fact, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to do with just about everything it does.  It's a bit of a mess of a film!  Probably not least because it wasn't originally a Hellraiser film at all, but the script got rewritten to cram in a bit of Pinhead and some cenobites so Dimension could chuck another film out, this time (and every time hence) straight to video.

Josh and Yakov dig into the fingers issue, the new and actually not too bad cenobites (especially compared to e.g. CD), the film's too-brief accidental flirtation with Lynchian cowboy brilliance, the way that the movie does a bump-and-set-and-then-just-walk-off-the-volleyball-court schtick with *so many* dropped leads that Anton Chekov would probably just use his figurative gun to shoot himself and have it done with, and whether or not this whole film is actually an alternate universe production by a Joss Whedon who never had any success and had to resort to made-for-cable softcore.

We also mention, because of reason, some random shit like:

Synth Coke!

A little spoken word crooning from He Who Loves You, Baby!

Sukiyaki Western Django, a film that oh my god why have I not seen that yet.