#hellraiser: hellworld

"You smell good", he mutters into your hair and pulls you even closer into him. You can't hold back a laugh.

"Shhh", you caution, fumbling your key from the lock and pushing the door close again. You wince at the horribly loud sound it makes. Mike buries his nose even deeper into your hair and inhales again.

"Shit, you smell so good, Sweetcheeks."

He's so loud, so loud in comparison to the silence all around you. And he's so warm. And so big...

"Be quiet", you warn, even as your hands begin to run along his. You just can't help yourself, not when he's so close, when he's holding you so tightly to him, like he couldn't bear if you left him.

"But I want to be loud with you", Mike mutters, his nose brushing your hair from your neck, tickling your skin. God, he's so drunk. And so tall.

"But you'll wake up my parents", you whine. "And we still have to get upstairs."

Mike groans into your neck.

"Can't we just crash on the couch?", he asks and then his lips touch your skin and you quite literally melt into his arms. Your keys clang to the floor.

"Fuck", you curse, but Mike's arms only tighten around you and he presses another kiss onto your neck. You forget about the keys almost instantly as a shiver runs down your spine. You need to squeeze your eyes shut for your brain to process thoughts at all.

"No", you say then, "We cannot crash on the couch. My parents will wake us up at six."

Mike groans again, then pulls back from you. Your hands slip from his and you stumble for a second before catching yourself and turning around to him.

"So upstairs", Mike says and in the dark of the room, you need a moment until your hand brushes against his again.

"Upstairs", you agree quietly.

Mike pulls you close to him again and steers you towards the stairs - entirely unhelpfully, because he's swaying about as much as you are and doesn't know the layout of your home nearly as well as you do. His fingers are clasped around yours and his arm is around your waist and you have to slow him down at least twice before you even take the first step up the stairs, just so you don't crash into something.

The climb is slow, too. Partly because Mike has decided that it's absolutely unacceptable that he can't look at your ass while you walk up the stairs right in front of him, and so has hooked his thumbs into two belt loops and put his palms flat against your ass instead.

You can barely hide a giggle.

"Mikey", you breathe when you get to the top step and can finally turn around to him, his hands falling back to his sides. "Honey."

He's got you in his arms again in the blink of an eye. His arms around your waist, pulling you close, his lips ghosting over yours, his breath warm.

You have to smile.

"Mikey", you repeat. But his lips are just hovering there. Waiting.

He's hardly ever waited this long to kiss you. You think he might've just fallen asleep momentarily. It would be very much him. You wouldn't be all that surprised.

"I love you", he says then. Soberly.

You freeze.

You must've misheard. You must have misheard.

You hadn't said the L-word. Not once. Not until now.

So you'd definitely misheard.

But Mike kisses you softly, for just a moment, his lips barely grazing yours, and he says it again:

"I love you."

Your hands cramp into the front of his shirt. It's too dark to see his expression - to see much of anything, really.

"Mike-", you whisper, because that's about the only thing you can manage to get out at the moment. Then you break off.

What are you doing?

Fucking god, what the hell are you thinking?

He's just told you he loves you. Twice. And all you're doing is standing there, staring into black nothingness and saying his name? No. No, this won't do. So you press yourself against him and your lips onto his, so suddenly that he almost stumbles back a step. He feels so familiar. So warm and so tall and so familiar. You can't believe he's actually real.

If this wasn't at all obvious with movies 6 and 7, we're definitely into the 'sunk cost' stage of this franchise. The first four all had their charms despite tapering off and I'm on record as a fan of Inferno but Hellseeker and Deader felt like a bit of a chore. But, as much as my lack of keeping to a schedule might dispute this, I am a creature of habit and the end is in sight. And, if anything, we're really due to go off a cliff next year so all the more reason to stick it out and see what depths we can plumb with this series. Hellworld was filmed back to back with Deader all the way back in 2002 but sat largely unused, saved for a few showings over the years, until the pair were released direct to DVD in 2005. It's always stood out on the horizon for me as I've worked my way through the franchise given the plot ties into the world of online gaming. A strange turn for the franchise, sure, but given we're 8 movies in now I think any subject matter is fair game in order to freshen things up. Plus, this would have been right around the time of a boom in online gaming and, given the film pitches Hellraiser as an MMO, you would have had things like Ultima Online, Everquest, Runescape and even Final Fantasy XI (World of Warcraft wouldn't have existed at the time of filming but would have been out by the time the films actually released) so I can sort of see the potential in touching upon the dangers of addiction, both as an analogue to the pleasure seeking that is so prevalent in Hellraiser but also to tie in to the hot topic parent scaremongering of the day.

Nevermind all those other games though, who remembers Graal?!

The video game stuff though is largely glossed over. A friend of our main characters is said to have killed himself following his addiction to the game but it's all very vague and skimmed over during an exposition dump during his funeral.

Even the game itself is shown only briefly and I was going to compare it to a Flash game from the time but I'm pretty sure I was playing Flash games on the school computers at the time that had more gameplay than this. The Lament Configuration doesn't exactly feel like the kind of thing you would adapt into a video game either, it strips away that tactile feeling of handiling the cube, twisting and prodding to try and open it up.

What little we do see of the game is little more than a means to shuttle our main characters off to the meat and potatoes of the movie, an exclusive Hellraiser themed party taking place at Leviathan house. This is something that irked me early on with the movie, it's often said that these later movies are just a case of slapping the Cenobites onto someone else's screenplay and that they barely even show up but these fet a bit tryhard in trying to shoehorn a bunch of references in early as if to say 'See, we're a REAL Hellraiser movie'. Very quickly you get mentions of Hellraiser, Hellworld, Pinhead, Leviathan, LeMarchand, the Engineer…it's like the other extreme of not showing them at all but just trying to cram mentions in within the first few minutes.

Among our crew of party goers is none other than Superman himself (well, one of them at least) Henry Cavill.

Plus Lance Henriksen as the party host, a man with a storied past in the horror genre and notable for me at least for his role in Pumpkinhead, though I think that may have gone undocumented on this here blog.

Our friends are shown around the house but all start to experience strange visions, usually very brief and sometimes involving Pinhead making thinly veiled threats.

Spoiler alert, the twist of the movie is that Lance Henriksen's Host character is actually the father of the friend that commited suicide and he's out for revenge for what he percieves as their actions in enabling his addiction that resulted in his death. It's revealed that upon their arrival to the party, the Host drugged them with a very strong psychodelic drug and buried them in shallow graves outside with an airtube to keep them alive and prolong their suffering. The events of the movie have been playing out in their heads with cell phones left in their coffins through which the Host has been using suggestion to influence their visions. Now, this actually does bring some degree of interest to the film which had been largely boring up to this point and I did appreciate the idea of how this could play into the overarching story of addiction. If these kids are so immersed in this game then these monsters from within it could be making their way into their visions in a very violent way. The problem is that because they made pretty much zero attempt to re-contextualize this film's world and to potray the Cenobites as characters within this game, plus the fact that this movie does the exact same drive by Pinhead scenes (to borrow my own phrase from last year), these interactions just feel like more shoehorned references to justify the film bearing the Hellraiser name. If they had actually taken the time to show these kids playing the game and some digital versions of the Cenobites from which they would have formed these assocations, the whole idea might have worked better.

It would have been all moot anyway though as it's revealed at the end that the Cenobites are in fact actually real when they show up and tear the Host to shreds. Thanks for ruining my shades of grey for me, lads. Whilst I can appreciate the efforts to make the series a little more contemporary by taking this video game angle, it does also strip away a small aspect I've always liked in that all of these movies felt like they took place in the same universe. It's always come across as an anthology piece to me, the Lament Configuration managing to find it's way into someone elses hands who have these delusions of how this is going to lead them to pleasure undivisible whilst we get to sit back and watch as several hooks and chains promptly tear those delusions asunder. Ultimately, it's one of those films where I can see the genesis of a decent idea that goes unfufilled. And whilst I'm all for taking wild departures this deep into a franchise, it does feel like too big of a disconnect from the series to have ever been successful.