Hellriser

The worst movie in a long time And I have had my share of it Idiotic plot bad effects bad acting And i fell in sleep, though fast forward

88 Films are a company that put out cult classics on DVD & BR, including many so-called "video nasties". Sadly they also put out low budget crap & Hellriser is such a film. The plot is about an unlikely couple of police officers investigating a series of city centre murders & a female inmate at a questionable mental institution who wants to open the gates of Hell on Halloween. Or something! The acting is abysmal. The rubber gore effects look like things that you can buy in the shops at Halloween. For some reason the makers thought that by adding a smoke machine it would make scenes look spooky. It doesn't. What looks like a small kitchen is used as a pathology lab. The mad doctor, with his bad German accent, is called Unnseine (insane, get it?). The ONLY interesting thing on offer here is that Raven Lee, plus another girl, get naked a couple of times. Were it not for this then I'd have scored it 1/10. Waste of time and money.

Never before have I left an IMDb review but also never before have I felt that a movie deserved 0/10. On this site the minimum allowed is 1/10 however trust me I am writing this with the intentions of leaving it as a 0. I watched this with a friend after he mistakenly thought this was Hellraiser, the movie series that I love. Once we quickly realized that no this is not Hellraiser we thought oh well yolo lets watch it anyway. This movie adds absolutely nothing to the horror film industry. It is the same old cliché of naked girls, demons and clueless detectives but in this film take all of those clichés and give them a budget of $12 and you have Hellriser. It is hard to imagine that the producers of this film thought that this would, in anyway, be a movie that would benefit the horror industry. Even the name of it is clearly uninspired and copying another film. The plot is nearly non-existent, you never get to see any cool demons, the entire cast looks cheap and all together everything looked like a High School film project just with more lesbians.

It isn't difficult to understand how this film received various negative comments on its title alone. One letter makes all the difference. To put myself in the position of independent film-makers - if I wanted extra exposure for a production, I would be tempted to give it a name very similar to a well-known franchise in the hope that some would purchase this thinking it was somehow related to the better-known release and hopefully like what they see. I can sympathise with that approach. Clearly, I'd be open to various accusations, but maybe even that would give my film an extra boost.

'Hellriser', as its title is supposed to suggest, is actually a parody of other horror films, with various references thrown in. Director/writer Steve Lawson clearly has very little money to play with and while I'm usually a fan of low-budget ventures that people have worked hard on, 'Hellriser' sadly doesn't really succeed.

To be able to poke fun at other franchises, however well meant, you need to produce something of quality to be able to do so, otherwise the audience will spend their time noticing the lack of sets, the varied acting and the meandering story instead of appreciating attempts at comedy (mainly reserved for character names - Locke and Keyes for example, as well as the insane Dr. Unnseine). If you lack a certain sophistication, then either make an outright comedy, or an outright horror and allow that to become the main focus; 'Hellriser' tries to be both and ends up being neither, I'm sorry to say. A shame, because it starts off quite well. My score is 5 out of 10.

After a series of gruesome murders, a woman joins a detective on the case looking into the deaths of several prostitutes murdered over the span of a month, and after finding a connection involving his targets and a strange woman from a previous case of his sets out to stop the rampage.

This was a fairly solid and enjoyable feature. One of the better elements here is the rather solid setup involving quite a few solid concepts brought together into a solid mystery. The starting point offering a murder case with a similar set of targets taking place within a restrictive time-frame in a specific section of the city creates an intriguing setup, much like the subsequent investigation that has connections to the previous case forms a fine feature here. With the supernatural implications tying together some of their work on the case with the resident inside the sanitarium who starts them in on following the facts of the case, the overall status of the case featured here is a pretty solid and enjoyable one. Due to this setup, the implications of the case comes off quite well offering a decent series of clues to figure out the case. With the murders seemingly pointing to the detective but which are soon given to a much more sinister figure as time goes on, this sort of paranormal-themed murder mystery case offers some charmingly solid investigations where the clues are revealed to fall into place quite nicely. Providing some solid gore along the way with the few kill scenes here taking on a fun mixture of gruesome giallo-inspired ferocity alongside more over-the-top sequences which provide some cheesy sequences as well as some fantastic atmospheric touches that include the lighting and mist swirling around the scenery for a chilling Gothic atmosphere, these manage to give off a lot to like here. There isn't much to dislike here, but it does have a few minor flaws. The biggest issue is the film's somewhat sluggish and slower tempo than expected, as the focus on investigating the deaths rather than dealing with them on screen. Given that it's been a point of contention to have multiple bodies in the rampage already taken out before the start of the film and several more are taken out during the course of the investigation, not getting as many opportunities to revel in them since the police procedural is more of the primary focus here leading to a lot of overly-long dialogue-heavy segments throughout here. The other drawback here is the somewhat cheesy visual effects here with some cheesy CGI and silly effects in the finale to present the twist it brings up that are understandable due to the particular twist attempted, all of which bring this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, and Full Nudity.