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| Detective Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer) steals a puzzle box from a crime scene. He soon will wish he hadn't. |
Release Date: Oct. 3, 2000. Running Time: 99 minutes. Screenplay by: Paul Harris Boardman, Scott Derrickson. Directed by: Scott Derrickson. Produced by: W. K. Border, Joel Soisson.
THE PLOT:
Detective Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer) has always loved games and puzzles. "No matter how confusing the mystery, no matter how difficult the puzzle, the answers always seem in the end as natural as rain.".
Thorne may be a good detective, but he is not a good cop. He is addicted to cocaine and regularly shakes down a local dealer. He steals cash from a crime scene as routinely as if he's prepping his grocery list. And when he discovers a mysterious puzzle box at the scene of his most recent murder case, he swipes that too. After all, he loves puzzles.
Opening that box soon turns his world upside down. As he investigates the murder, he keeps seeing visions of demons. The prostitute he slept with ends up as the next victim. He learns that the box is the property of a shadowy figure known as "The Engineer," who is leaving a child's finger at the scene of each killing.
The coroner informs Thorne that the child was alive when the fingers were removed. This makes Thorne determined to rescue the child, to do one good thing for a change. But his informant tries to warn him off, telling him:
"Hunt the Engineer, they say, and the Engineer will hunt you."
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| Thorne receives advice from Dr. Gregory (James Remar). |
CHARACTERS:
Det. Joseph Thorne: Begins the movie slick and smug, totally in control of himself and his environment. That sense of control is demolished as the story progresses. By the final Act, he is disheveled, and he doesn't so much walk as stagger through his surroundings, looking for all the world like a wild-eyed lunatic. Given that it hadn't been all that long since actor Craig Sheffer was spotlighted in major releases like A River Runs Through It and The Program, I'm guessing that a direct-to-video Hellraiser sequel was not his preferred career direction - but to his credit, Sheffer gives a fully committed performance throughout.
Det. Tony Nenonen: Nicholas Turturro is also good as Thorne's junior partner, who is as honest as Thorne is corrupt. In some ways, he is the inverse of Thorne, the man that Thorne might have been had he chosen a different path. Where Thorne neglects his wife and daughter in favor of drugs and prostitutes, Tony begs off a department game specifically so that he can spend time with his family. His decency puts him at odds with his partner, but he continues to react to Thorne's increasingly unhinged-seeming antics with compassion.
Dr. Gregory: The department psychiatrist. He's an Episcopal priest, but he makes sure to clarify to Thorne that he considers himself a psychiatrist first. He has past experience with the Engineer, having attempted to treat a past detective who ended up in the Engineer's crosshairs and was driven to suicide. James Remar is pretty clearly just picking up a paycheck, but he still invests the role with intelligence and screen presence, even when most of his scenes anoint him as the Bringer of Exposition.
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| Pinhead judges Thorne's life and finds it wanting. |
PINHEAD:
Has a total screentime of less than three minutes, making this almost certainly his briefest appearance in the series. He gets a two second cameo early in the movie, and he is not seen again until the final Act. I can't argue that he feels a bit "tacked on" - There probably needed to be either at least one good scene more of him or none at all.
That said, I think his big scene near the end is quite memorable. He's presented as, essentially, Hell's Judge. Doug Bradley makes the most of what is essentially a single monologue, connecting this version of Pinhead to the monster of the previous films by putting maximum disgust into the observation: "The eternal refrain of humanity, pleading ignorance, begging for mercy: 'Please, help me, I don't understand.'" This may be a more moralistic take on the character, but the disgust with humanity he showed in Bloodline remains intact, which helps to connect these very different versions of the character.
THOUGHTS:
After the disappointing reception to Bloodline, Dimension stopped making Hellraiser for the big screen. Starting with Inferno, the series moved to low budget, small-scale stories, which were released direct to home video.
As such, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Inferno isn't half bad. For the first time since Hellbound, there's a moral dimension to the Lament Configuration. As in Hellbound, the worst tortures are not physical, but psychological, as the box's victims (the guilty) are visited with punishments that fit their own sins.
This was the first motion picture from director Scott Derrickson, and he delivers some strong visual moments. Thorne sees a tattoo of two female Cenobites on a witness's back - only to watch in horror as the tattoo comes to life. Thorne is sent a video of one victim being severely whipped. We see very little actual gore, but the context, the sounds, and Thorne's reactions make it feel much more gruesome. Two more victims are found, left to freeze on a rotating pillar, an image that is simultaneously disturbing and beautiful. The movie is consistently well made overall, and it looks as good as its modest budget allows.
That's not to say that there aren't problems. The story is rather predictable. If you've read or seen even a handful of similar tales, you'll know where this is going pretty early on. Also, this barely feels like a Hellraiser movie. Derrickson has insisted that it was always intended as one, but it's still very easy to imagine a version that features no puzzle box, no Cenobites, and no Pinhead.
These are relatively minor failings, though. The movie's biggest issue is one that reduces it to being merely interesting when it might have been emotionally compelling...
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| Thorne at his most smug - and most despicable. |
A BADLY BALANCED PROTAGONIST:
Centering a movie around an unlikable lead requires a delicate balance. It can, and has, been done. Great movies have been made about cowards, murderers, backstabbers, and liars. But to work, there still has to be something about the character to make us want to connect to him.
Inferno tries to do this. Once Thorne learns that the Engineer is holding a child, he becomes obsessed with saving the captive. One scene shows him looking through photos and files of missing children, growing angry at the thought that most of them will never be seen again. This is good; it shows that this corrupt cop still has a hint of a soul.
But it comes about forty minutes into the film. By this point, we've already seen his single worst moment, as he plants evidence and uses it to blackmail his partner. Since almost nothing prior to this scene has shown him to be anything other than a louse, the blackmail pushes him across the line from "potentially interesting anti-hero" to "human garbage."
Had the two scenes been reversed, so that we saw him looking at the missing children before betraying his partner, then his determination to save the child might carry us through. As it stands, I couldn't make myself feel empathy for Thorne, which reduced the potential effectiveness of the story. By a lot.
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| Two more of the Engineer's victims. |
OVERALL:
Despite its misjudged lead, Hellraiser: Inferno is a better movie than it needed to be and a much better movie than I expected it to be. Performances range from solid to very good, it's directed with visual style, and it has some startlingly effective moments.
The Hellraiser elements may feel a little tacked on, possibly to the detriment of the main story. But I still think it's the best sequel since Hellbound. It's more interesting than Hell on Earth, and it's more of a unified piece than Bloodline.
Overall Rating: 6/10. Plenty of faults... but surprisingly worth the watch.
Previous Movie: Hellraiser - Bloodline
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