321 CRYPTICON 2025!

321 CRYPTICON 2025!

The gang talks Hellraiser at Crypticon Seattle, 2025!

*LIVE AUDIO*

Transcript

Unknown: 0:10

Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? Somewhere between science and superstition, show such sights to show you, strange eons. All right, welcome to strangeeons radio. That is Eric over there, hello. That is Vanessa over there. I am Kelly, and we are recording live at cryptocon 2025 which means you guys have to make some noise. Very nice, excellent, very nice. I know one person has been here to one of our live shows before. Has anybody else done this? Wow. Hey. Thanks for coming back. Mean to sound so surprised, as bad as I remember, I'm not even find out. You guys even remember last year the whole concert happening behind music stuff going on, absolutely in honor of the Hellraiser mini reunion going on this year, we have decided that today's episode is going to be about the hell raiser franchise, and specifically the first three Hellraiser film. Yes, because who wants to go too far beyond, okay, I've watched them also, kind of, I can't talk, yeah, yeah. I think we've all watched them all. That's why we chose the first three. Yep, I will start this off, if you guys don't mind. Sure, sure. Okay, so we want to do some Doug Bradley, oh, right, Vanessa, were you going to tell us a little bit about Doug Bradley, no, okay, then Doug's a neat guy. He's got a great voice, and whenever he's not playing pinhead, it really glows. I know he wants guaranteed he looked like, Yeah, that guy who looked like a little baby, child, yeah. Let's hope he's not listening. He's not. Let's play the odds. Is that okay? Dive in. Then I will dive in. So back in the 1980s when horror novels were the thing, a young Liverpudlian playwright shook up the genre with his short story collections, the books of blood. Clive Barker weaved tales of gore sex and sadomasochism, and they sold like hot cakes when one of the stories raw head Rex, and another original screenplay that he wrote, underworld, not that underworld, were turned into pretty lousy films, I think we can all agree, Barker decided that he would try directing himself. The problem was that he wanted to put something out there that he knew could be made on the cheap to get studio money. And so with this in mind, he linked up with first time producer, Christopher fig and he set about crafting a story that he could hopefully get a million dollars for to ensure the story worked. He wrote it as a novella first which also completed a prior commitment. He had to American publishers, dark harvest for a 30,000 word novella to appear in their night visions three anthology. And so into the world came the hell bound heart. The hell bound heart. Has anybody read the novella that this is based on? Okay, so the hell bound heart starts with Rory and Julia moving into rory's deceased grandmother's house. He desperately wants to save their marriage, but doesn't realize she wants his missing brother, Frank, with whom she had an affair shortly before marrying Rory. And neither of them know that Frank died in that house the previous year after solving Lamar Shannon's puzzle box and opening a gate to hell. So what we've got here in the novella is Rory, a nice guy. He's married to Julia, who's a bit cold towards him, and also he doesn't know that his best friend, somehow, Kirsty, has a crush on him. Julia herself is actually more tortured in the books than the people who opened the puzzle box since her affair with Frank, she sees how unfulfilling her life has become, and technically in the book, if you remember, it is Julia, who is a protagonist, which gives the book a much darker tone. Frank Roy's older brother lives for self gratification. This guy loves pleasure, and then Kirsty has secretly loved her best friend for years. So despite knowing that Julia is bad news, she tries to help her best friend save his marriage. Kirsty, I suppose, is the closest the book has to a heroine with Frank being the antagonist, and well, more the antagonist than the Cenobites Barker described. Short story as romance rather than horror, and that the hell bound heart of the title belongs to Julia. We're all aware of the Cenobites. This is the big part of the story that we all love. No one love. How much they change over the course of the franchise, but they have already changed a lot just from novella to the first film in the novella, their summoning has a very overt religious connotation. They they require an offering of a jug of urine and a plate of doves heads. And when they show up, Frank is even given the chance the option to back out twice. And when he does not do that, then that results in all of his senses being heightened, preparing him for what follows. So I reread this book not too long ago because I am currently working on a novel that I thought I wanted to sound like the hell down heart. When was the last time you guys read this? My niece, yeah, I have not read this work. It is not his typical writing is very dreamy. It's almost poetic. A lot of the conversations are described in paragraphs as a conversation these two people had about this, instead of the actual lines of dialog of the conversation. And I realized I can't even pretend to write like this. It was so strange. The other thing that I thought was really interesting about it is that Barker hints of these other charts that can lead you to the Cenobites. There is a coded theological work locked away in the Vatican, and an origami sculpture once owned by the Marquis de Sade. And then the puzzle box, which personally I would have loved to have seen examined in the sequels. I will say I think the franchise has leaned too heavily on pinhead and the box itself. So if they had kind of widened it, we might have gotten some more interesting films. Anyway, this novella just a dry run to get the movie going. I will talk about Hellraiser, the movie, excellent, all right, you. I was bored. I'd gone to the limit. There was nothing else I wanted. A box, not just any box. It opens doors, doors to the places of Heaven or Hell. Do anything you want, anything you gave me an experience beyond the limits you give me that box. Give me that box. We have such sites to show you. Hellraiser, there are no limits, a film by Clive Barker, new world, based on this story he has written that hasn't even been published, gives him$900,000 to make the movie. He's a first time director. He's made a couple of short films. They just adding up already. Yeah, haven't seen the short films too. Yeah, they're crazy. They are wild. So he wrote the screenplay, and after a title change to Hellraiser, which I will get to at the end, he only begins in London in September of 86 the movie version of Julia is a more sympathetic character. We're actually kind of on her side. On the first death she's repulsed and horrified by what's going on, but she kind of quickly gets caught up in all of it. And the thing that I love about the movie is she gets more beautiful every time she kills somebody, so you see her also filling out as a human. Rory is now called Larry, changed from British to American to help us sales. And Kirsty is also American now because her character has been changed from a best friend who's in love with him to Larry's daughter from a previous marriage. The change is so smart, it works so much better, and it allows movie Piercy to be more of a proactive heroine, and introduces kind of a fairy tale element, if you think about it, with the innocent daughter, the gullible father and the wicked stepmother. Yeah. When you hear the tone turn the page. The original franchise plans were to focus on Julia, but Claire Higgins plays Julia left after hellbound Hellraiser too. Not a fan of horror movies, and didn't like it when the first movie came out. She was like, oh, no, this is way scarier than I thought. Another character who barely features was about to become its figurehead. Pinhead, elegant, eloquent, terrifying. And if you remember, in the first movie, listed in the credit says, yeah, yeah. Now, not pinhead. Unfortunately, the studio didn't like the way he was written in the script, and so they were just like, Wait, this is what's happening. Nightmare on Elm Street. Lost Boys, evil, dead movies. They wanted some kind of comedy mixed in with their horror. So they sent production executive Tony Randall to fix honestly what was not broken, including pinhead. They wanted him to be either completely silent, oh my god, oh my god, or Jason or white tracking was like, Absolutely not. Fred cooker, he gets Barker was like, Absolutely not. And somehow he gets you're doing too, Tony Randall, he gets Tony Randall to side with him, and that's super important, because Tony Randall ends up directing, directing Hellraiser too, yeah. If you watched the movie recently and read the novella recently, you're going to see that the movie improves on the story in every way, but especially in Kirsty, in an extended finale that is so much better than the book, it's almost shocking it wasn't in the book. She defeats the cenophites by reversing the moves of the box, which is like, Oh yeah, and and then she closes the gate to hell. And then somehow the the box is returned to the person who originally sells it. And we just get this really lovely bookend and an opening for sequels that is not in the original novella with, you know, little sketchy effects, but a cool ending. My God, the book opens in september 1987 who saw this in the theater when it opened? Damn right. Yeah, I was I was young. Oh, you were very young. Yeah. I was alive. I said in the theater, I remember loving it, and it was too dark, too dark. The the film print, oh, so I couldn't really see what was going on. Um, it grosses anywhere from 14 and a half million to $20 million depending on various reports, it's the most successful foreign film in many territories. And remember, $900,000 budget, 14 point 5 million. Not too shabby. The sequel is already greenlit by new world based on what they have seen. So before it even does any kind of box office, they're like, Yeah, this is cool. We're gonna put it out for me. I think that the book works better with the world it creates, especially with the other modes of summoning. The Cenobites, the Vatican code is super interesting to me, and I really would have loved that, because Barker describes the Cenobites is kind of like the popes of hell. And so I was just like, I really want to see where this might have gone. But the film clearly benefits from the book, kind of road testing the premise, and it allowed Barker to smooth over the wrinkles so frank in the book is not given the option to back out by the Cenobites, but Christie, in the book is not given the benefit either. They just kind of let her go for some reason. And if you read it and it's a short novel, you're you're confused, it makes no sense. So the way that that he figures out this ending is it's a much better payoff. It makes more sense, she actually gets to fight for her life, freedom and everything, and it's just way more satisfying. I have some trivia on this movie. You guys, you're going to be shocked and surprised, unless you also have Wikipedia. So we know the Cenobites by their names that were given to them over the years. They were just called Lead Cenobite, stuff like that female son by so but you'll all know that the chatter, the guy with the teeth and butterball Cenobites, they actually had dialog. In the original script, once their makeup was applied, it was impossible for them to say their dialog, and so their lines were given to the lead, Cenobite and the female Cenobite, which is why suddenly pin had become such an important figure in this those lines were all supposed to be spread out throughout all of them. Clyde Barker has explained that Eric, due to a very limited budget, there was no money left to have the special effects done professionally after the primary filming. Instead, Barker and a Greek guy animated the finale scenes by hand over a single weekend yellow electricity that flows over the Cenobites bodies as they are sent back to hell. Barker says that he thinks the FX turned out really well considering the amount of alcohol the two of them. Wow. Clive shows this movie to his mom before anybody else. He says she cried tears of joy upon seeing her son's name in the opening credits. And he leans over and says, This will be the happiest you'll be for the next two hours. The film was originally titled The hell bound heart. The studio decided the title sounded too much like a romance, and asked why change it. He offered sadomasochists from beyond the grave, which was immediately rejected. He opened the floor to the production team to offer up their own suggestions, prompting a six year old female crew member says, suggest what a woman will do for a good fuck. The hell riser title comes from Christopher fig Eric, did you know because I know you were a Christopher Young fan, yes. Did you know that industrial band coil originally did the soundtrack. I didn't. There's a full soundtrack for this film by Coyle. The studio ultimately decided to have the film re scored by a house musician that would not have to be paid royalties, fucking Hollywood. And the house musician was Christopher Young, and his score is amazing you want to do, all right, yeah, yeah. The score that Coyle recorded, a total of nine tracks, can be found on their compilation, CD, unnatural history, two smiling the face of perversity, and on another album, the unreleased themes for Hellraiser, which I guess are apparently both quite rare, very hard to find. So, yes, I won't worry about it then, yeah, but it does sound like something you want to track down. Yeah. Oh, somebody has it nice. Doug Bradley, who played pinhead, he revealed that he and Clive decided early on that pinhead was formerly human. Quote, a line from one of Clive's plays, swam into my mind. I am in mourning for my humanity at this point. There was no backstory for the character, but I discussed this with Clive, and we had agreed that he had once been human, but whether this was yesterday, last week, last year, 10 100 1000 years ago, I didn't know a perpetual, unconscious grieving for the man he had once been for a life and a face he couldn't even remember, and a frozen grief I feel now the Pinhead exists. Existed in an emotional limbo where neither pain nor pleasure could touch him, a pretty good definition of hell for me, damn, yeah, this way you hire these kind of actors, right? They come into this with all this amazing backstory. And then finally, according to the crew, the backbone of special effects was, in fact, lube and condoms. Well, you know, given the nature of the film, but fitting the crew, actively sought out condoms because they were made out of latex. Lube made things look wet and stay wet under the camera lights. And according to the crew, they were mortified whenever they'd have to make a run to a shop to load up on what surely looked like, as for the birthing sequence, the special effects gang actually used a step up from lube. They used, oh boy, methyl cellulose, the food thickener mainstay. We would pump up methyl cellulose by the gallon. Riddles keen, who is the special effects supervisor? You can see the pump in early action early in the sequence as pools of clear goop ooze up from the floorboards, the thick snot like strands coding Frank's in progress. Body are also likely methyl cellulose. When Frank's arm stumps erupt from the pools of booze. Those are two animatronics. He says that they built lots and lots of puppet rigs. The forming flesh effect itself, where bone muscle and tendons reconstitute, was accomplished with wax and reverse photography. And then they constructed models of body parts out of different waxes with different melting points, layering them as needed, so they would be burned and then filmed in reverse, and then that is the effect of the reforming flesh that we see in that amazing sequence. Required a multitude of stages, as well as close up appliances to show the growth of Frank's hands and organs. The crew also used color colored thread for Frank's veins, which, when pulled and played in reverse, looks like conscious slime mold likes in you. And that's pretty much all of my notes here. I want everybody to kind of remember that and then go watch that scene again, because it is something else, thread and burning wax and reverse photography. It's just really lovely, great. That is my write up on the first Hellraiser movie. I do interject something on what you said indirectly, and we're sitting in a small room or convention. Talk about a super rare album and two people, well done. This is also Wikipedia. As far as I know, this is all available on YouTube. Vanessa, you watch the next movie, yeah, you know, I had memories of what this film was, and then I watched it, and it was like, fuck. Is happening right now? Yeah, so hell bound, Hellraiser two from 1988 the vision is renewed. I The power is re awakened, the fear is reborn, because they have returned. Time to play hell bound Hellraiser two, brace yourself for terror you have never imagined, and your suffering will be legendary, even in hell and others you can never escape, and you wanted to know now, you know, last year, they Brought hell to Earth. Now they'll take you through hell. They'll take you through hell, hell bound, Hellraiser, two time to play a budget of 3 million gross, they think I don't know. I had to check a lot of internet sources, and they seemed very sketchy. So let's just say 3 million grossed. Crazy. I know Google's AI was like, we got you 3 million grossed, 12 million directed, of course, by Tony Randall, who actually is mostly an editor. He had 31 editing credits, but 23 directing credits. This included children of the night, Amityville, 1992 it's about time. Fist of the North Star, 10 episodes of beyond belief, fact or fiction. And of course, written by Clive Barker, who we've just talked about so you know everything you need to know about him, and Peter Atkins, who, of course, is behind hell raiser and wish master as well. Have you heavily involved? So starring, of course, Doug Bradley, pinhead, 85 credits. Pinhead was his first feature film role, and then did night breed. He did a lot of TV walk on roles and tons of voice work, including Star Wars, Old Republic video game. And he's also an invincible. Ashley Lawrence, who plays Christy, has 45 credits, including creep show Gentle Ben and a lot of TV walk on work. This is going to be familiar. Then we also have Imogen Borman, who played Tiffany 14 role. Else, dream, child, coronation, street, casualty, the tripod. So she must be British. Kenneth Cranham, who plays chan Dr channard, 207 credits. You have seen him many, many times, but I sure was like, I don't know. He looks fakely familiar. He's like, kind of heavier white dude, and that's what he be. He's in layer cake, Oliver and again, lots of British TV. We also have Claire Higgins, who returns as Julia. She has 84 credits, including lots of lead TV roles. Finally, a lead she was also in the worst witch trying East Enders, the soap opera, Kitty and Pride and Prejudice, the TV series so close to my heart. And of course, we have the returning Sean Chapman as Frank. Who are we missing? Andrew Robinson. We'll come back to that later. So the plot, we start with a big old recap of the first film. And I was like, man, they must have saved some money. Why am I watching this film again? And then, as you watch the film, you will continue to get full seeds of Hellraiser, such a joy, mostly, though, the recap does not tell you the story. It just shows you all the cool special effects, so you are not prepared for the plot at all. We then jump into a British military officer who looks very much like pinhead, toying with a box, opening it and becoming becoming a Cenobite. Then we jump into Kirsty's story. Now we are going to start immediately after the happenings of the first Hellraiser movie, but it's going to be very weird, because her boyfriend and her were sent to a mental facility for some reason, not like a, you know, like an actual police station or somewhere where they're like, man, there's a lot of dead bodies. I guess we'll send you to the mental institute. But her boyfriend was released because his story checks out, but hers does not, because she sounds crazy. She doesn't help matters by being hysterical and flailing around a lot. So there's that um, Dr chanard is the lead doctor at the facility. He's very interested in, uh, opening up his patients and messing around with their insides, mostly their brains. He's also interested in Kirsty's story, and as it turns out, has been obsessed with the box for years. So it's just lucky that she turned up here. He even has copies of the box in his house. He has three, at least, I didn't know there were this many boxes. So they all kind of love that they've widened this out. Yeah, you could just stumble on these guys, I guess. I mean, they're just everywhere. He also has lots of sketches and is clearly obsessed with this universe. His assistant, Kyle, feels sus when he hears that. He wants this bloody mattress delivered directly to his home, and so he sneaks over there wants to see what Chandra is up to, and witnesses him sacrifice a mental patient to the mattress and a skinless Julia crawls on out. He's like, That's not cool, and goes back to the institute to burst bust Kirsty out, but she insists that they need to go to Chandler's house because she believes her father is trapped in hell and she needs to save him. So they returned to Janos house. Immediately, Kyle dies, so don't worry about him. He's fine. Tiffany, who is a young, beautiful, by the way, mute, patient and a wizard puzzles. It has also been carted over there to the house to help open the box. The Cenobites return. Channard and Julia go into hell the labyrinth, excited to check things out. Tiffany and Christy follow for some reason, and in the second part of the film, Channon gets everything he could dream of by becoming a Cenobite himself. Julia proclaims herself the queen of hell. Percy flils around a bunch confronting her uncle, Frank for reasons, and Tiffany finds the way out. So thoughts I just so the plot is really strange. It's extremely disjointed. It's hard to remember this film because there's so many pieces that don't really truly intersect in a way that makes sense. They're cool scenes. Sorry. It's a puzzle missing like 80 pieces, and you're like, I'm there's a Bunny's nose somewhere in this pile. I know it there is not it is just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But again, we'll get to that in the trivia. I don't fully understand the story with Julia, especially because she keeps leaving hell, but she likes hell. No, but she has to leave hell to get like people to sacrifice. But then at the end, she's like, Aha, I'm gonna leave again, and I'm gonna get these moving guys who are with my mattress. And why is the mattress through a way of getting into the anyways, it's fine. Everyone is losing their skin all the time. Christy is insufferable. She just screams and runs around confused or mad or in extreme emotions the entire time, and it's really frustrating and very hard to watch. However, she does do one cool scene where she dresses up in Julia's skin to save Tiffany, and that's really nice. So although, of course, if you think about it, that means the actress playing Julia was the one who played one good scene. It's fine. Also, they have a scene in the end where they escape, and there's a sort of closing wall situation, and it closes and a screaming face goes, and it fades to the it is stupid as fuck. And that is like the ending finale to this film. I'm like, I mean, they could have ended it in any other also, you can die in hell. Who knew that? I am still confused by a great deal. And also, Chand as, like, a set of A is kind of OP, like, he's way overpowered for just, I don't know, just becoming a brand for just becoming a brand new dude. He's like, Haha, I can float and do everything, and I can kill other Cenobites, and I can kill all these people in the real world, and I can come back, and I don't need anything to get me between places. So. But he also has the easiest way to die ever, which is just, if he spits and hits and hits the ground and struggles. You can kill him easy, and he's dead. So it's basically signs this movie. A little bit of trivia for you. Julia Claire Higgins was originally supposed to rise from the mattress as the Queen of hell at the end of the movie, The theory being that she would be the series continuing character. But once Hellraiser opened, pinhead proved to be the most popular character among the public, so it was rewritten. Andrew Robinson refused to reprise his role as Larry cotton, forcing hasty script rewrites. This partially accounts for the muddled story structure of the final film. So basically it was supposed to be a lot more with him. The original script, which featured Larry cotton as the major character, was essentially the same as the final film produced, except that Larry was the shame. Larry was in the chamber with Frank, which is she goes down to hell to find her father and never finds him. Where they were attached to each other, so frank and Larry are attached to each other like Siamese twins, until Frank attacks Kirsty, at which point Larry cuts them apart and begins to fight until Julie arrives. Later, Larry escapes with Tiffany and Kirsty from hell, and it was him, not Kirsty, that kills Julie, but he promptly has a heart attack and is ushered away when they return to the hospital. This segues into a notorious deleted scene with pinhead in or scrubs, where he informs Kirsty that Larry will die in an in an invitation of a doctor. However, Larry returns at the end, still alive, and it is him, not Tiffany, that Christy leaves the hospital with. I think it's a little different, Also fun fact, the horn inside the Leviathan is actually doing Morse code for the word God, and that's what I got. Oh, I think you're gonna find some pushback here for America. And I who think this is probably the strongest film, I think it's really good. I think it's visually stunning, like, there's so much cool shit happening. It just doesn't, like, there's just too many question marks and not enough like reasons for it. Like, why does Kirsty know? Like, she's screaming about the mattress from the start, like she doesn't know any of that. She wasn't there. She doesn't she doesn't know that. How that works, you know? So there's just a lot of like, wait, what? Like, robots destroy her making sense, but I do enjoy the second one quite a bit. Yeah, I think I still lean to the first one, just conceptually, but I think the second one's a fairly strong film. It's really disturbing. It's really disturbing, especially the mental patient stuff. Yeah, I don't know if I feel like everyone is surprised when I tell them this the the Queens Reich song, silent lucidity samples dialog from Hellraiser too. When, when you hear that stuff in the in the middle of the song, that's Dr Shinar talking to his patients. So yeah, but the and they prefer to a while since I watch, I guess. But the when she opens the box, they don't go for her, because it's supposed to be desires, not cause that's not what hands. That was really cool. That was such a good moment. Because you're like, Oh no, Tiffany, don't get sucked in with the Cenobites. You're just a mute girl. And instead, they're like, she's not. Why we are here, I will return to and I love that that they've got a just, it just kind of fits that there is a mute girl who is just so involved in puzzles, and then this doctor who's got this weird thing, and then Kirsty shows up, and all of it starts to work. I mean, it feels like a Clive Barker story that is probably like, have you read a lot of Barker? That could be why we appreciate it? Yeah, in a different way, because read it with that. Have you seen the covers of the original books of blood? Yes, most people would not read them. Yeah, I just don't have time. Ridiculous, no, no. I mean it like it's one of those things that's on my bucket list. But yeah, good for the adder and Jack. He's a nice, simple All right, so hell raiser three in Hellraiser one. Clive Barker showed you his vision of a private hell. In Hellraiser two, he took you on a journey inside the inferno now the terror returns in mankind's final confrontation with evil, and this time is going to be hell on earth. Great club. I really love it here. It's a great club. Jesus Christ, not quite you. Just give me the box ready for your close up. You. We're going to hell, ladies, first baby, this is better than sex. It's so good to be back. Clive Barker presents Hellraiser three, hell on earth, at least in 1992 kind of wanted. I'm a Hellraiser nut. I have seen all of them as most we have. I actually, like, got this weird box sets. I own all of them. Why do you own all of them? So this one is directed by Anthony Hickox, who is best known for his worst works with wax work one and two. And he did do the warlock and the song I enjoy greatly from this, he directed the video for motorheads version A Hellraiser song. All right. This is writing credit Peter Atkins, who's got credits for five of the hell raiser movies, two, three bloodline and two shorts actually not features. Wish master one through four fifths of the North Star, the live action movies selling you on this guy, aren't I? And Tony Randle and Clyde Barker get story by credits for obvious reasons. This is, of course, Doug Bradley as pinhead. Jump forward for trivia on this. This is the first film where he is actually referred to as panhead. Terry Farrell is the lead in this. You might know her from 148 episodes of Deep Space Nine bonfire the vanities, where she played a party guest, a bunch of other stuff. Kevin Bernhardt, who 376 episodes of General Hospital and dynasty. So you know what he looks like. Very nice and interesting. You mentioned Christopher Young, my note, first note when this movie starts out and that Christopher Young movie music is still awesome. Yeah, the they have put and I'm glad I was right, but I'm going watching the beauty this movie. I do not remember Hellraiser two with him being entered into a giant piece of art. No, like, Why is he in a giant piece of. Art spinning in this galley, galley, galley gallery. It is kind of cool looking. I mean, it's an interesting art piece. Oh, he does well, it does. It kind of like, yeah, this column there's Yeah. It's really weird. It's when the mattress guys come by to, like, pick it up. Like, they Yeah, they get eaten by the mat. One of them gets eaten by the mattress, and then it the pillar comes out and spins, and you see a really bad looking Yeah, no, no, yeah, yeah. But Terry plays a small time reporter, and she's looking for a story because she doesn't want to, you know, cover the fluff pieces anymore. She's in the morgue and disappointed, because there's no good stories, and suddenly a man gets pushed down there with chains cut into his hand scratching down the the hallway. So it's like, oh, this seems like it might be a story. He gets torn asunder very quickly, honestly, not the greatest effect it. It lacked blood for a Hellraiser moment like that, compared to what's been done in the last two films. So she starts to investigate, to find out what's going on. There's a young woman that comes in with her and says, I have nothing to do with this guy. I don't know him. I was just at the boiler room with him. So she goes, Oh, boiler room. What's that? It's a weird, crazy ass nightclub, one half metal bands. I mean, it's armored tint, Oh, wow. And then the other half, like, Oh, see through wall. Away is a five star looking restaurant with classical music playing like that. Is some badass soundproofing installed in that wall, so it's kind of weird. And the guy who bought the art piece is a fuck boy frat from word go, and really just a nasty little character. He was less, even less redeeming than I remembered him the for some reason, I really don't know why the younger lady did decide she needs to talk to the reporter. Maybe because she showed up at the boiler room with, Oh, that's cool, okay, I don't know. And, holy shit, you know, if you get paid to cover on our weddings and bar mitzvahs and you can afford this apartment, do the late it's like two floors, gourmet kitchen, spiral staircase, lovely view like frenzing. I'm not on this shit, man. The music in the clubs, it comes back and forth, is a fun mash of, like, early 90s music, not quite consistent enough for a club, but that's okay. Then that doesn't come in for a while, but I know it would have been cheesy. I know it would have been ridiculous, but I still would have loved him come back and say, We have such sites to show you. I just would have loved that. But he apparently, in the spinning thing when Doug finally has to speak, was horrible, and so he said it's one of the worst things he's ever had to do on screen was get into that makeup and and speak for whatever reason, it looks fine. Wouldn't look like it was that bad. But apparently it was just not good. First half of this film I'm going, Why did I have a problem with this? Man? This is fairly decent. It's not great. And then, well, there's First, there's the very entertaining scene of Hellraiser showing up at the boiler room. And it is a combination of gore and laugh out loud, funny, weird shit going on. So I don't quite know what he was going for as a director, because, I mean, there's goof shit, like the guy who's got two pool balls stuck in his mouth and really violent, tearing some people apart. So it's, it's a weird scene that is a lot of fun to watch. The they they do something that really bugs me. My one of my favorite aspects of the first two Hellraiser movies is that these Cenobites are not killers, they're not Ed gates, they're not Jasons. They are a very specific breed of demon from hell that has to be summoned and has to have a reason. This movie, they signed up 10 heads broken away from hell, and now he's a free agent. Can do whatever the hell he wants to. Hell he wants to, and I'd forgotten that happened in this movie, and I was, like, really disappointed to hear that, because that's always been my biggest problem, that they got away from it, but I guess at least they explained it at some point. But it really, really hurts the the. The lure of the Cenobites and pinhead to turn him from somebody that has a weird, weird but present moral code to just another crazy, badass serial killer. So I was like, okay, all right, whatever the ending is strange, for some reason, he creates a but load of new Cenobites, partially because they're free from hell too. You do whatever they want to, except they just do whatever he wants them to do. And the what works so well in the first Hellraiser with those Cenobites is they're weird. They're unrecognizable, sort of, they're not human things. They're strange creations. Well, this one's got a cameraman who's now got a camera in his head whose zoom lens kills people, a DJ who shoots CDs to kill people. So by the end, I remember, Oh, this is why I don't like how extra three, yeah. But the first 45 minutes, how our show the moon is actually fairly good. It's not great, but it's, it's a lot stronger than I remember, and it definitely has the 80s and 90s trope of, hey, we're going to have to end the movie in the construction site, which doesn't sound that trophy, until you really start to think about it, you go, hold on the lethal weapon noise damn near every action buddy top movie, but, and it's fine, the ending is very forgettable, and it's just and it's got pointless Turns where the young lady that stays with her, get here's a message on the phone. Just flips out what you lied to me and runs away, and just your relationship is so good. By now you should have maybe said you're moving. Is this true? Which wasn't true, of course. Anyways, Randall was attached to direct, but the producer removed him for the way, wrong reason that they were worried he was going to make it too bleak. Oh no, it's Hellraiser movie, please. This is one of the few movies that should just be bleak. The scene with, well that's mentioned with a Hellraiser and him not liking it. Penn had found, or Doug Bradley found, watching this, that they had to use a stunt double to play him at one point, and he became jealously protective, okay? And like, I don't like somebody else playing him. He has volunteered now to come back to meet the new pinhead. Maybe that was in the last movie, and work with her. I'm going Sure. Why not? I don't know. We'll see. But the one time Doug did not play Hellraiser was not let's see. Peter Jackson was asked to direct this film, and his his reason for declining is perfect is I don't make these kind of films. I'd be immediately starting to think of funny gags and weird stuff I could do with pen head getting his head stuck in a wall, random shit like that. So he passed on it, but just that a curiosity factor that would have been wild, especially considering the kind of movies he was making then, or bad taste and anyways, probably would have ended with a giant preacher falling apart, and preachers fall dead, alive, dead, alive and bad chase for us in the same way, although probably Barker was technically an executive producer on the film, he was largely uninvolved because He recently had had the problems with night buddy, yeah, where they really messed with the editing. He was not interested in working with students a studio at the time. However, the movie grossed almost $13 million Wow. So it was a pretty big success on a two to $3 million budget. So I don't know why they didn't decide to keep going with mid budget levels and decide just push it off a cliff and give the next guy like five bucks to direct it. Right? Because from three the drop off in quality of films is strong. I mean, there's a couple that are fun. But, you know, the the construction of the Cenobites in this that I think what makes them so cool in the first two movies is they're timeless, even Dr Chouinard doesn't have anything that ties him to his present. You see CD guys. I know. Well, that's just it. You know, that kind of stuff, then is like, you've now immediately dated this film. You've got a DJ spinning CDs, literally, right? So, you know, that's, I know. Yeah, that's a bummer. Um, what do you guys think of the the next few movies? I've got a list here. There's one that's a game. Oh, well, actually, bloodline is the next one, which is, I think you talked about, or what do you guys talked about in an actual episode, and that's the one that's that goes through time, yes, and the spaceship and all that. That one's amazing. Almost good. It's almost good. It's actually only same with, like, yeah, I feel like three is good, if you don't think about one and two at all, like, it's at least funny. It's always really funny, because it does, I mean, the scene in the club is solidly entertaining. It's so, yeah, it's so entertaining, and like the the Cenobites are genuinely pretty hilarious. That one's directed by Kevin Yeager, yeah, so that's there's a little bit of quality there. The next one is Inferno that's directed by Scott Erickson. Erickson who has done the Exorcism of Emily Rose The Day the Earth is still and Dr, strange. Oh, sure you're like, what? Somewhere? Well done. The list continues after bloodline, Inferno, hell, seeker, debtor, hell world, Revelations, judgment. And then this latest one on Hulu, which was just called Hellraiser again, kind of a reboot, and I was fine with it. It mostly worked for me. I thought it was an interesting way to approach I love that they tried. Yeah, that was all I really wanted. I was like, ah, as opposed to, like, cared one of the Hell Raisers, one of the films that random scripts would come in and they go, Hey, Put pan ahead and call it Hellraiser. We'll make your movie, right? So that's why so many of them are so weirdly completely unconnected. Because they're completely unconnected, right? Well. But I also want to kind of point out that this last Hellraiser, which was a Hulu original that was three years ago already, and I kind of thought, with the buzz that had happened around that, that we might have gotten something else, and in fact, that there was supposed to be a Clyde Barker produced Hellraiser that has gone away his TV series. I can't find any information on anything that's actually in production anymore. So anymore, I think after what's happened with Chucky, they're probably all gonna well, maybe there'll be a Hellraiser movie, amen. Maybe there'll be a Jason TV series. Maybe they'll be right that did so well, yeah, for sure, but he, you know, you can always get in more recent times by playing Dead by Daylight, because he comes as an enemy. Oh, nice add on pack. I know there was a time, I think, down at the Lovecraft Film Festival when we were talking to Doug Bradley, and he had said that he and Clive had imagined some kind of sequel where pinhead was now an old, fat ruler of hell, a demon that ruled hell, and that they would continue on with him, kind of as an overseer. And I thought that sounded amazing. Yeah, very interesting. But that's off the table now too. So there seems that there's nothing going on with the franchise coming soon. King Kona. We've got a couple of minutes here. Let's open it up to the floor, if anyone wants to discuss anything or not. Oh yes. Have any of you read the sequel, Scarlet gospel? So the question is, Has anybody read the sequel Scarlet gospels? I read that, which was a nice continuation of the Pinhead character, never called pinhead, right? I can't remember what he was called, The hell priest, the help John, when you were saying about how, yeah, yeah. And I thought that was actually really good, but a little slow, you, Eric, I don't think I did. It's interesting. All right, yeah, Vanessa doesn't read, so I read a lot of comics. I read so many comics. Comic book series had some that had some interesting, pretty damn good stuff, stories, okay, heart was always pretty cool. Have any of you seen the trailer that came out were undone Hellraiser early 20 teens. There was a conversation about doing a Hellraiser movie in hell. Bites. You know, conquering hell. Becoming the Oh, I know the trailer came out as like, a teaser trailer they could centralize. It looked amazing. Wow. Was this just a fan thing, or was this somebody, at least, to my knowledge, this was a real teaser trailer they put out to try to get interest about it early, too. Oh, yeah, well, I will have to look that up. That sounds yeah, there's some neat there's a lot of neat fan films, hard to say, because some are made very professionally, but there's some interesting Hellraiser shorts that are out there. You can I mute most of them on YouTube and stuff. But so if you're really into it, it's worth checking those out, because a lot of them are neater ideas than the movie, the later movies well. And you know, jumping on one of the things you said in the 90s, Marvel Comics had their epic line, and they had a Hellraiser series. And very rarely did any of the Cenobites from the movie show up. It was all new Cenobites, and it was really interesting. And I think that was probably the way the films should have gone, yeah, that would have been a lot fun. But, you know, we can sell pinhead. You can sell that's true random. I mean, if you're going to rewrite starting from the second one, to make sure that you feature pinhead then. But I think Julia as, like a, you know, a bad guy as the Queen of hell, would have been pretty interesting too, because she was a really compelling character, absolutely and arguably the best actor in the bunch. I mean, in a series, the first two movies of pretty decent actors, yeah, she really shown Yeah. She was very like, not only was she watchable, but she sold some really incredibly difficult concepts. So yeah, and there's a tonal change. I forgot to mention that Hellraiser three was the first one shot in the US. So that's kind of why it's got a tone change. That's why it's so like it's just a surge commercial. It's all adding up. Now, you know, that sounds like a great time to wrap this that mine has it actually is any last comments by anybody here, then I will make the last comment, the last couple of comments, which is to say that our show comes out every week. Every Thursday. It's called strangeeons radio. We really appreciate everybody who's out there listening, who's donating, who's calling in, saying really lovely things. And this one will be showing up live shortly. So fingers crossed. If you want your Yeah, this stuff works. You want your voice heard, you got to yell something now. Nothing. Well. Well, then thanks everybody. I hope everybody has a great con, and thank you so much for showing up transportation and other considerations for strange eons, radio produced by Pan Am airlines. When you think of traveling, think of pan and you can't beat the experience. Guest of strange eons radio stay at econo Lodge. Everett. It's an easy stop on the road. 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