Director: Kevin Yagher/Joe Chappelle
Writer: Peter Atkins/Rand Ravich
Starring: Doug Bradley
Body Count: 7
Review: Following on the footsteps of his work on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers, director Joe Chappelle takes what was probably at one time a really good movie and fucks it up royally.
Hellraiser: Bloodline takes place in three different times, as seen through one man and his descendents. The film begins in the 1700s with the creation of the puzzle box, then moves ahead to 1996, and finally sometime in the distant future, where on a massive space station, the young man descended from the box's creator sets out to do battle with Pinhead and the Cenobites.
Unfortunately, this movie just more or less...sucks. It's hard to pinpoint what's wrong, but perhaps some explanation lies in the turbulent history of the project.
Special-effects wizard Kevin Yagher (creator of the Chucky doll effects from Child's Play), meant for this to be his directorial debut. Instead, Miramax/Dimension went over his head so far that he dropped out of the project, and Joe Chappelle was asked to come in and stitch the movie together piece by piece. The puzzle he constructed is a piece of shit--and a boring one at that. No good deaths, no great one-liners...this movie's just no good. And it's not even 90 minutes long!
Worthless...
Trivia: Kevin Yagher dropped out of the project, and as a result, the credits read Alan Smithee (the Director's Guild official name for projects where the director has quit or wishes to remain annonymous). In addition, Peter Atkins developed the original story (the one Yagher was working from), but he was overruled by Dimension and Chappelle, and so a new writer, Rand Ravich, was brought in.
