Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)

Directed by Kevin Yagher [Other horror films: N/A]

Quite possibly better put-together than the third movie, certainly with more ambitious ideas, my problem with Bloodline has always been that it just feels rather soulless.

Cenobites vs. the Merchant family during three different time periods (late 1700’s France, 1990’s New York City, and futuristic space time) didn’t enthrall me. None of the three ages did much to interest me at all. Part of this is possibly because it seems wholly removed from the previous attempts.

And it brings far more questions than it even gets close to answering, such as why Angelique became a Cenobite after the New York sequence, and why exactly didn’t the finale in New York finish up the Cenobite problem. None of these are really answered, and sadly, that’s not all they brought forth without explanation.

Aside from Pinhead, Angelique, and the Siamese Twins, there’s no additional Cenobites in the film, unless you count the Chatterer-based dog, which utterly sucked every time it was on-screen. Doug Bradley did well as Pinhead, again had some good lines (“Do I look like someone who cares what God thinks?”), but Angelique and the Twins bored me to death.

It’s not as though the movie didn’t have potential, especially with such an ambitious story, layered such as it is. There are a few solid performances, such as the aforementioned Bradley, Bruce Ramsay, and Kim Myers (Lisa from the second A Nightmare on Elm Street), but does anyone really stand out? Not quite. Possibly because, like I said, the final product didn’t have much soul.

There was a troubled production behind this film, and the director himself rather disowned it and left before filming was finished, so as to why it occasionally feels as some topics are left untouched on, this strikes me as being the most likely reason.

Regardless, the movie, as it is, isn’t worth much. Many of the death scenes were rather ehh (and that mirror scene was atrocious), and the special effects were, shall we say, not really worth mentioning in a positive light.

I didn’t care much for the third movie. However, if I were asked to choose only the third or fourth to watch again in the future, without much hesitation, despite the ambitions this movie possessed, I’d go with the third. I’ve seen Bloodline something like four times now, and it’s disappointed me for hopefully the last time. Might be worth a watch should you be a Hellraiser fan, but it didn’t do it for me.

5/10