Plot: For Kirsty Cotton nightmares never end. Still fresh in her fevered memory are her father’s skinned corpse, the evil machinations of her uncle Frank’s reanimated body and the unspeakable perversity of the Cenobites. But the worst is yet to come. From beyond the Outer Darkness, from the darkest regions of the imagination comes Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

My Review: So this time around the daughter from the first movie is locked up in a loony bin because of what happened to her in the first film. She has a couple funny lines, especially “you have got to destroy that mattress!!” just the way it was delivered cracked me up. Anyhow we get a little recap of the end of the first movie right in the beginning. Then a little while later the daughter retells the whole story. Funny in a way because I stated in my review of Hellraiser that it the whole plot of that movie could have been told as flashbacks in a much better film.

A the movie goes on the we learn that the doctor at the hospital has an obsession with finding a way into the hell that can be reached via the weird puzzle box. He hears Kirsty’s claims about the mattress (from the first movie where Julia died) and brings Julia back. Obsessed with finding out what the other side is like, the doctor gets the help of another patient who just so happens to love puzzles. Then everyone dukes it out in hell.

That’s really all there is to the movie. The characters were all blah to me as well. I just didn’t care about them, and the only back-story they really had was that shit had happened to them in the first movie. I guess I just expected these movies to be totally different then what they so far have been…I expected torture rooms and people being tortured and ripped apart left and right and goriness in all its glory, and I haven’t gotten any of that.

I just kept trying to tell myself that this was another dimension, a hell so to speak, and to get used to it being weird, and having weird creatures. But I guess its just not my thing in the end.

Gore/FX: The muscle suit that Julia wears is obviously a suit, it looked better in the first movie, but she was kinda neat looking in the bright white room. Again I couldn’t help but laugh at the demons. The doctor was hilarious later in the film. The special effects look a lot older then 1988. I do like the last shot at the end with the mattress though.

Sexual Content: Ok, it freaked me out a little when the doctor guy started making out with Mummy Julia and feeling her up. I mean he just bandaged her up cause she looked like a meat/muscle suit. Do these two even know each other? Maybe I missed something. Why are they making out all of the sudden, he can’t be overcome with hornyness after seeing someone with no skin! Or is this a new fetish I am unaware of? There is also hints of incest/molestation between Kirsty and her uncle, there were hints of it in the first film as well.

Acting: Why does Kristy always yell at Pinhead, its not loud in there, she’s yelling at him like she has to yell over some other noise in the room, and he’s talking all normal. The acting for the most part was fine, the actors who played the demons stuck me as being funny, but as I stated before, I think that was because of their looks.

Overall: I suppose I like my horror straight forward…and well at least a little spooky. I didn’t care for the overall story, in either movie, and I thought the demons were funny. Overall this really just isn’t my type of film and by far the first was more entertaining to me. I don’t know why I’m gonna do it, but I’m gonna try to finish off the series and review them.

[rating:1/5]

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