Pinhead sucks as a villain

You may want to check out part 3. Pinhead is the main villain and he at his nastiest. That may be more of what you were expecting.

I agree with him being probably his nastiest in part 3.

He wasn't really meant to be a main villain in the first (that was meant to be Uncle Frank). Pinhead became one of those horror icons you'd see on VHS covers in the old rental stores, but he wasn't depicted like that Clive Barker's original short story, "The HellBound Heart." He's more impressive there.

It's a decent read, especially if you like Barker's other stuff.  You can read it here for free:  photo.goodreads.com/documents/1240860240books/52635.pdf

Have to agree with kingkoopa and Marv on this one. In the first movie, he’s meant to be mysterious; a figure that makes you question his presence. Too bad the advertising falsely claimed him as the central focus.

Yeah, he was defeated rather easily but the majority of the film is focused on Frank and Julia - the main villains - so when they die the story feels finished. It would make somewhat sense to kill off the Cenobites off so quickly because they no longer have a part in the story rather than to torment Kirsty because why the hell not. It makes the movie have this chaotic ending with all the destruction.

However, I do agree that they handled the deaths of the Cenobites pretty poorly in the second film; one of the worse things about that one.

As others have said, Frank.is the main villain in the first. Pinhead doesn't even have a name in it, he's just credited as "Lead Cenobite". He became the poster child because he looks awesome and Doug Bradley is a scene stealer.

He is perhaps the most underutilized horror icon, though. He's a secondary villain in the first couple, then later sequels weren't written as Hellraiser movies so he just gets jammed in here and there. Now Bradley has left. Just a lot of missed opportunities for Pinhead to live up to his full potential.

Pinhead never impressed me.

Here's a movie I would watch.


The trailer would start with Jason stalking through the woods with the familiar ch-ch-ch music playing until he stops--inexplicably seeing a fashionably dressed dark-haired woman with blank expression at the end of a white glassy tunnel. The music switches to a romantic aria sound with a woman singing in songbird mode. He follows her, and seemingly without any fear she waltzes into an adjoining room where Jason follows. The room is designed like a hockey net, but the netting is razor sharp, and it traps and constricts on him, cutting him to ribbons.
We see a figure in white robes next to the woman fling a hockey puck into the net next to the mask.


Then we see Freddy in his boiler room set-and once again the woman appears, and Freddy follows her into a bedroom. He jumps on the bed and says something about "sweet dreams" and as he does, he realizes the bed is made of whipped cream. He starts sinking into the bed until he is totally smothered. The same white figure places a big cherry on the top of it by his hat.

Then Michael Myers appears. Same thing-he chases the care-free woman into a house. He thinks he corners her in a closet. But when he opens it, she is gone, and he is impaled on a giant rubber butcher knife. The same white figure puts a couple of wrapped candies on each of Michael's eye sockets.



Then we see an organ rising up from a floor. There's a mechanical band playing to the side of it.
The white figure is seen at the organ, playing.
He turns to the camera, it's Dr. Phibes.
He's come back to get rid of all the horror movie stars that came after him.

He’s kind of an antihero...or a neutral antagonist.