Rank/Rate the Hellraiser movies

Again, it's been a while since I've seen most of these, and I didn't grow up with this series like I did the other classic horror franchise series, so that original film had always been hyped up as this classic to me, and maybe I was just underwhelmed when I saw it. I did think it was easily the best of them, but the character dynamics didn't do much for me. The daughter is innocent, everyone else is despicable and deserves to suffer, then there's a lot of gore and suffering, the end.

Great makeup effects though. Pinhead's look is iconic, obviously, but the regenerating body of exposed muscle tissue is an extraordinary design and actually looks great functionally. 

The movies all generally have good makeup effects, but the ones I didn't like in the second one were the background effects. Obvious matte painting and shoddy sets took away from the obvious next step of putting the characters in the realm of hell. Bur it all looked really cheap and unconvincing to me at the time I saw it. It was an ambitious approach, but my guess is that the budget was too low to pull off what they were aiming for. And I became really annoyed by the dialogue and the girls yelling each others names to each other with an echoey sound effect.

But these first two movies are clearly beloved, and that alone warrants another viewing in the near future. And I do like the concepts behind it all.

I actually enjoyed Judgment quite a bit, but that's mostly because I had extremely low expectations for it. My rating is not especially high for it, but much higher than it was for the last one, which set my bar extremely low. 

The plot is a bit convoluted, the police procedural approach was done a lot better in Inferno, the low budget results in the police department consisting of apparently one room and two total cops who are brothers and one other lady, the twist ending of the mystery plot is extremely obvious, the gross out scenes are out of place and dumb, some of the costumes look cheap including Pinhead's exposed ribs, the inclusion of the 'other side of the coin' is novel but not well handled and makes both sides seem too small, the way they solve the mystery is pretty silly, the bad guy monologue is cheap and poor writing, and the entire existence of the guy who eats child tear soaked pages of your sins and vomits into a trough is stupid and out of place, and there isn't really any character worth caring about or developed into something approaching a real person.

With all that said, it's a thousand times better than the last one. It is clearly cheap, but it's shot with some level of style, and Paul T. Taylor is actually quite good in the Pinhead role. I might have been annoyed if I knew that the 'Auditor' character was played by the writer/director/makeup artist ahead of time, but I found out later, and he's actually pretty good. He's given a lot of screen time, but I would never have guessed that he wasn't really a professional actor. He's one of the best things in the movie, and the makeup design looks really good and is perfectly in line with he series.

Also, the ending is actually pretty ballsy and interesting. The main character's story doesn't really matter at all, but what happens to the character that we actually all came to see could set up decent sequel potential, provided they move ahead with something related and don't just scrap everything and remake it like Clive Barker apparently wants to. 

Considering this one was super cheap and also, it seems, another attempt at just retaining the rights before they expire, it was a lot better than I could have expected, and if they actually give this same guy some more time and some level of a budget he might be able to make good on a better sequel that was set up here.

But we'll see. I think the Weinstein company selling to new ownership complicates all of that.