I didn't think Hulu Hellraiser was great or anything, but not bad. Gotta admit that I'm not a fan of the Hellraiser series like some folks out there are; I own the first two and have watched them a lot. Not sure how many of the post-Hellbound sequels I've seen because it was a long time ago that I watched them, but they ranged from "whatever" to "downright awful" for me. Hulu Hellraiser was at least better than those sequels. I also liked it much more than Halloween Kills and/or Ends, as well as that awful Suspiria remake/reimagination for whatever that's worth.
I agree with ya on where it ranks, and I will say as well that its eons better than the Suspiria one. I couldn't get into the Suspiria reimagining as the runtime got me, plus too dramatically different than the original. Hellraiser at least kept to its' roots it felt like, with some nice additions to the mythology. I vaselate between it ranking before or after the third one. Hell on Earth is kinda off, but shit, compared to the rest of the sequels, it was far superior.
So I ended up just rewatching all the Hellraisers over the past week or so, and whew, it was indeed meandering. Most of them were on Cinemax OD, in at least really better vid quality than I originally had. All I had was an old fullscreen DVD multipmovie pack of 3-8 particularly.
Like I said, part three could have been so much better and a majority of instances made no fucking sense in the context of the Hellraiser universe, but I thought as an extension to the second film, it delivered somewhat. This was the first of the series I ended up seeing way back when, so that might explain why I still dig it.
I mentioned already the mess that was Bloodline, and to think this was their idea to kill off Pinhead too....wow. Just bizzare. The workprint cut on YouTube wasnt much better, really.
From this point, the films really shift into a lesser quality (although some are surely better than Bloodline, a low bar to reach) and many feel like a seperate original story with a Hellraiser addition rewrite added to it in pre production. In a few of them, that certainly was the case. I'd say most are tolerable, but particulary Revelations and Judgment are just straight up atrocious. I think both were done to simply keep the franchise with Dimension at the time.
The last one with Doug Bradley was Hellworld (part 8), and what an underwhelming one to go out on. That was filmed back to back with Deader, I felt one of the better sequels past part 3. I remember at the time that both of those were in some sort of shelved hell of sorts for years after they were filmed.
Hellseeker was pretty decent too, that was the one with the Kristy character returning, presumably dying, only to reveal she made another deal with Pinhead to avoid her own death. Apparently there was some plans to follow up Hellseeker with a follow up Kristy vs Pinhead finale type of film, but then came Deader instead. That was always the thing missing from a Hellraiser followup, too bad it never happened.
11) Revelations
10) Judgment
9) Bloodline
8) Hellworld
7) Inferno
6) Hellseeker
5) Deader
4) 2022 Remake
3) Hell on Earth
2) Hellbound
1) Hellraiser
