I'm wondering if I'm being a little harsh with my rating this time because there are some good things here, but when I comes right down to it, this is a horror movie completely lacking in scare and suspense. Usually, that is because you don't care about the characters, "So what if this or that air head gets picked off," you say to yourself and disengage from the whole thing. But in this film, I did kind of care about them. I wanted the sister and brother to come to some kind of understanding and they were both fairly good actors. Perhaps the problem is that they were the only good actors. Who could possibly care about the sister and brother's significant others or the roommate whom I didn't know one thing about throughout the entire film.
There were other problems, too. The villains are too fantastic, so it's hard to take the situation seriously. You never know what the rules are and if anything can happen there's no way for you to put yourself into the situation to figure out what you would do.
I did not come to this film as a fan of the franchise. I do kind of like Clive Barker's writing, I very much enjoyed The Thief of Always as a kid and I've liked the adult things of his I've read. But the only Clive Barker movie I've cared for was the original Candyman (and that is just the best of all slasher movies), but the first Hellraiser has some major problems too. Some of the same problems. This sequel does do one thing better than the original, however. In the original, you're given all the weird characters and told all about their problems, but then they are just killed one-by-one, problems solved! I felt like, why did I bother getting involved in theses people's lives. In this one, at least, the story is the main girl's story, and her issues with her brother are worked out through the movie's more fantastic events.
There were other problems, too. The villains are too fantastic, so it's hard to take the situation seriously. You never know what the rules are and if anything can happen there's no way for you to put yourself into the situation to figure out what you would do.
I did not come to this film as a fan of the franchise. I do kind of like Clive Barker's writing, I very much enjoyed The Thief of Always as a kid and I've liked the adult things of his I've read. But the only Clive Barker movie I've cared for was the original Candyman (and that is just the best of all slasher movies), but the first Hellraiser has some major problems too. Some of the same problems. This sequel does do one thing better than the original, however. In the original, you're given all the weird characters and told all about their problems, but then they are just killed one-by-one, problems solved! I felt like, why did I bother getting involved in theses people's lives. In this one, at least, the story is the main girl's story, and her issues with her brother are worked out through the movie's more fantastic events.