Bounding Into Halloween, Night 10: It’s Closing Time At “90s Week” With ‘Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth’ & ‘Cube’ Taking Us Home
We have reached then end of our journey through the 20th Century’s final decade. It’s not a hard place to get lost within while seeking respite from the real-life horrors of modern times, but it doesn’t erase the fact that the 1990s are gone, and there will never be enough boom boxes, boy bands, and bloody gloves to bring back those comparatively much simpler days.
Before returning to the grid (and grind) of the “Screeching Twenties (patent pending!)” there’s one more night of 90s jams to finish. Both will test your callousness at the sight of extreme bodily harm, your capability of suspending disbelief, and your competence at solving puzzles. Now, come, we have such sights to show you…
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
Doug Bradley returns to the iconic role of Hell Priest (aka Pinhead) in this follow-up to the disturbingly graphic 1988 horror classic, Hellbound: Hellraiser II. When we last left our hero, his soul had been bifurcated after remembering his former life prior to becoming a lead torture master in Hell’s labyrinth, and that led to his prompt termination as Lead Cenobite. His human side was sent to limbo while his “evil” side manifested into its own separate entity, imprisoned within a large, sculptured pillar of tortured souls for all eternity, along with the Lament Configuration (aka The Box).
Unfortunately, the “Pillar of Souls” is bought by a scummy night club owner named J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt). This sex-crazed fellow manages to pull a “Frank Cotton” and partially resurrects the Hell Priest after accidentally splashing the pillar with his blood.
After helping Monroe ghost a lingering one-night stand from his bedroom, the talking statue gets the greedy ETSY version of Matt Dillion to agree to help him get back on his feet in return for more flesh, more power, and more dominion. Once freed, this incarnation of Captain Elliot Spencer’s id plans to permanently close the gates of Hell and turn Earth into his own personal dark paradise of pain.
Already greenlit before the release of Hellraiser II, this movie went into temporary developmental hell after 20th Century Fox flayed Clive Barker’s 2nd feature, Nightbreed (1990), with their post-production meddling. They released a mutilated mess to the confounded masses who cursed it to a dark nether realm that makes Midian look like a Hobbit Hole full of good food, and all the comforts of home. This caused Barker’s production company, Film Futures, to go bankrupt, and he wouldn’t even get involved with the project until after post-production.
This entry would see the series depart from its British roots and forever become an American-made product that further deviated from its creator’s vision with every sequel that followed. The generally impartial Hell Priest became the next kill-crazy movie monster for a post-slasher era, but his brutal methods still put his contemporaries to shame, and the same goes for his superior linguistic skills (courtesy of screenwriter/Bartender Cenobite, Peter Atkins).
One side note with mentioning is that the director, Anthony Hickox (Waxwork, Full Eclipse), died in Romania two years ago at the not-too-old age of sixty-four, and the cause of death has never been made public. Nothing can be found about it online, or anything that suggests that he was in poor health, but it might be best to just whistle past that quiet graveyard and go rent Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth off of Prime.
Below is the video for the Motörhead song “Hellraiser” off of the Hellraiser III soundtrack that was directed by Clive Barker, and it features the Hell Priest playing a game of poker against the band’s late frontman (and eternal Metal God), Lemmy Kilmister.
Cube (1997)
While the last movie shows the terrors that come from out of a puzzle box, the next feature takes viewers inside of one. It comes from the land of maple, hockey, and not-too-terrible beer. A cult classic that’s an enigma wrapped inside an enigma, and sucker-punched by parable, it’s also proof that a Sci-Fi Channel debut didn’t always denote a death sentence for a movie. From director, Vincenzo Natali (Splice, Come True), this is Cube.
It’s about five people who’ve been imprisoned inside of a giant labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms that contain deadly booby traps, and the rooms randomly shift around like puzzle pieces. It’s up to a math student (Nicole de Boer), an idealist doctor (Nicky Guadagni), a prison escape artist (Wayne Robson), an asshole cop (Maurice Dean Wint), and a desk jokey with a big secret (David Hewlett) to find a way out of the world’s worse funhouse.
Conceived with the assistance of mathematician David W. Pravica, the Cube prison is made up of an outward cubic shell that kinda acts like a sarcophagus with an estimated 17,576 rooms (give or take) on the inside. Each room is labeled with a particular set of three numbers that the prisoners try to use for coordinating the progress of their attempted escape, but that fails when they realize that the rooms never stay in the same place for a very long time.
Cube harkens back to a time of guerilla-style filmmaking without even a full shoestring for a budget. The effects are dated, but they’re still a marvel when compared to the abominations that were premiering on Sci-Fi at the time, and the movie’s aesthetic perfectly captures the bleak cyberpunk atmosphere that brought such a special unique flavor to the late 90s.
Reserve a room right now on TUBI but beware the powers of prime numbers. Here’s the trailer:
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