The scene is basically a time capsule of the 1980s in under five minutes. It starts with a riff on A-ha’s “Take On Me” video, puts Freddy on a skateboard for some reason, includes a fairly creepy moment with a porcelain doll, makes some sort of commentary on the then-prevalent gritty, ‘roided-out superhero comic book fad, unironically uses the phrase “Super Freddy,” and then has our titular Elm Street nightmare go in for the kill while yelling about how comics will rot your brain.
So, does Freddy then actually rot our hero’s brain? Go into his head and watch it wilt away? Pull it out of his head and stomp on the festering grey matter? Or do we follow up on the Punisher-esque gun battle, reveling in gratuitous violence? Does he remember that he came in on a skateboard and start ollie-ing off the guy’s face? Nope! None of the above!
Our burned badass instead turns his victim into a cartoony drawing – one that doesn’t resemble the art of any of the comics they were riffing on – and then Freddy viciously attacks a literal paper cut-out. Close-ups of his iconic glove slicing up construction paper do not have the intended effect. Unless, of course, that effect was for the audience to be all, “Oh, crap, this movie is not good.”
Cenobite Camerahead Zooms a Guy to Death
In the sprawling pantheon of monster movies and slasher flicks, the Hellraiser series has always stood on its own. They are, as Katie Rife of The A.V. Club once called them, occult art projects, intellectual horror films obsessed with flaying people alive and making haunted Rubik’s cubes seem not stupid. They’re also big on speeches, delivered with legit gravitas, about the thin line between pain and pleasure and how Cenobites are considered demons to some and angels to others. Like this:
The first Hellraiser also reveled in gratuitous gore, putting on a damn masterclass in practical effects.
And then there’s Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. Whoever was in charge of creating new Cenobites – you know, the S&M-looking torture angels – kind of ran out of ideas. Sure, there’s Barbie, a flame-spitting demon wrapped in barbed wire; that’s some solid Cenobiting right there … but then there’s Camerahead and CD.
Camerahead is a former cameraman with a camera in his head. That’s his whole deal. When he decides to murder a guy, he just zooms the camera in his face through the other guy’s face, all while making a Freddy Krueger-style pun. Not to be outdone, CD murders people by ejecting compact discs from his chest and then throwing them like he was Gambit locked inside a Circuit City.
I guess it’s a commentary on, I don’t know, consumerism? The media? The film was made in 1992. Grunge was just getting big and people were getting very cynical, even if they didn’t always know where to aim it.
What’s really messed up is that this isn’t even the worst Hellraiser movie; Hell on Earth is actually one of the better ones. Camerahead and CD stand out because there’s still something halfway decent around them. Because, unfortunately, the Hellraiser movies are pretty much the definition of diminishing returns.
But, hey, maybe the gritty reboot coming will fix everything.
Eirik Gumeny is the author of the Exponential Apocalypse series, a five-book saga of slacker superheroes, fart jokes, and assorted B-movie monsters, and he recently added werewolves and assassins to The Great Gatsby. He’s on Twitter a bunch, too.
Top Image: Miramax Films
5 Embarrassing Low Points Of Fearsome Horror Movie Villains
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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