HELLRAISER: JUDGMENT (2018) ½ *

Poor Pinhead has had it rough since we saw him last.  Instead of chilling in Hell, he’s living in a house with a couple of guys.  As far as roommates go, they're not so bad.  One guy hooks people up to his typewriter and interviews them using their blood as ink.  The other guy douses those pages with the tears of children and eats them before barfing it up into a funnel so some S & M babes with pieces of their faces missing can run their hands in the puke and make judgment on them.  

Yeah, I didn't get it either. 

The pre-credits sequence is full of a lot of WTF for WTF’s sake nonsense.  It’s not good or scary.  It’s just WTF and gross. 

If it wasn’t for the occasional cutaway shot to Pinhead, this wouldn’t even feel like a Hellraiser movie.  The new hellish characters like “The Auditor” and “The Assessor” don’t feel like true Cenobites.  In fact, The Assessor is just a fat dude who wears a sports coat with no shirt underneath.

When the plot finally does occur, it’s a blatant rip-off of Hellraiser 5.  That’s right, we’ve got to put up with another drug-addled alcoholic cop hunting down a serial killer.  It was pretty terrible the first time around and things haven’t improved since.  (I guess the filmmakers feel they have to rehash this plotline every five sequels.)  As boring as this shit is, at least there is one gnarly scene where a dog is stitched inside its owner.  That’s the only memorable part though.

The new guy they got to play Pinhead isn’t bad.  He’s a HELL of a lot better than the dude who played him last time around.  Gary J. Tunnicliffe (who’s handled the special effects on the series since Part 3 and also directed this turd) and John Gulager (the director of the Feast movies) fail to make much of an impression as The Auditor and The Assessor respectively.  A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Heather Langenkamp has a bit part as a landlady, but her appearance is too brief to be of much use.

Like most shitty DTV Hellraiser sequels, you have to wait until the very end before you finally get to see some proper Hellraiser shit.  It takes about seventy minutes for them to go to Hell.  Trust me, you'll tell this movie to go to hell a lot sooner than that.