Director: Scott Derrickson
Writer: Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson
Starring: Doug Bradley
Body Count: 10
Review: Against all the negative criticism I heard about this film, I held out hope. I mean, hey, it had to be an improvement over Hellraiser: Bloodline, right?
Wrong. Everything you've probably heard about Inferno is true. The movie is awful. Pinhead and Chatterer (or MAYBE he's Chatterer) are the only two cenobites to show up in the film and their screen time combined only amounts to maybe five minutes. The story is boring, inane, and treads old ground. The only thing I heard about the movie that wasn't true was that there was a decent amount of gore. There is not. There may be a decent body count, but most of the murders are done off-screen, or in such a way that little bloodletting is seen.
So, yeah, the filmmakers failed to make this one better than Bloodline; but at least they did try. The story of this fifth film in the series tells the tale of a corrupt police detective on a downward spiral to Hell. In truth, there was a rather nice, refreshing morality to the story--the detective coming to terms with how he's treated people and how that has doomed his own soul (sort of a horror-version of A Christmas Carol). But this element is done so poorly and leaves so much more to be desired that it is almost lost amid the huge sea of just plain badness that is Hellraiser: Inferno.
I can see why Clive Barker took his name off of this. If there is indeed a follow-up to Inferno (as I've heard is the plan), let's just hope that they take a slightly different (and, if nothing, less boring!) route than the makers of this waste of time.