Cheap Hellraiser 3 - Hell on Earth [IMPORT] (DVD) (Doug Bradley, Terry Farrell) Price

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Customer Reviews of Hellraiser 3 - Hell on Earth [IMPORT]

Paramount took over the franchise (New World Pictures folded) and turned Hellraiser into something more akin to a slasher movie. They keep Pinhead on the screen far too long, which in a horror movie is a no-no. He suffers from Freddy Kruegerc Syndrome, where instead of finding the character creepy, you become familiar with him until he starts injecting humor into the whole thing.

This is not a good entry point to the series. The franchise comes across as plain cheesy at times in this entry. Yet, it seems like they had all of the elements in place. Clive Barker is producing, Tony Randle and Peter Atkins (who were involved with Hellbound) return to pen the story, and you've got the always-game Doug Bradley as Pinhead. Yet it is an unfortunate departure from the tone of the first two films.

Pinhead starts the movie trapped inside the Pillar of Souls, which is purchased by nightclub owner JP Monroe for his own collection. Meanwhile, the mysterious and head bursting death of a young man by way of hooks and chains in the ER one night leads intrepid reporter Joey Summerskill on the trail of the Lament Configuration.

This movie rounds out the origin of Pinhead that was touched on in Hellbound. Following the end of that film, Pinhead is free of his human half and comes to earth as a truly dark and unmerciful figure. Hell on Earth has a high body count, including the massacre of an entire club full of people. There is also the unforgivable sin of several bad one-liners following grisly deaths, namely by the Camerahead Cenobite. Speaking of Cenobites, Pinhead now seems capable of creating them at the drop of a hat for his own purposes. They cheapify the whole thing by giving us a CD-Cenobite who throws deadly discs, the aforementioned Camera Head guy with the awful lines, and a cool-looking but
equally pointless Bartender Cenobite who mixes fiery drinks. Cripes. Bring back the Chatterer!

Overall, the film just fudges with the Hellraiser mythos that made the first two films stand out from the rest of the horror movie pack of the time. Not a slasher series, Hellraiser is given a working over in Hell on Earth for some cheap thrills.

At the end of the day, I don't hate the movie as many fans do. I sat back and had some fun. I found the follow-up, Bloodline, to be an ambitious failure. I think the series returned to the spirit of Barker's original story with the later Inferno and Hellseeker, both released straight to DVD following the bad taste left by Hell on Earth and Bloodline.

The DVD is awful, one of the worst I've seen. It says Special Edition, but that's a complete joke. This looks like a VHS copy of the film. We get no widescreen, we get no extras, no sound work over, no nothing. The cheapest, barest bones DVD I've seen in a long time. This movie needs a proper release with some extras in the hope of some redemption.

Recommended for fans of the series, as you'll want to see them all. Otherwise this might satisfy genre fans on a slow night.

Decent Film, Horrendous DVD
Stay away from his cheap videocassette copy. That's right, this is a plain Video Cassette copied onto a DVD, it looks [bad] and the sound is garbage. A new, cheap ... copy is coming... It's gotta be better than this garbage.

at least no.3 is available
wish it was widescreen or letterbox .
It looked like they took it from a old video tape grainy like old low res video.
hopefully they will re-release it from the original print in widescreen and add thx to the sound or DTS along with the extra footage.
they might consider this an import just because of it being lions head a canadian company.
all the video reviews look like they are for the same version so you can't tell what version they were revewing.
The tech details don't say what company all the info comes from the reviews.
mine is a 2001 release cat.no. 14556E region one.
plot was ok but a little short.
they need to release a box set after hellseeker.