Macabre...ish Horror Review: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2

by Kimberly Walker July 28, 2019

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, 1988/ 93 min.

An Officer with the British Military, Elliot Spencer, using the puzzle box opens the doorway to the world of Cenobites and becomes Pinhead.

After being traumatized, losing her parents and crossing paths with Cenobites, Kristy is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She recounts her experience and pleads with the doctor to destroy the bloody mattress but, seemingling, only one person believes her.

Unbeknownst to her, the doctor has been searching for that specific puzzle box, the Lament Configuration, for years, having procured others. After hearing Kristy's story, he retrieves the mattress and brings it to his home as well as a deranged patient, who he leaves on the mattress, cutting himself with a straight razor. His flowing blood, freeing Julia from the Cenobite's dimension, and like Frank, she is whole, with the exception of her skin.

Kristy then meets a patient, Tiffany, who is adept at solving puzzles. That same night, she dreams her father is trapped in Hell and decides to try to help him escape, with MacRae, who is the assistant who believes her story and witnessed the doctor's collection as well as the summoning of Julia.

Meanwhile, the doctor keeps a regular flow of mental patients for Julia to feed on, their bodies stacking up in his attic and Julia mostly whole again, kills MacRae. Completing her transformation.

The doctor then kidnaps Tiffany using her as a proxy to open the box, he and Julia enter the world of Cenobites. There they discover that it is not enough to simply open the box, "it is not the hands that call but the desire". And so the doctor is attacked, instead of Tiffany.

Pinhead then reconfigures the box and traps them into a labyrinth and the story becomes more bleak and treacherous, with new cenobites and a cenobite power grab and more death.

This movie manages to be more dark and bleak than the first. The effects are still as good, a somewhat convoluted story and also has many of the same characters as the original. It's bloody, gory and violent. This is a continuation of the first.

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