PLOT: A troubled man is framed by his therapist and killed by police in a shootout. He passes to the plane of existence called Midian and taken in by benevolent monsters that work to help him stop the murderer.
This one’s done by Clive Barker, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise if I said this was like a mirror image of Hellraiser. Here, instead of monsters coming into our world to inflict pain with Pinhead’s sense of sadomasochism, our monsters in this one – at least most of them – are poor trapped souls in another plane of existence. The real monster here is a therapist that pins a string of murders on his patient. That monster, for some reason, is played by David Cronenberg.
I love Hellraiser, and this one is kind of feels like it could’ve been a sequel or a spinoff movie of that series. It’s better than most of the sequels, but never reaches the greatness that is the first two films. This one is ultimately cheesier than those, but it still does some great makeup work and I thought the scenes where Cronenberg’s character was in active serial killer mode were great.
Overall
Kind of a forgotten film, but it’s a nice, easy companion to the Hellraiser films if you want something without the bondage aesthetic. It gets kind of incomprehensible if you try to decipher what the actual rules of Midian are, but it also doesn’t really require that much attention to details.
I could never get into nightbreed. It was always that one horror film that is well lived in the horror community and the one film I hated and felt like there was something wrong for me to think that way.