Hot on the hells of Clive Barker’s nightmarish ode to demonic cuckery, Hellraiser, from out of the shadows and into the black light came the satanic sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, a vast labyrinth of infernal imagery and chilling characters that bested the original and, sadly, ensured that the still-ongoing series could never reach these serpentine highs again.
Still dealing with the pure trauma of seeing her father pulled apart by hooks and chains — it’ll screw you up every time — young Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, Warlock III: The End of Innocence) is being kept in an unsettling mental hospital run by the perverse Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham, The Legend of Hercules), a man intent on stupidly opening a gateway to hell. The guy is also a serious collector of Lament Configurations and even has a mute girl who conveniently likes to solve puzzles, mostly as a way to deal with her mother’s murder.
Channard, using the infamous bloody mattress from the first film as a protein-rich conduit, resurrects Julia (Clare Higgins, Ready Player One), Kirsty’s spiteful stepmom, now apparently risen to unholy power as the Queen of Hell or a position of equal malevolence. Meanwhile, Kirsty’s uncle (and Julia’s former lover), Frank (Sean Chapman, Psychosis), is being tortured on the daily by ghostly nudes that he can never touch. I know the feeling, Frank!
Kirsty, on the other hand, has her own devilish date with the dark side: travelling through the mazes of the underworld to rescue her father (Andrew Robinson, Into the Badlands), seemingly sent to hell by mistake. But when Pinhead (Doug Bradley, Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines) and his cadre of cenobites show up to torture her nubile flesh, she makes yet another deal with the saints of sensual suffering in a bid to stop Julia and the updated Cenobite Channard, who is now floating about with a syphilitic penis attached to his cranium.
With a sadistic streak that momentarily alarms as much as it eternally arouses, Amityville 1992 director Tony Randel — not that one, unfortunately — entrenches us even further into Barker’s world of godless sin and sanctity, creating a far more bitter version of hell than has ever been seen on film, presided over by an immense monolith called Leviathan, which occasionally shoots glowing spheres of ’80s special effects at interlopers.
To be fair, I thought this netherworld would have better security that that, but I guess that probably isn’t erotic enough for Pinhead and his pals. —Louis Fowler
Since having a stroke over a year ago, I’ve lost close to 200 pounds. And, even though I’m considerably older than the titular Brittany in Brittany Runs a Marathon, how the world’s opinion changes — for good and bad — when you drastically change yourself is so honestly depicted here that, unless you’ve been through it, you’ll probably never understand.
The tribulations that Brittany goes through to get to the marathon, from dealing with random food binges to mysterious leg pains to an Instagram roommate who tells her she be fat again soon, is an earnest account of an unhealthy person trying to change not only her outer self, but her inner self as well. That being said, it is also dramatically funny at times when it doesn’t intrinsically hurt.
After helming nine documentaries on 
Reads the opening crawl of the geopolitical goofball 