So, over the past week, I watched both Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and Candyman.

Hellbound was better than I expected. Apparently the franchise doesn't quite become "All Pinhead, all the time" until Hellraiser 3. I enjoyed the reappearance of Julia. (According to Douglas Winter, Barker intended for Julia to be the continuing villain character of the series. Might have been interesting if it had worked out that way. Julia is deliciously evil and surprisingly sympathetic. Pinhead is deliciously evil and intriguingly inhuman. You run into the problem with Pinhead that you can't keep making movies about him without destroying the very air of mystery that made him interesting. Would Julia have become less sympathetic with each passing film? Probably. Though I liked her in Hellbound, I think it was mostly hold-over affection from Hellraiser.)

Anyway, the biggest problem with Hellbound is pacing. The first part (before the puzzle box is solved and the gate to Hell opens) feels a bit leisurely. The rest is a hectic series of chases and set piece confrontations. There are too many villains, and our heroines, Kirsty and Tiffany, must have a dramatic showdown with each of them. Plus some of them get to have dramatic showdowns with each other. Kirsty escapes Cenobites, Kirsty battles Frank, Julia betrays Frank, Julia betrays Channard, Kirsty and Tiffany escape Julia, Kirsty and Tiffany confront Cenobites, Channard battles Cenobites, and so on.

Also, I hate to say it, but this film shows its small budget much more than Hellraiser did -- even though I'm sure that Hellbound had a much larger budget. The filmmakers do a pretty good job of evoking Hell with a couple of stone corridors and a few models. But when Channard becomes a Cenobite and sprouts tentacles with scalpel and surgical drill attachments, they look cheap.

Still, some good scares. I will say that the Hellraiser franchise has built up some good "boo!" credibility with me: when the camera does a close-up shot on a character, and starts to pan slowly around them, and the music gets creepy -- I tense up, because I know that the camera is going to show me something creepy.

Candyman was certainly more artistically successful than Hellbound, and arguably more artful than Hellraiser, though I'm still not sure if I liked it more than the latter film. I liked the way it made use of urban legends. It makes the supernatural elements seem like they might be part of the viewer's lives, just lurking around the corner.

Just as an example: after watching the film, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. Looking at the medicine cabinet with the mirror on the front, I realized that it was very like the ones pictured in the film. It was inset into a relatively thing wall (I know my walls are thin; I can hear my neighbors through them.) I could imagine if I pried it out of the wall, I would see the back of the neighbor's medicine cabinet, and if I pushed that out, I'd be able to enter their apartment.

Or, if they were a homicidal maniac, they could enter mine.

Then something clunked on the other side of the wall, and I jumped a little bit. But fortunately, I don't live next to any homicidal maniacs.

Overall, the film didn't quite feel complete. It hints at a lot of things that it didn't quite have time to explore. There's also a rather jarring transition in the middle: Helen loses consciousness, and then wakes up in an impossible situation that plays out like a dream sequence: complete with slow motion, crazy camera angles, etc. You keep waiting for her to wake up, but she never does. The "dream sequence" is reality, and the film simply continues on from there. That could actually have been a kind of cool effect -- mirroring in the viewer the kind of "this can't be happening to me" feeling that Helen must have -- but the major effect it had on me was to leave me confused and uncertain for several minutes, and I think I never quite got back into sync with Helen. I wonder what it would feel like on second viewing.

There are a couple of Candyman sequels. I don't know if I'll bother to rent them. I wonder how they get around the fact that the Candyman has (apparently) been destroyed and Helen has taken his place? Probably they ignored it, the way they ignored Pinhead's death and the possibility of Julia's return at the end of Hellbound. (Funny that Barker keeps wanting to hand the villain role off to a woman, and the Hollywood powers-that-be hand it right back to the man. There's a metaphor there that probably doesn't bear being read too closely.)

Odd bit of trivia that one notices watching these two films in close proximity. The fake blood used in Hellbound is very bright red and fairly thin, except in places where it's been thickened with gelatin. The fake blood used in Candyman is darker and thicker, more opaque. I wonder if this reflects changing fashions in film blood, or if it was dictated by something else. (I have a feeling that in Candyman, liberal applications of fake blood were used to avoid having to show the underlying alleged wounds. I'm sure the MPAA (not to mention viewers! Well, this viewer for sure!) would have balked at realistic depictions of people who had been split open with large hooks. Ew.)

Well, time for me to run. See y'all later.