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THE ABSOLUTE WORST. The Hellraiser film franchise is one that suffered from a severe downturn in quality early on and yet continues to be expanded by studio greed and easy returns exploiting fan's love of the property. The first two films are considered classics of the genre by most fans of horror and rightfully so. They've earned their spot in the horror pantheon for variant reasons. But it gets sketchy from that point forward. Even though the series has seen some truly awful entries in it's long history even the worst doesn't compare to the abominable dreck that was Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth.
Plagued by countless production troubles, studio buyouts, and the heavy hand of the Weinsteins, the majority of the blame really lies in the director's clumsy hands. Hickox was not favored by Barker, cut corners like crazy, and cast friends and made an already compromised product into something far worse. In the end the movie is nothing but z-grade rubbish that even the once powerful presence of Doug Bradley as Pinhead can't save. Horrid acting, basement level effects, terrible soundtrack, a severe lack of scope and creativity, and some of the worst and most staged looking shots in horror history.
Clive Barker has denounced it and, though the studio allowed him to try to go in and fix the product after it was shot, it proved too much of a disaster to salvage. Initial drafts of the script from Atkins and Randal were done away with and rewritten to the point where they went from ambitious to downright uninspired and trashy. The result was a by the numbers schlockfest that is best left unseen and forgotten.
In the annals of horror history this goes down as the absolute most poisonous entry in a franchise and considering some of the movies that followed are pretty bottom of the barrel already that says a lot. Not even remotely worth seeing if you're a die hard fan. Upon rewatching this trash i went from hating it to wanting to destroy every print in existence.
