I have now of course, given away the plot of Hell Night. As the fraternity and sorority kids creep through passageways of the old house, their candle flames fluttering in the wind, Andrew the Gork picks them off, one by one, in scenes of bloody detail. Finally only Linda Blair is left. Why does she survive? Maybe because she’s a battle-hardened veteran, having previously more or less lived through The Exorcist, Exorcist II: The Heretic, and Born Innocent. At least in those movies, something happened in the first reel.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
(Directed by Tony Randel; starring Ashley Laurence, Clare Higgins; 1988)
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of nightmares, the kind that you actually have, and the kind they make into movies. Real nightmares usually involve frustration or public embarrassment. In the frustrating ones, a loved one is trying to tell you something and you can’t understand them, or they’re in danger and you can’t help them. In the embarrassing ones, it’s the day of the final exam and you forgot to attend the classes, or you’re in front of a crowd and can’t think of anything to say, or you wandered into the hotel lobby without any clothes on, and nobody has noticed you yet—but they’re about to.
Those are scary nightmares, all right, and sometimes they turn up in the movies. But Hellbound: Hellraiser II contains the kinds of nightmares that occur only in movies, because our real dreams have low budgets and we can’t afford expensive kinds of special effects. The movie begins a few hours after the original Hellbound ended. A young girl named Kirsty has been placed in a hospital after a night in which she was tortured by the flayed corpses of her parents, who were under the supervision of the demons of hell. What this girl needs is a lot of rest and a set of those positive-thinking cassettes they advertise late at night on cable TV.
But no such luck. The hospital is simply another manifestation of the underworld, hell is all around us, we are powerless in its grip, and before long Kirsty and a newfound friend named Tiffany are hurtling down the corridors of the damned. Give or take a detail or two, that’s the story. Hellbound: Hellraiser II is like some kind of avant-garde film strip in which there is no beginning, no middle, no end, but simply a series of gruesome images that can be watched in any order.
The images have been constructed with a certain amount of care and craftsmanship; the technical credits on this movie run to four single-spaced pages. We see lots of bodies that have been skinned alive, so that the blood still glistens on the exposed muscles. We see creatures who have been burned and mutilated and twisted into grotesque shapes, and condemned for eternity to unspeakable and hopeless tortures. We hear deep, rasping laughter, as the denizens of hell chortle over the plight of the terrified girls. And we hear their desperate voices calling to each other.
“Kirsty!” we hear. And “Tiffany!” And “Kirsty!!!” and “Tiffany!!!” and “Kirstieeeeeee!!!!!” And “Tiffanyyyyyyy!!!!!” I’m afraid this is another one of those movies where they violate the First Rule of Repetition of Names, which states that when the same names are repeated in a movie more than four times a minute for more than three minutes in a row, the audience breaks out into sarcastic laughter, and some of the ruder members are likely to start shouting “Kirsty! and “Tiffany!” at the screen.
But this movie violates more rules than the First Rule of Repetition. It also violates a basic convention of story construction, which suggests that we should get at least a vague idea of where the story began and where it might be headed. This movie has no plot in a conventional sense. It is simply a series of ugly and bloody episodes, strung together one after another like a demo tape by a perverted special-effects man. There is nothing the heroines can do to understand or change their plight, and no way we can get involved in their story. That makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans, who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here. You’re welcome.
Her Alibi
(Directed by Bruce Beresford; starring Tom Selleck, Paulina Porizkova; 1989)
You know a movie is in trouble when you start looking at your watch. You know it’s in bad trouble when you start shaking your watch because you think it might have stopped. Her Alibi is a movie in the second category—endless, pointless, and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.
He plays a detective-novelist named Blackwood, who has run out of inspiration. So he goes to criminal court for fresh ideas, and there he falls instantly in love with Nina (Paulina Porizkova), a Romanian immigrant who is accused of murdering a young man with a pair of scissors. Blackwood disguises himself as a priest, smuggles himself into jail to meet Nina, and offers to supply her with an alibi: She can claim they were having an affair at his country home in Connecticut at the time of the crime.
These developments, and indeed the entire movie, are narrated by Blackwood in the language of a thriller novel he is writing as he goes along. One of the minor curiosities of the movie is why the Selleck character is such a bad writer. His prose is a turgid flow of cliché and stereotype, and when we catch a glimpse of his computer screen, we can’t help noticing that he writes only in capital letters. Although the movie says he’s rich because of a string of best-sellers, on the evidence this is the kind of author whose manuscripts are returned with a form letter.
If the plot of his novel is half-witted, the plot of the movie is lame-brained. Blackwood and Nina move to Connecticut to make the alibi look good, and they’re shadowed by a band of Romanian spies who make several murder attempts against them, including one in which they blow up Blackwood’s house. The movie betrays its desperation by straying outside the confines of even this cookie-cutter plot for such irrelevant episodes as the one where Blackwood shoots himself in the bottom with an arrow, and is rushed to the hospital by Nina in one of those cut-and-dried scenes where the racing vehicle scares everyone else off the road before arriving safe and sound.
In a movie filled with groaningly bad moments, the worst is no doubt the dinner party at which Blackwood becomes convinced that Nina has poisoned him and everybody else at the table. Why does he think so? Because the cat is dead, next to a bowl filled from the same casserole. We are treated to the sight of eight characters doing the dry heaves, and then another visit to the hospital, after which we learn it’s all a false alarm and the cat was accidentially electrocuted in a neighbor’s basement and returned by the solicitous neighbor to a resting place beside the suspicious bowl. Uh-huh.
The explanation for the whole story is equally arbitrary and senseless, and the big reconciliation scene between the two lovers is not helped by taking place at a clown’s convention, with Selleck wearing a red rubber ball on his nose. But for a full appreciation of just how much contempt Her Alibi has for the audience, reflect for a moment on the movie’s last scene, in which Blackwood and Nina are back home again at last in the snug Connecticut farmhouse, for a big love scene and a fade-out. The people who made this movie apparently actually forgot that they blew the house up half an hour earlier.