Every few years studio Dimension hammers out a cheap new Hellraiser sequel in order to keep the rights. In 2011 Revelations went the found footage route, and this year brings us Hellraiser: Judgment, which looks to have one eye on the Saw template. The tenth Hellraiser of the franchise introduces its third Pinhead (Paul T. Taylor following Doug Bradley and Stephan Smith Collins), and the trailer has just arrived.
With an estimated budget of well below a million dollars, it seems pretty clear that Dimension, par for the course, haven't thrown a lot of weight behind this. What it does have going for it, however, is director Gary Tunnicliffe: a veteran FX artist and Hellraiser fan for whom Judgment is a genuine passion project. He wrote but lost control of Revelations, so is seeking to prove himself worthy here. Most of the new creature characters we see in the trailer are part of a different order to the regular Cenobites, so there's some expansion of the mythology going on. Most promising appears to be The Auditor - yer man in the dark glasses - who remains an enigma in the publicity: he isn't on the cast list and the actor's identity hasn't yet been revealed.
The Saw vibe comes from the plot's set-up of cops investigating some gruesome apparent serial killings and getting closer and closer to the secret of the horror. With all the new monsters – which also include The Butcher, The Surgeon, and collectives called The Jury and The Cleaners, it doesn't look as if it actually needs a re-cast Pinhead at all. But Dimension's own auditors almost certainly insist on him as the face of the franchise, so...
The cast's biggest name is Nightmare On Elm Street's Heather Langenkamp, while, oddly, Feast and Piranha 3DD director John Gulager is playing a character called The Assessor.
Hellraiser: Judgment is out (straight to home media) in the States just in time for a Valentine's night in on 13 February. There isn't a UK date yet.