Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988): Leviathan’s Labyrinth and the Photo That Wakes Pinhead

Hellbound: Hellraiser II opened in 1988. Tony Randel directed. Peter Atkins wrote the script. Clive Barker wrote the story and stayed on as executive producer. The Cenobites are extra-dimensional priests who no longer keep pain and pleasure on separate shelves. The sexual engine of the film is among adults. Tiffany, a young patient, is not a sexual partner.

The hospital and the mattress

In India in the 1920s, British officer Elliot Spencer opens the Lament Configuration and becomes the Cenobite Pinhead. After Frank Cotton kills her father, Kirsty Cotton is put in a psychiatric hospital. Dr. Philip Channard and his assistant Kyle MacRae interview her. She begs them to destroy the bloody mattress. Her stepmother, Julia Cotton, died on it. Julia is not Frank’s stepmother. She is Kirsty’s, and she had already been involved with Frank. Channard is secretly obsessed with the box. He has the mattress brought home and talks a mentally ill patient into lying on it and cutting himself with a straight razor. The blood lets a skinless Julia out. She consumes the patient for the energy. Later, after she has seduced him, Channard brings more patients home for her to feed on until her body returns. Tiffany is young, mute, and very good at puzzles. The film uses her as a key, not as a sexual partner. MacRae sees Julia feed, runs, and comes back to tell Kirsty he believes her. At the house, a fully regenerated Julia kills MacRae. Channard and Julia kidnap Tiffany and force her to open the box. The Cenobites spare Tiffany for the moment. She turned the box, but the desire behind it was Channard’s.

Leviathan hangs over the labyrinth, a huge stretched diamond. The film calls it the god of flesh, hunger, and desire, lord of the maze. It fires black beams that force Channard to remember atrocities he committed. He is not a bystander who got dragged in. He wants to join the Order of the Gash. Julia betrays him to Leviathan and has him made a Cenobite in a hellish parody of a transfusion. Her job is to bring Leviathan souls, including his. In the maze Kirsty meets Frank. He admits he pretended to be her father and wrote in blood to pull her in. Julia tears his heart out for his betrayal of her. A vortex then takes Julia and leaves only her empty skin.

The photograph

Tiffany is a key because she can solve the puzzle, not because anyone is meant to have her. Channard forces her to open the box to get into Hell. When the Cenobites arrive they let her pass, because the desire is his. Kirsty shows Pinhead a photograph of Elliot Spencer from Channard’s study. It is not a family portrait. He remembers that he was a man. The other Cenobites remember they were human too. Channard, now one of them, overpowers them and kills them. Before Spencer dies he looks at Kirsty, not at Channard. Kirsty puts on the skin Julia left behind, draws him off, and gives Tiffany time to solve the box backwards. Channard tries to pull free of the serpentine tentacles that have him, and rips himself apart. The door shuts. Kirsty and Tiffany leave the hospital. Tiffany is still a young patient, not a body in the sexual plot.

The shoot, the eyes, the gross

Bob Keen’s crew did the effects. Nicholas Vince plays Chatterer. During a swinging torture-rack shot, a hook hit him in the jaw. He asked for eyes so he could see. A later scene that gave the eyesight back was cut, which breaks continuity with his eyeless entrance. Some fans preferred him without eyes. Doug Bradley plays Pinhead, and the cold mask sits against the memory of Spencer.

The film screened at the Toronto festival on 9 September 1988 and opened in the United States on 23 December 1988. The United States and Canada took about $12,090,735. The United Kingdom took £980,503. The round “about $12.1 million” is that North American figure. On Rotten Tomatoes, 53% of 32 reviews are positive, average 5.6/10. Metacritic is 41/100 from 13 reviews. After Kirsty and Tiffany leave, two movers are taking Channard’s things. One of them is pulled into the mattress. A pillar rises. One face fused into it is the vagrant from the previous film. He asks, “What’s your pleasure, sir?” Clare Higgins plays Julia. Ashley Laurence plays Kirsty. Kenneth Cranham plays Channard. Imogen Boorman plays Tiffany. William Hope plays MacRae. Sean Chapman plays Frank. Doug Bradley plays Pinhead and Captain Elliot Spencer. Barbie Wilde plays the Female Cenobite. Simon Bamford plays Butterball. Oliver Smith plays the skinless Frank. Christopher Young’s score is bigger than the first film’s. For the horn-like sound at the center of Leviathan he worked in the Morse code for the word “god.”