Hellraiser: Bloodline, aka Hellraiser 4, infamously sent Pinhead and the Cenobites to space, and ended up being disowned by director Kevin Yagher. It feels safe to say that the Hellraiser franchise has been a massive disappointment overall. Clive Barker's 1987 original Hellraiser is a classic, and 1988 sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 is in the same league, but after that things drop off a cliff in quality. Sure, Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth has some fans, and Scott Derrickson's Hellraiser: Inferno is surprisingly good for a direct to video sequel, but neither is even close to beloved by the majority of horror consumers.
Released in 1996, Hellraiser: Bloodline performed so poorly on both a critical and commercial level that it holds the dubious honor of being the last Hellraiser film to date to actually play in theaters. After Bloodline, Pinhead was shunted to the tortured realm of direct to video, forever doomed to have his films fill Wal-Mart bargain bins and play on premium cable at 3am. While a theatrical Hellraiser reboot finally looks to be in the offing, it won't save Pinhead from the two decades of suffering he's already endured.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Hellraiser: Bloodline is that many of the concepts it presents are full of potential for success, delving as it does into the history of the Lament Configuration and the power structure among the Cenobites in Hell. If Yagher had gotten to make the film he intended to, it could've arguably been one of the better entries in the series.
A top-shelf special effects creator, Kevin Yagher only has three directorial credits, two episodes of Tales from the Crypt - Yagher had designed the show's iconic Crypt Keeper puppet - and Hellraiser: Bloodline. Then again, he's not actually credited on the latter, as Bloodline is credited to infamous Hollywood pseudonym Alan Smithee. It's a sad turn of events, as Yagher wasn't very gung ho about directing a Hellraiser sequel, that is until he was impressed by the script written by Peter Atkins, who had also written the second and third films. Unfortunately, much of that script didn't make it to the screen.
Yagher turned in the initial cut of Hellraiser: Bloodline to Dimension Films executives in early 1995, which ran 110 minutes. The problem was, the studio hated it, demanding that the film be drastically re-worked. New scenes were written, but Yagher was burned out after what had been a difficult filming process, and declined to participate. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers director Joe Chappelle - who at one point was in line to direct Bloodline to begin with - was then brought in to film these new sequences. The final edit was chopped down to a brisk 85 minutes, creating a rushed feel to the story, and leaving many elements of the plot and character backstories poorly explained or altered entirely. Pinhead's role was also beefed up at the behest of the studio.
This was exactly what Yagher had feared would take place the moment Dimension asked for rewrites and new scenes, and he felt that the final cut of Hellraiser: Bloodline wasn't the film he had signed on to make, asking for his name to be removed. Chappelle hadn't filmed enough new material to warrant a credit of his own, so the Smithee name was used. A leaked early workprint of Bloodline has made its way around the bootleg circuit, but it's obviously not an official release, and while it restores some lost footage, it's still missing quite a bit from Yagher's original cut.
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