There is a list I keep in my mind of the things I really wish I could have gone my whole life not seeing. If I had not seen a couple of these things, I might be a little more well-adjusted and less mean as catshit. They’re not all gruesome, mind you, but if there’s a God, he’d have called foul by now, a yellow flag, SOMETHING! Things like”¦

-That damned “Mission Accomplished” banner.

-The details of Bill O’Reilly’s phone sex conversations.

-Any episode of Saturday Night Live past the ’01 season.

-Four words and a hyphenate: “Aaron Boone walk-off home run.”

With all the depravity, deceit, and just plain ooginess on display in those four examples, a disembodied cervix that has hydraulic equipment embedded in it is the chumpiest of chump change, which is what’s on display in this week’s installment. I don’t know how it’s gonna pan out in quality, but in terms of grisly imagery at least, I have a feeling that The Hellraiser Experiment might just be more easier than I thought.

And even in terms of quality, it’s panning out okay so far. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth, which I have been assured is the most painful of the series’ theatrical chapters, isn’t as bad as everyone told me it was. In fact, it’s a little below the second one and a hell of a lot higher than the first one. Allow me to explain”¦

Saw IV
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman
Starring Tobin Bell, Lyriq Bent
Rated R

Walking out of the latest sour headache of a Saw movie, I was consumed by a single question: Why are people going to see these movies? They’re cynical, depressing, and not that whole “fun” thing one would associate with Halloween. Now I’m not gonna say a couple of them aren’t decent, but they use up the same tricks over and over again and thrive on shallow, rusty shit. So why do people want to hurt the horror genre to the extent that they’re willing to shell over their ticket money every final weekend in October like clockwork? In three days, Saw IV made more money than the infinitely superior 30 Days of Night did in nine days. So with all the bellyaching I hear about how these movies suck, why do people still go?

Why do they hate America?

I have a couple of theories. I think some might wish to stay on the crest of the pop culture wave. If they don’t see it when everyone else does, what on earth will they talk about at work on Monday? Or hanging out with their friends that night? And I have nothing to tell these people other than “You’re fucking worthless, you’re dragging the curve down, stop going to the movies, you don’t deserve them.”

But there is another theory all the more sinister. These movies just might be attended by a whole bunch of unpaid Internet movie-humps like me, hoping to drum up some late October readers for whatever site or blog they post their stuff on. And they are read by OTHER unpaid Internet movie-humps looking for commiseration on the pissery and moanery of “HAVING” to see Saw IV. If this is the case, then I’ll be a man and admit it. I’m part of the problem.

What with all my waxing theoretic, I forgot about the actual movie. Fourth verse, same as first, second, and third!

Gory trap, development of characters we don’t give a shit about, gory trap, flashback, gory trap, the introduction of a time limit, gory trap, flashback, gory trap, wildly implausible ending, door left open for sequel, credits.

Aw, and I spoiled it for you.

To make a long story short”¦

I reviewed the twentieth anniversary DVD of Hellraiser for Fatally-Yours.com because, well, it’s been twenty years and I hadn’t seen the Goddamn thing. I didn’t like it and, as I am wont to do, said so, and quite loudly.

The response in a circle or two was not kind, calling me “delusional” and claiming that I “didn’t get it.” This was so entertaining that I reviewed the second one, Hellhound: Hellraiser II, with largely similar results. People I didn’t talk to a whole lot started leaving me messages and some dude who knows the WRITER of the second one left a comment on my MySpace blog, it’s all just fuckin’ weird. I just wanted to review ONE movie, and I got sucked into a world of horrible dialogue and S & M posing.

One of those attentive readers was Dave, one of my editor at Geeks of Doom, who is also a die hard Clive Barker fan. He wanted me to tear something he calls Hellraiser IV: Pins In Space a new asshole. I told him I couldn’t do this without seeing the third one, to which he consented to post on GoD.

Being as I’m in for penny after penny at this point (and there being a remake on the horizon), I might as well be in for the whole pound. Which is why, in partnership with both Fatally-Yours and Geeks of Doom, I am both pleased and sickened to announce The Hellraiser Project. Why stop at just reviewing the four that went to theaters, when I can do the ones that went to video as well? I’ll be switching back and forth from site to site, leaving my depressed little movie droppings when it comes to this franchise.

Rise: Blood Hunter
Written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez
Starring Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, James D’Arcy
Rated R

A couple of errant adaptations of Dracula aside, I think it’s safe to say that most vampire movies suck ass instead of blood. But in this warmed over and terminally bad subgenre, there are three towering classics. There’s FW Murnau’s silent German masterpiece Nosferatu, which seems less a film nowadays and more an intangible relic of old and superstitious times. Then there’s Kathryn Bigelow’s cult film Near Dark, which defied every vampire cliché and showed us what happens when bloodsuckers mated with white trash. And even after that, there’s Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II, which depicted vampires as little more than animals and made them OBSCENELY hard to kill.

But mostly they’re decked out in the silk and leather that Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee started off and Anne Rice turned into a marketing ploy. They’re the Barry Manilow of the movie monster pantheon. They’re copies of copies of copies and now we have Rise: Blood Hunter, a movie that is the cinematic equivalent of Vioxx and Sominex. It will put you to sleep, but it will also induce diarrhea, rickets, and projectile leprosy. But something became prevalent during the viewing. Not only have they made a bad movie, but they’ve made the WRONG bad movie.

I said I wanted to upgrade the finger and so from now on people should use both the ring finger coupled with the middle finger. I called it the SUperFInger. -Revelation 4:2

I hate Dane Cook. It’s no secret, really. But like many of my pop culture enemies, I once rooted for him to do good so I could look at him differently and”¦ Ya know”¦ Learn something. I watched his HBO special, which looked to me like a red-assed howler monkey with a metrosexual haircut shrieking at the top of his lungs, telling long and unfunny stories that didn’t have a point and didn’t really go anywhere. I saw Employee of the Month“¦ And soaked my eyes in bleach immediately afterwards. But that was just a bad movie. I heard good things about Mr. Brooks, so I went into Good Luck Chuck with an open mind, waiting to be convinced of the MySpace comic phenomenon.

I’m not rooting for him anymore, and my reaction to this”¦ THING”¦ manifests itself in more than hate and now actually resembles a borderline obsession with bloodthirsty revenge. Good Luck Chuck is beyond horrible, so much so that the light from “horrible” would take SIX TRILLION FUCKING YEARS to reach it, kind of like stars from far off in the universe. It’s offensive, but not the fun offensive like the movie it’s trying to ape off of (There’s Something About Mary). It hates women with such virulence that even Eli Roth might call this movie on going too far. To put it as succinctly as I can”¦

If you like Good Luck Chuck, you’re going to hell. Sorry. And I’m an atheist saying this, so think about what THAT means.