
Like the plot, the cast is minimal, so there’s a lot of padding courtesy of sex scenes, inane dialogue and shots of the other revellers decked out in white masks and going hell for leather on a red-lit dance floor. The narrative essentially consists of teens partying at a spooky mansion, splitting up to explore said mansion, venturing into creepy, blue lit rooms, calling each other on complimentary mobile phones to say stuff like “There’s something really strange going on in this house”, and then getting themselves murderlised in a succession of tensionless and not very interesting ways. Based on a story by Joel Soisson (writer of Mimic 2, Hollow Man 2, and various Prophecy sequels) called The Dark Can’t Breathe, Hellworld unfolds as a strange and rather bland fusion of slasher flick and creaky haunted house yarn.


The eighth instalment of the on-going Hellraiser series, Hellworld, like Deader before it, didn’t actually start out as a Hellraiser film. Before long, the gamers are picked off one by one as nightmarish fantasies become entwined with disturbing reality. Accepting an invitation to an underground rave party at an isolated mansion, they’re told by their sinister host that the Cenobites and the puzzle box of Hellraiser infamy are actually real. Two years after the death of their friend, who died while playing an online game based on the Hellraiser mythology, a group of teenagers find their own lives endangered.
