Hellmaster (1992)
"He'll show you the way to hell and meet you there!"
Plot
Years after Professor Jones’ mind-altering chemical experiments end in catastrophic side effects, he returns to the Kant University campus to finish what he started along with an army of his latest mutant creations to assist him. Waiting for him are a reporter, who knows the secret of Jones's power and a group of students, who all set out to end his resurgence.
Review
Imagine trying to shoot a horror film in the dead of winter and your location is an active and operational mental asylum. There are real patients just down the hall from your set, and your actual production office, the place where you're coordinating the daily call sheets and managing this tiny shoestring budget, is literally set up inside a padded cell. Looking at the absolute chaos that would emerge from that exact scenario and it’s kind of understandable as to why Hellmaster is an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. I could have spent ten years trying to write up an accurate synopsis, but it wouldn’t have been long enough to whittle down this utterly incomprehensible mess of ideas and logic into something coherent. I can only best sum up Hellmaster as sort of a film school student cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser, only you wish it had half of the attraction of either film.
First time director and writer Douglas Schulze was clearly swamped with this project from day one. As a fresh-faced twenty-year-old, he’s clearly not adept at writing at all, to the point where he had to draft his brother to come to the set and try to frantically fix the script on the fly. He seemingly incorporates brand-new crazy ideas the very moment they popped into his head rather than developing the themes he had already established and this gives Hellmaster the feeling of a pick ’n’ mix collection of scenes and shots all straddled together with no real purpose. Schulze’ didn’t just direct and write it, he produced it, he edited it and even served as the art director and built some of the sets himself - trying to be a one-man Hollywood studio certainly came at a cost of the finished product. Originally released under the name Them in 1989, in 1992 Schultz decided to completely re-edit his own film for the straight to home video market. He renamed it Hellmaster to blatantly capitalize on the massive success of the Hellraiser franchise at the local Blockbuster. He wanted a leaner, faster, more aggressive horror film. I initially had only seen the butchered version of this film but thankfully a recent physical media release contained both versions and so I was able to watch both.
There is this cultural assumption that when a creator goes back and tinkers with their work, it yields the definitive superior version like Ridley Scott with Blade Runner (though fans of Star Wars won’t agree in the slightest with George Lucas’ alterations to the original trilogy). Think about the editing process like tree surgery. If your tree is overgrown, you want to prune a few branches to let the sunlight in to make it healthier. In the Hellmaster cut, Schultz didn't prune the branches. He took a roaring chainsaw straight to the trunk of the tree and then wondered why all the leaves died. He completely removed the actual emotional stakes of the movie. It takes time to set up the dominoes before knocking them down. For example, there's a sympathetic blonde character named Barb. In the Them cut, you meet Barb during an opening lecture scene. You understand her personality, you see her social standing on the campus, and you establish her dynamic with the other students. So later, when terrible violent things happen involving her, you know exactly who she is and you care. But Hellmaster does away with that and it completely robs the film of any actual pathos. In the original Them cut, there is a genuinely tragic arc for Joel, a crippled boy. He is manipulated by Professor Jones, gets mutated by the drug, and is eventually killed by Barb, the very girl he had a crush on. And Shelly gets a moment to grieve for her friend. But in the Hellmaster cut, that emotional weight is just gone. Schultz used his chainsaw edit to completely cut Barb's opening introduction, so the audience has absolutely no idea who Joel is talking about. She doesn't appear on screen for another twenty minutes.
With all this butchering going on, it isn’t just characters and their arcs that suffer but just general tension building and atmosphere. Despite the intentions to increase the pace and make the new edit zippier, Hellmaster does exactly the opposite because you’re forever wondering who is who, what parts of the plot that have been edited are characters referring to later on, and the stop-start nature grinds the whole middle section to a halt. It’s only when Jones and his mutants turn up and start picking off the college kids that Hellmaster picks up. There are some interesting mutants which make up Jones’ army and the make-up looks good. Jones’ main henchman, Razor Face, looks like the love child of Freddy Krueger and Pinhead, so of course he adorns the front cover and most of the publicity even though he isn’t the titular character. If that wasn't enough sensory overload, one of the drug-mutated minions roaming the campus is a limping nun played by Ron Asheton, the actual real-life guitarist for the seminal punk band The Stooges. The gore effects are plentiful however, between the various kills and fluids flying around on camera. There’s a syringe to the brain sequence plus a full body meltdown which really fits in well with similar splatter showcases from the 80s and 90s.
The only two recognisable names in the cast are horror veterans John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare Beach amongst others) and David Emge, who horror fans will immediately recognise as the ill-fated helicopter pilot Flyboy from George A. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead. Saxon does lend the film a lot of credibility and enjoys chewing the scenery as much as he can when he’s on-screen. He knows the type of film he’s starring in here, is likely as confused as the rest of us as to what is going on, but mugs for the camera knowing full well he’s the only thing you’ll remember by the end. Saxon was only contracted to be on set for four days! Four days to shoot all the scenes, all the dialogue, and all the exposition for the main villain of a feature-length film. You can see the scenes in the film where they're scrambling just to get Saxon on camera. Almost like they had to shoot his dialogue in complete isolation, sometimes just staring at a blank wall, so they could splice those close-ups into scenes later with other actors who weren't even in the room that day. Emge makes little impression in his role as the reporter but at least the two notable actors share a few scenes together. The rest of the cast is filled with first-time actors (probably last time actors too judging by the performances) but not even the likes of Laurence Olivier or Ian McKellen would have brought life to the clunky script.
One element is what ultimately saves Hellmaster from obscurity - the cinematography. The visuals are fantastic. Shot by a cinematographer Michael Goi, and despite the tiny budget, the freezing weather, and the rundown mental asylum setting, he managed to create these strikingly beautiful phantasmagorical visuals that elevate the entire project. Goi was clearly inspired by Italian horror, specifically like the giallo films of the '70s and taken some cues from the likes of Argento’s Suspiria and Bava’s Black Sabbath. He realised they didn't have the budget for realistic, detailed sets, so they had to create atmosphere through light. You can see that Italian influence exploding on the screen in Hellmaster. Goi decided to use this incredibly intense, oversaturated lighting scheme. He bathes the dilapidated, peeling asylum hallways in these deep, surreal, theatrical reds and greens. It gives the whole film this nightmare realm quality and the aggressive lighting completely distracts you from the cheapness of the sets.
Final Verdict
An atrociously bad horror film, Hellmaster is virtually unwatchable and this review is for that version of the film. Them does fare better with the re-added sequences fleshing out characters and arcs that didn’t need to have been cut to begin with but the VHS version, Hellmaster, that has been doing the rounds for years is very rough going, even for an ardent horror vet like me. It’s horror eye candy, not very engaging, but it depends on what you’re looking for in a low-budget 90s splatter film. There are enough ideas in here to show that Schulze had plenty of potential if he had been reigned in more with someone more experienced overseeing proceedings but what we get here is a “kid in a candy store” style approach where nothing is off the table and the final product suffers massively as a consequence.
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Hellmaster Director(s): Douglas Schulze Writer(s): Douglas Schulze Actor(s): John Saxon, David Emge, Amy Raasch, Jeff Rector, Ron Asheton, Todd Tesen, Sean Sweeney, Emile B. Levisetti Duration: 96 mins |  |
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