Well, it's Halloween, and there's a Hellraiser movie where a video game is involved. That, along with the recent announcement of Clive Barker rebooting the Hellraiser series, makes Hellworld seem like pretty good material for the latest Gamer Cinema. The basic plot goes pretty meta: There's an MMO based on the Hellraiser franchise, and one kid out of a group of friends apparently got to into it and committed suicide. Two years later, most of that kid's friends are still playing the game (really?) and score special invites to an exclusive party for super fans of the MMO. But crazy shit goes down and something even more sinister is going on behind the scenes at the party.
Honestly the biggest problem I have with this movie is what I feel is false advertising. The Netflix description seemed to peg it as Pinhead trapping the kids in the videogame world and torturing them, when in reality the "game" is more of a quick plot device to get the teens to the party. I was hoping for either silly or creative video-game themed kills, but what you get is very run of the mill stuff here, along with the usual cliches' of people stupidly going off on their own and getting trapped in easily avoidable situations (which actually describes the party itself, even in 2005, teens weren't this fucking stupid in most horror films). There's also a lot of confusing back and forth about real & imagined stuff and it might be the teens dealing with the guilt of their friend's death but the movie stumbles pretty badly on that thread. Pretty much the only noteworthy stuff is seeing Henry Cavill just a little before he hit it big in Tudors and Lance Henriksen just slumming it here and clearly not giving a shit. Ultimately, as a horror film, it's not completely terrible, just wholly unoriginal and cliched. So not a completely awful choice if you are looking for a brainless slasher flick to watch on Halloween.
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