Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II

This is without a doubt THE best documentary on Hellraiser and it's first sequel, Hellbound:Hellraiser II. An extremely thorough and exhaustive collection of interviews with pretty much everybody involved in the creation of these two masterpieces on Horror cinema, the only real exceptions being Clive Barker himself (I believe due to illness) and Ashley Lawrence, who portrayed Kirtsy Cotton in the films, but due to the sheer amount of information and anecdotes from the large number of talking heads on offer here, their absence is barely noticeable. Spread out over 3 DVD's, with the first two dedicated to Hellraiser and Hellbound respectively, and the third disc being crammed with extra features, which include mini documentaries on Clive Barker, Channard, The Cenobites, the unused music of Coil and much more.

Fans of other excellent documentaries of this type, such as More Brains!:A Return to the Living Dead (from the same writer), Crystal Lake Memories:The Complete History of Friday the 13th and Never Sleep Again:The Elm Street Legacy will certainly enjoy this, I'm sure.

Highly recommended for fans of the Hellraiser franchise

Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser - this documentary, narrated by Oliver Smith, focuses on the production history of Hellraiser & hellbound, its cult status, and some of the key themes/sub-themes in the films. Included in it are interviews with special effects designer Bob Keen, image animator Geoff Portass, Ashley Laurence (archival footage), Doug Bradley (Pinhead), director of photography Robin Vidgeon, producer Christopher Figg, and director Clive Barker (archival footage) , amongst others.  A great assortment of interview material. Highly recommended for fanatics.

It's hard to believe that a documentary can have a run time of minutes under 8hrs, one single documentary!

Now when they did the Friday 13th documentary (Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013)) it covered 12 different films and was around 6hrs long. This is 8hrs and covers 2 films, 2!

Nobody can dispute that the documentary is thorough and is arguably a must watch for fans of the first two Hellraiser movies but 8hrs is far far too long.

As you can imagine the documentary goes over old ground several times, it's interviews are decent but the number of people interviewed is far less than you'd imagine especially the absence of Ashley Laurence (Not as if she was the lead or anything)

I liked Hellraiser and considered the second film a watchable affair but this was seven shades of overkill and damaged my enjoyment. This really should have been edited down to 2hrs, 3 at the most.

The Good:

Very thorough

Some decent interviews

The Bad:

Too few people interviewed

How can you do this without the lead? Seriously?

Far too long

Bit repititious

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

I have far too much time on my hands

This was a documentary that I've been wanting to watch for a while. What held me back was that I see on Letterboxd that it is listed as being almost 8 hours long. There is a version on Screambox that runs around 3 hours. I decided to just pull the trigger and watch that while I was working, treating it like a podcast to look down when something interesting that I needed to see. Mostly just to listen to this to help the time pass.

Now this is broken into two parts. The first covering the original film, Hellraiser. Then we have the second part that is about the sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II. These are my favorite types of documentaries about classic films like this. We get interviews from actors like Doug Bradley, Clare Higgins and Imogen Boorman. We also have a bunch of behind the scenes people who worked on the effects, the director of the sequel Tony Randel as well as Christopher Young, who did both soundtracks.

Just the wealth of knowledge we get here is great. I love hearing the behind the scenes aspects about how they could bring certain creatures or makeup to life. The difficulties of bringing scenes to life or the challenges of how they could film them. There is such a rich lore here thanks to the writer and director of the original, Clive Barker. These are the types of docs that help to appreciate the films even more.

What also helps here is that these are well-made. We are hearing stories and they will edit footage to visually show us. This could be like hearing the makeup team talk about how they did something. We then see what the final product looked like in the film. They would also incorporate behind the scenes images as well, like seeing Bradley in the middle of getting his makeup done to become the iconic Pinhead.

This is a documentary that I'd highly recommend to anyone who is a fan of these films. There is such interesting information here that I think helps to deepen the experience and maybe even get more appreciation for what went into it as well. I'm giving this my highest rating for documentaries.

My Rating: 8 out of 10.

"Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II" is a feature length documentary uncovering the history and the making of Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" and "Hellbound: Hellraiser II" films.

First of all, the opening credits are a bit drawn out and I wish that wasn't the case. But the rest of the film makes up for that. In fact, the Arrow Video release is very extensive, and (as I understand it) was expanded to the point that it had to be turned into two documentaries. (The first half is 90 minutes and I assume the second half is similar.) Where this documentary excels is where it goes into great detail about the makeup and special effects, because this is what really makes "Hellraiser" stand out. Also, the coverage of the Coil music is awesome, because I don't know how many people know their work or knew they had anything to do with the film. (The Arrow set goes into much more detail on the Coil-Barker connection.)