A trio of detectives is hot on the killer's case - brother duo Sean ( Damon Carney) and David Carter ( Randy Wayne) and their recently assigned watchdog Christine Edgerton ( Alexandra Harris), who are all just suffocatingly boring. In Judgment, the killer refers to himself as The Preceptor, targetting those who violate the ten commandments (so yeah, it's not exactly subtle about the Seven parallels). Unfortunately, Tunnicliffe matches his Hellraiser innovations with a human story that's painfully trite and familiar. Stop me if you've heard this one - An extreme, moralistic killer is ravaging the sinful citizens of the city, leaving behind gory tableaus of horrific violence.
Every time Judgment turns its attention away from the outlandish perversions of hell, the film grinds to a halt with a tiresome detective yarn pulled from the well-worn DNA of Seven and Saw. If half of the film is pulsing with the bizarre, disturbed energy of a proper Clive Barker adaptation, the other half is flaccid and soporific. Unfortunately, Judgment rarely lives up to the standard it sets for itself. It's a lot to process a thorough probing of the senses, and it announces Judgment as a film to sit up and pay attention to. They prod around in the bile, announce the man as guilty, and he's whisked off for a thoroughly repulsive "cleansing" by saliva before a to a torturous visit to the Butcher ( Joel Decker) and the Surgeon ( Jillyan Blundell). Once those are all tallied and typed up, a sweaty, slovenly man known as the Assessor ( John Gulager) consumes the confession and pukes it up into a drain pipe that leads down to a trio of naked, faceless ladies.
#JUDGMENT REVIEW FULL#
There, the Auditor (Tunnicliffe) straps the man to a chair, hooks him up to an intravenous typewriter contraption, and demands a full roster of the man's sins. A child murderer is lured to a creepy, desolate house with the help of an online posting. With that established, we cut to the sequence that will have you squirming and possibly gagging in your seat before the title credits even roll. A brief intro that tells us Pinhead has grown bored and emo in the internet age, unable to compete with the rampant sins of the world wide web.
The film's best sequence is dripping with that squalid surrealism. Tunnicliffe doesn't totally nail the balance - Judgment is pretty sexless for a Hellraiser film - but he does manage to dip a toe in the tricky hallucinogenic nightmarishness that gives Barker's work it's singular sting.
It's incredibly difficult to capture the sensation of walking into Barker's worlds the way they stick to you, with equal power to propel and allure. Tunnicliffe also channels what is no doubt the trickiest element of a Hellraiser film – that skeevy, surreal, super-extra flourish that defines Barker's unique expression of fantasy and horror.
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