Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson, DIRTY HARRY) and his wife Julia (Claire Higgins, B. MONKEY) move into his childhood home, which has been empty for years since his mother's death. They discover signs that his ne'er-do-well brother Frank (Sean Chapman, EAT THE RICH) has been squatting there recently. Little do they know that Frank has solved a puzzle box that opens up a gateway to the world of the Cenobites, and that he has been torn apart after experiencing their extreme forms of sadomasochism. Larry is also unaware of Julia's brief affair with Frank and her pining for his brother. When Larry cuts himself and rips blood all over the attic floor where Frank died, Frank is resurrected and implores Julia to help him. Julia brings a string of men to the house under the pretense of sexual encounters and murders them so Frank can feed on them. Larry's daughter from a previous marriage Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, LURKING FEAR) grows suspicious of her stepmother's behavior. While snooping around the house, she comes across Frank's latest victim and then skinless Frank himself. After a scuffle with Frank, Kirsty escapes with the puzzle box. She collapses in the street and wakes up in a hospital. Kirsty solves the puzzle box and the Cenobites come to get her, but she may be able to save herself if she can lead them to Frank. After two previous adaptations of Barker's work (RAWHEAD REX and UNDERWORLD) proved unsatisfactory, Barker set about adapting his novella THE HELLBOUND HEART for his directorial debut. The script and resulting film differ in some important ways from the source, but the changes serve to weave the first film into a "family saga" in which the iconic Cenobites are nowhere near as vile as the human villains. From the third part of the series onward, the Cenobites - Pinhead, particularly - were often portrayed as the principal villains and usually as agents of hell rather than beings from another dimension ("Angels to some, demons to others," says Pinhead); although, in the sequel, Julia identifies their god as Leviathan (depicted as a monolithic, three-dimensional lozenge floating in the center of a layrinth). New World's contributions to the film included the shooting of Frank's resurrection, Christopher Young's renowned orchestral score (in place of the electronic tracks composed for the film by British group Coil, which were released on CD), as well as a very clumsy attempt to Americanize the film by dubbing all of the supporting characters - as well as Frank - with American accents (despite the locations, some indirect comments made by Kirsty's new boyfriend, and about Julia being back on her own turf). Although Pinhead was not technically the villain, he has joined the ranks of American horror film villains alongside Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Meyers, and Leatherface. Kirsty's encounter with "The Engineer" showed up on a TV screen in Paul Verhoeven's BASIC INSTINCT.

1080P Single-layered Blu-ray

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

Total Video Bitrate: 19.97 Mbps

DVD Release Date: 26 September 2000
Amaray

1080P Single-layered Blu-ray

Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video

Total Video Bitrate: 19.97 Mbps