Rank the 9 movies

Because under no circumstances should a Hellraiser film ever contain a round house kick.

Hellraiser
Hellbound
Revelations
Inferno
Hell on Earth
Hellseeker
Deader
Hellworld
Bloodline

Revelations, to me, was the first sequel since Hellbound that was actually a Hellraiser movie, and not an attempt to either take the series into a conventional horror dimension at the expense of its characters ("Hell on Earth" and "Bloodline") or an unrelated movie with a blatantly shoehorned-in Cenobite plot (pretty much every other sequel).

Inferno was the next closest for me because the cop is the closest the series comes to another Frank, and the plot-- ultimately about a morally bankrupt man whose quest for the extreme lands him more than he bargained for-- is the closest the series got to the original mythos.

I disliked Hell on Earth for turning Pinhead into an actual demon (as opposed to a morally depraved entity beyond human understanding) but I liked that there was some elaboration upon his backstory, and I enjoyed Bradley's performance as Elliot Spencer.

Hellseeker only gets listed as high as it does for managing to bring back Kirsty. This is kind of a cheat entry since I'm really giving it points for the deleted scene on the DVD that revisits the events of the first two films. Had it not been for that, this would be ranked lower.

Deader had the potential to be one of the better sequels, but the final half hour of the movie kills it as the director and writer make it quite obvious they had no idea what the hell they were doing or where to take anything, completely wasting all the nice buildup to that point. If they had spent near as much time on polishing up the script and making it clear what the Deaders were hoping to accomplish, why they had the powers they did, and why it was necessary for the reporter to open the box for them, as they had on the gore train, I might have been able to have ranked this higher.

Hellworld, like Deader, was shaping up to be one of the better sequels, and I really enjoyed the metareference, "Hellraiser meets Scream" style of the first half hour or so. But like Deader, the movie just falls apart in the final act and the fact that this was not originally a Hellraiser script becomes very, very obvious.

And finally, Bloodline... what can I say? It has the elements that made me hate Hell on Earth (demon Pinhead, world domination plot) but none of its redeeming qualities, coupled with the ridiculous sci-fi plot, the convoluted "Hell's re-org" subplot, randomly injected Cenobites, sloppy editing, and the list just goes on. Easy to see why this one killed the franchise (it was the last in theaters, after all), but hard for me to understand how anyone can rank it higher than the bottom of the pile.