Review - Hellraisin 3: Wrath Of Grapes by Marc Richard

Preamble

This is it, people. The one you’ve been raising for. The conclusion to the epic Hellraiser parody trilogy written by Marc Richard. No more raisins – from now on, it’s figs and dates and perhaps even the dreaded dried apricot.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. It’s either five stars or nothing these days – if I don’t like it, no review. Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

If you’ve made it through the first two books, you know what to expect with Hellraisin 3: The Wrath Of Grapes. More ridiculousness, more absurdity, more parody of the classic B-horror movie that terrified you when you were a kid at the video store because of all the S&M imagery on the box.

If you haven’t seen the third Hellraiser, you’re not missing a whole lot. It’s alright – schlocky and ridiculous like the rest. Hellraiser 5 will probably surprise you with how it’s actually a damn fine film, and the first one is a classic. And maybe number two gets in there with the first one. But number three was simply not all that great.

This parody, though, is fine. It bounces back and forth between sarcastic smarm, perverse humour, and straight up rando plays on words that are uttered by the characters. You can tell that Tim and Eric have made sweet love to Marc Richard’s sense organs because this is pretty much a Cinco production.

I’ll be honest – I grabbed this because I became somewhat bored with the other book I was reading. Richard has to be commended on the quality of his production here. The editing is pretty top notch, and I’ve read a bunch of self and traditionally published fare that is not quite as pristine as this. I think I might have found a single spelling error among the entire three books, not to mention zero grammatical issues that I picked up (and I’m a bit of a linguistic pedant who ended up doing the law thing for his day job).

I laughed out loud a few times whilst reading this. In my book, there’s hardly higher praise than that.

Check it out on the ‘zon here.