Crew
Director/Screenplay/Art Direction – Douglas Schulze, Producers – David J. Dalton, Kurt Eli Mayry & Douglas Schulze, Photography – Michael Goi, Music – Dana Croll & John Traynor, Special Effects Supervisor – Roger A. White, Makeup Effects – R.A.W. Productions Crew (Supervisor – Roger A. White). Production Company – Dolphin Productions.
Cast
John Saxon (Professor Jones), David Emge (Robert), Amy Raasch (Shelley O’Deane), Edward Stevens (Drake Destry), Jeff Rector (Jesse Jameson), Lisa Sheldon Miller (Barb Bunson), Robert Dole (Professor Damon), Todd Tesen (Adam O’Deane), Melissa Zafarana (Tracy), James Croteau (Paul), Tina Ashley Agius (Chris)
Plot
A group of students are taking a special course at the Kant Institute of Technology under Professor Damon. At the same time, Professor Jones reappears and reactivates a series of experiments he conducted several years earlier where he injects subjects with a serum that makes them zombified and places them under his mental control. The zombified subjects now pursue the students through the facility, seeking to complete Jones’s plan.
Hellmaster was the first film from Douglas Schulze, who subsequently went on to make the likes of Dark Heaven (2002), The Rain (2009), Mimesis (2011), The Dark Below (2015), Mimesis: Nosferatu (2018) and Thorns (2023).
Hellmaster is typical of the type of film that was being made for video release in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It follows on from the hit success of Re-Animator (1985) with its mad scientist conducting unethical experiments, where everything ultimately becomes a Makeup Effects Vehicle with the creation of lots of creatures and gooey meltdowns. There are quite a number of similarities to the earlier The Dead Pit (1989), which had essentially the same plot of a mad scientist creating zombies in the disused wing of a hospital. The title Hellmaster is also clearly intended to suggest something of the Clive Barker hit Hellraiser (1987), while one of the zombified characters who resembles Pinhead somewhat with his face divided into a lattice of grooved scars.
Much of Hellmaster is set up around makeup effects set-pieces. There are a range of zombified grotesqueries from a child with strange doll-like features to a nun-like woman and the aforementioned not-pinhead man in a suit. James Crotean and others undergo an entertainingly gory meltdown, while professor Robert Dole is strung up on wires like a puppet. To establish his genre cred, Schulze brings in a couple of familiar genre faces with John Saxon, a longtime B movie actor best known here as Heather Langenkamp’s father in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and David Emge, one of the four survivors in Dawn of the Dead (1978).
There is not really a lot of script that is given over to any rationale about what is going on. John Saxon has a role that consists of wandering in black leather saying things in a deep voice that sound like profound aphorisms: “madness has achieved the impossible,” “If a god created this world in six days and I can make hell of it in one night, then God must be dead” And “Why should I be persecuted when mankind kills mankind in the name of a god that doesn’t exist?”
Everything takes place at what is called an Institute of Technology but it seems a strangely deserted campus. For reasons unclear, Jeff Rector carries a whip around with him on the campus (and appears to have no qualms about using it). Mostly, Hellmaster consists of the zombified crazies pursuing the cast of twentysomethings around interspersed with occasional novelty deaths and reality and illusion games but without much beyond that.
Trailer here