Los Angeles Times

This follow-up is faster and campier than its mostly somber predecessor, but the basic grim tenets of British horror author Clive Barker's supernatural worldview are still intact: a universe with a senseless hell but no heaven, without a god but with plenty of demons, without real good but oozing evil to spare.

IGN

Hellbound is gorier, larger, and more accessible than the first. It rehashes the original at the outset so people can grasp it whether or not they'd seen the first and as a result is an easier film to enjoy.

TV Guide Magazine

The obsessive lust that drives Higgins to horrific extremes in Hellraiser was almost enough to carry that film, but Hellbound has no such straw to cling to, and the film collapses into a bloody mess of bravura set pieces that never add up to a satisfying whole.

Chicago Tribune by Dave Kehr

Hellbound offers a consistent, low-level queasiness, an effect more of revulsion than horror. It's nothing that a good shot of Pepto-Bismol wouldn't take care of.

Slant Magazine by Eric Henderson

The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.

Washington Post by Richard Harrington

The effects are generally good, and those Cenobites are definitely not the kind of folks you'd have over on New Year's Eve. Still, it's odd that the most intriguing, and threatening, items in the film are those darn puzzle boxes.

Variety

Hellraiser II is a maggotty carnival of mayhem, mutation and dismemberment, awash in blood and recommended only for those who thrive on such junk.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Offering memorable imagery and little more, it eventually devolves into distasteful gore for its own sake. It's far less compelling than its no less bloody but far more intelligent inspiration.

The New York Times by Caryn James

Though the script for Hellbound is related to the Barker story, the film drops its plot whenever a fake-looking monster walks on the screen. Ogling strange creatures is the film's true reason for being.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Hellbound: Hellraiser II is like some kind of avant-garde film strip in which there is no beginning, no middle, no end, but simply a series of gruesome images that can be watched in any order.