by Adelaide Song on 2023-12-01.
Tags: film
Spoilers follow.
We’ll get the obvious out of the way. Jamie Clayton as Pinhead… would.
With the most important part of the review over, we can actually talk about the movie itself. Hellraiser mostly understands the assignment even if it only brushes the cum-brained delirium of one of my favourite novellas of all time and its pulp classic adaptation. (The Hellbound Heart is fresher in my memory than Hellraiser OG, but I might fix that now that I’ve finally got around to watching the remake.)
Don’t go into this film expecting a video nasty. Times have changed since ‘87, this isn’t Censor. Think about it as something more along the lines of- and bear with me here- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a slightly shitty midbudget film that spent most of its time and money on dumbass setpieces instead of minor nitpicks like ‘pacing’ or ‘writing’. Of course it suffers from having leads nowhere near as charismatic as Nic Cage, and it shows in the somewhat tedious first act. The most exciting thing that happens for about the first twenty minutes is a hysterical audio match cut between a twunk being torn apart by hooks and the protagonist getting fucked—but in fairness, it’s a really good match cut.
Like I said, it definitely gets what it’s meant to be, even if it doesn’t always dare to really go there the way that Barker did. The Hellbound Heart’s central antagonist is a guy who got reconstituted from the nut he busted on the floor while getting eviscerated. You can’t play this wholly straight without whiffing altogether, and the film is strongest when it’s dancing between gonzo slapstick and genuinely affecting body horror, instead of tepid domestic conflict.
I’ll be the first to admit that the comedy doesn’t always seem intentional, but that’s still charming in its own way. Riley passing out on the merry go round, the most preschooler-ass fight possible over the box leading to Serena getting cut; dumb, contrived, but very much in the spirit of a film that can be boiled down to ‘a bunch of people get owned by an obviously fucked up box.’ It helps that the clumsiness is (usually) more than made up for by the payoff.
I can’t stress enough that most of Hellraiser’s brainpower went into its visuals, but in fairness, when it’s on, it’s on. The Cenobites are out of the park amazing; the new Phyrexia sets wish they could be half as cool as the Masque alone. Using Escherian space-fuckery to represent Hell intruding into regular reality just feels correct. It’s also got a really pleasing visual symmetry with the new Configuration being a series of polytope-esque forms, instead of just Cube. (It’s now Cube 2: Hypercube!) The nightmare logic does so much to sell the inevitability of the Cenobites, and it’s used to fantastic effect in the best setpiece of the entire film—the van.
Oh man, the van. Holy shit, this sequence fucking rules, no disclaimers or anything. Just a genuinely clever idea whose climax is probably what earnt them the R-rating. Absolutely lost my shit when the back of the van started shifting. That entire act of the movie is probably where it peaks for me: the Menger sponge-esque cage around the mansion serving as what’s basically a Hell Faraday cage is sick, and Castanets willingly giving itself up to Pinhead before being fucking ripped asunder is both awesome and also probably the horniest part of the film. You know Pinhead was definitely pegging that dude with a depilator on the weekends.
Unfortunately that last detail should tell you a lot about the final act, and overall this movie’s frustrating failure to recapture the original’s magic. Unintentional shittiness can be charming, but the final act stalls enough that it starts to fall out of the transcendence of kino and just becomes annoying. The one-two punch of Riley dropping the box by just fucking falling over, followed up by a spectacularly shitty read on the wholly unnecessary “Roland Voight!” pretty much took me out. It doesn’t help that it has to spend time on an obscenely obvious plot twist that doesn’t even result in particularly satisfying karmic vengeance, in part because he almost seems sympathetic in comparison to the OG’s cumunculus or his standin in this movie.
(I will say that not-Jeffery Epstein being owned by the Cenobites, first by being impaled with a Banjo-Kazooie jiggy and then basically turned into a penis angel is one of the best parts about that last third.)
Overall, I think this is an okay popcorn flick that’s halfway to being a true midnight movie. There are flashes of brilliance and some genuinely inspired sequences, but if you’ve ever watched any RLM or a Hunt Down the Freeman LP, you’ll know the worst bad media is the shit that’s too slow to still be fun. Now, Hellraiser is no Computer Beach Party, but it’s no Xtro, either. The discerning horror buffs and the horny trans girls should instead look up some YouTube clips or concept art respectively.