Review: Hellraiser

Image courtesy of Hulu.

 

It seems inevitable that acclaimed horror filmmakers will eventually feel the pull of big budget filmmaking to get involved in a previously existing horror franchise - and my instinct would be to tell them to run in the opposite direction. It's a rare thing that a horror director who has earned bona fides by crafting something uniquely creepy or original has much to gain - other than a paycheck - by getting involved in a series that offers little in the way of invention.

Such is the case with David Bruckner, whose well-liked "The Ritual" remains unseen by me, but whose eerie and compelling "The Night House" certainly got my attention. And now, his latest is a reboot of the popular 1980s and 1990s horror series "Hellraiser," which was based on a novella titled "The Hellbound Heart" by British horror maestro Clive Barker.

The newly rebooted "Hellraiser" isn't so much bad as it is unnecessary. A bigger budget obviously made it possible for this new entry in the series to include oodles of special effects and better settings. It does not, however, make this already tired franchise any fresher. To be fair, I was never a huge fan of the original "Hellraiser" films from the 1980s - but I'll say this about them: They were distinctive.

Trying to explain the world of "Hellraiser" is a recipe for a headache, but suffice it to say that the film centers around a group of sadistic beings from another dimension known as the Cenobites whose God-like powers enable them to torment and torture anyone who has the misfortune to cross their paths. This happens when an unsuspecting victim stumbles upon The Lament Configuration, a puzzle box that jabs those holding it in the hand once they figure it out, thereby causing their blood to leak into the box and giving the Cenobites the right to claim them as theirs - that is, unless they sacrifice someone else.

In this case, the person to stumble upon the box is a recovering drug addict named Riley (Odessa A'zion), who has a fraught relationship with her brother, Matt (Brandon Flynn), and enlists the help of his boyfriend, Colin (Adam Faison), a roommate (Aoife Hinds) and her seemingly untrustworthy former addict boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey), when Matt disappears. 

The Cenobites' primary interest is sensation - although mostly bad ones - and their victims are strung up on skin-piercing chains before having their flesh mutilated in ways that might have you reaching for a vomit bag. The original films felt somewhat provocative because they considered - as Chrissy Amphlett put it - the "fine line between pleasure and pain." 

The Barker-directed 1987 original and the ultra-gory sequel, "Hellbound," were often surreal, kinky and frightening. The new version looks better, but it mostly follows the style of a typical American horror film in which a group of young people are being pursued by something awful. In the original "Hellraiser" films, many of the human characters were awful themselves, whereas those in the remake -  although there are a few who are particularly nasty - are mostly plagued by poor decision-making. 

Likewise, it's an interesting choice to make the lead Cenobite villain a woman - however, while Doug Bradley gave Pinhead some distinctive personality and menace in the original films, Jamie Clayton's The Priest speaks in a voice that seemingly intentionally drains it of any type of emotion and, in the process, sounds robotic. The Cenobites are disturbing to look at, but they had more of a presence in the original pictures, whereas here they become the typical stalking entities that lurk in the shadows and plague characters in horror movies (for another recent example, see "Smile").

It's not so much an issue of whether the new "Hellraiser" is good or bad - it's good enough from a visual standpoint, but the film's characters seemingly only exist to make stupid decisions that put them in harm's way - but whether we need this at all. Bruckner displayed some real talent with "The Night House," so his attaching himself to this film feels like a career step, rather than an expansion of an interesting horror filmmaker's point of view. If gory - but not particularly scary - horror movies are your thing, you might enjoy "Hellraiser." Others need not apply.