Reviewer David Leninhawk returns with a look at the latest chapter in the Hellraiser universe.
My biggest takeaway from this new Hellraiser film is that it is simply not fucked up enough. Sure, there’s good gore, and the Cenobite designs are cool and gnarly, but something that’s been missing from the Hellraiser films since the second film in the series has been a sense of danger. Those first two films felt like they could take you anywhere, into realms that are otherwise taboo or too BDSM-like for any other horror series. Starting with the mainstreaming of the series with part 3, there’s been a morphing of this series into a slasher box it doesn’t quite fit in. While this new film corrects many missteps the series has taken, it still feels weirdly safe and polished for the subject matter.
This is a very stylish and good-looking film, coming from director David Bruckner who previously made The Night House. After a bunch of boring and ugly DTV entries in the series, this at least looks like a feature film again with nice lighting and color temperatures and production design. The basic story here is decent too, except that it’s yet another attempt to graft a slasher formula onto the Hellraiser body. In this case, we have a different mythology added to the puzzle box and the cenobites. In this film, the puzzle box has a number of different “stages”, and which each stage is solved a blade will pop out to extract blood from the solver, and lead the Cenobites to take that person and do their normal sex-torture stuff to them, though this film doesn’t lean into the whole “pain and pleasure indivisible” angle as I would have liked, even if it’s more explicit here than in many of the prior entries. Once enough sacrifices have solved the box, it will reach its final configuration, and a prize of sorts will be awarded to whomever is left holding the box at the end. So, our structure is built wherein one by one people either solve the box, or get cut by the box, so the Cenobites can claim them and do their deeds. I guess the whole “It is not hands that call us, it is desire” angle from Hellraiser II is no longer in play.
For our human characters, we get a recovering drug addict and her boyfriend who initially steal the box from a storage container, but then events happen causing the death of the protagonist’s brother, and thus a journey to discover the nature of the box and if her brother can be saved. Since we know we’re watching a Hellraiser movie, we basically already know the mystery. The only thing we don’t know are the details in what makes this new mythology different from the ones of the original series, and how it all ties into a billionaire art collector who owns the box at the time of their theft.
On a story and character level, I just didn’t connect with the film. There’s nothing I can really point to that’s wrong about it, and the first hour of this film is largely character development with very little horror action, as that’s all backloaded into the second half of the film. If you compare this to Frank and his sister-in-law/lover, contrasted with the innocent Kirsty as the characters of the original film, there’s not a lot to hang onto here. Maybe the whole recovering-drug-addict-as-horror-protagonist-so-film-is-a-metaphor-for-addiction angle is just played out by now.
The new Pinhead is great, though. Jamie Clayton may be a female Pinhead, but the character is presented as largely androgynous and has this ethereal menace which works very well. Plus I love whatever the actress and the post-production team did on her voice, because it has that seductive yet frightening quality that this character should have. This version of Pinhead isn’t used as sparingly as in the original film, but she’s not front and center throughout the film either, leaving a nice balance.
The gore is good, though after seeing Terrifier 2 last night it can’t measure up to that. There’s only one scene of violence that really stood out to me, though, and it involves a very simple, prolonged neck injury, and is the highlight of all of the kill scenes. Though I am happy to report that, after almost a dozen films, we finally get to see what happens when Chatterer bites into someone with those teeth. Why did that take this long?
I liked the film, but I was hoping it would be more “out there” and transgressive. The Cenobites are still torture fetishists/sadists, but there should be an uncomfortable sexual element in these films, and that’s unfortunately lacking here. Still, aside from the one-victim-at-a-time slasher structure, I did like a lot of the new mythology introduced here, and there’s enough good elements to make me think a less safe sequel with the same director at the helm could really knock this thing out of the park.
Guest writer David Leninhawk sees a LOT of movies. Check out Letterboxd for more reviews.