‘Hellraiser’ Offers Few New Sights, Plenty Of Pain But Little Pleasure

Hellraiser (2022)

_{Spyglass/rated R/115 minutes}

_{Directed by David Brockner}

_{Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, with a story by Collins, Piotroswki and David Goyer}

_{Based on “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker}

_{Cinematography by Eli Born}

_{Music by Ben Lovett}

_{Debuting on Hulu courtesy of Walt Disney on October 7}

David Brockner’s Hellraiser feels like a prime example of what has become a ‘Don’t f*** it up!” era of franchise filmmaking. It’s a new variation of Clive Barker’s short story “The Hellbound Heart,” or more accurately, it’s another glorified part one in what might be a new Hellraiser franchise. It has a decent budget, a few overqualified actors and its share of painful R-rated carnage. However, the film, debuting on Hulu this Friday, is stricken by a specific need to play to the fans. It is almost too respectable for its own good. Because it’s essentially a glorified Hellraiser part 1 version 2.0, it feels restrained in storytelling and visual imagery. It hits most of the beats most fans crave, but only just so and only just that. Because it is stuck going through the part one motions, it never expands its horizons beyond what we expect.

What’s more dispiriting is how the film eventually devolves into a generic teen slasher flick where half-a-dozen hot young adults venture to a single location and get picked off by a supernatural menace. That the supernatural threat is Pinhead (a game Jaime Clayton even if she’s mostly an abstract concept) and her cenobites is only worthwhile for those already aware. Otherwise, they are exquisitely grotesque (swapping traditional S&M clothes for wearing portions of their flesh on the outside) but otherwise generic boogiemen and boogie women who occasionally spout platitudes about the thin line between pleasure and pain. The closest thing to subtext is making its lead protagonist (a frankly spectacular Odessa A’zion) a recovering addict, which plays into the whole pain = pleasure motif. Like many of the sequels, this feels like a generic horror flick that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie.

For those who need some plot, the film opens with a prologue whereby a done-it-all billionaire Goran Visnjic completes the “Lament Configuration” (think a Rubik’s Cube but with 74% more murder) and suffers horribly for his puzzle-solving skills. We then drift to young Riley (A’zion), who is living with her tough-love brother Brandon Flynn) and his longtime boyfriend (Adam Faison) as she recovers from addiction. It’s not going great, and her boyfriend (Drew Starkey) isn’t helping by convincing her to help him rob a storage unit. No prizes for guessing what’s being stolen or guessing that this seemingly harmless robbery results in 100 minutes of metal chains, ripped flesh and pontification. In this version, you must be cut by the box to summon the extraterrestrial pests, which stinks for Riley’s brother, who nicks himself on the death toy and gets literally dragged to hell. Alas!

I’m not going to pretend Hellraiser 2022 is ‘worse’ than (most of) the copious direct-to-VHS or DVD sequels. This is a better-made and more polished horror flick. However, there is a certain redundancy as we watch these (mostly underwritten) human characters discover the cursed puzzle box and get torn to pieces by the cenobites. So much of the film is spent telling us what we already know, which makes sense since it’s a fresh start, but I’d imagine most audiences watching this will have at least some awareness of the franchise. I’ve often made fun of how Adrian Paul helpfully shouts “The quickening!” in the first reel of Highlander: The Source as he’s being ‘quickened,’ as if someone watching Highlander 5 wouldn’t already know what’s going on. Much of Hellraiser feels exactly like that, as introductory exposition for the already initiated minus the franchise-specific kink.

Not helping matters is the picture is so poorly lit and grey that it can sometimes be hard to make out the various sights that Pinhead wishes to show us. Bruckner’s The Night House (a terrific supernatural chiller with a top-shelf performance from Rebecca Hall) wasn’t exactly lit up like a Christmas tree, but I never had to squint. None of the images are all that innovative beyond “Wow, this is as gory as I’d expect from a Hellraiser flick.” There’s nothing dangerous or transgressive about it. Again, we mostly lose the sexual oomph most associated with the first film, which makes the second nostalgia-skewing streaming sequel/remake in a week after Hocus Pocus 2 to be less horny than its cinematic predecessor. The overlong (around 110 minutes) film is so concerned with not being bad or disrespectful that it forgets to be good or innovative.

We’re dealing with a big(ish) budget production and franchise hopes trying to replicate a novelty made in 1987 purely to prove it was possible. The first two Hellraiser movies were gruesome and disturbing on shoestring budgets. They felt taboo and forbidden in a way that can’t be matched by a big streaming premiere on a company partially owned by Disney. Hellraiser was a mostly house-bounded murder melodrama, but Hellbound went full-tilt boogie. It still shocks and dazzles as a visually spectacular and feverishly frightening X-rated riff variation on Labyrinth. With underwritten characters (only Riley gets any depth thanks to A’zion) and a thin narrative, Hellraiser comes off as a variation on (for example) the House of Wax redo with Pinhead as the primary baddie. At least that trashy remake knew how to party. Hellraiser is, to quote Lisa Simpson, rebellious in a conformist sort of way.