HELLRAISER
Take four...
After seeing this movie three times and still failing to see what the big deal was, I gave up. Is there such thing as a "guilty displeasure"? Movies you really want to like, but just can't, movies that have captured the imagination of people with tastes like yourself everywhere but just do nothing for you at all? This movie is not only widely loved in the genre, but also widely respected - I've made peace with the fact that Kubrick's The Shining bores the shit out of me, but I've always wanted this movie to grow on me, which it never did. After three attempts to let it do so, I finally wrote it off as tiresome, clumsy and ridiculously stuffy for a movie centered around concepts like the ultimates of pain and pleasure.
It was only in the last week or so that I elected to give this movie a FOURTH chance. I can't believe I'm giving this movie a fourth chance. It's for two reasons - one, is Entombed's song "Hellraiser" on their Hollowman EP. It's a metallification of Christopher Young's music with samples from the movie scattered throughout, to very creepy effect. The second, I finally read the story Hellraiser is based on: Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart", and I enjoyed it quite a bit. So, why not?
Hellraiser opens up with a guy named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) buying a puzzle box from some far-east merchant who talks like he's right out of one of those old Aladdin serials. Next we see of him, he's playing around with it in a square of candles (that's a first; we usually see circles and pentagrams), and he eventually finds the hidden catch that opens it up - and when it's opened, it gets more than he wanted. (what he's looking for, the film later reveals, are new peaks in pleasure and pain) Hooks tear him apart, and twisted, S&M-gone-mad caricatures of humans called Cenobites come to collect the pieces.
Soon, Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Larry's wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the old family home with his visiting daughter from a previous wife (now deceased), Kirsty (Ashley Laurence). Frank cuts himself in the master bedroom; the blood seeps into the floor, and nourishes some life form living under it. Julia is the first to discover it when it reveals itself: it's Frank! Having escaped from the Cenobites, he's now back on the earthly plane but needs more blood to re-assemble his body. Julia, having slept with Frank just before her wedding and completely won over by his Marlboro Man charm, is happy to oblige.
What Barker has essentially done here is take a very entertaining and awesomely well-written novella ("...tongues fell out of their mouths like slugs") and turn it into a (I hate to say it, I know you probably love this movie but here it goes) mindless gross-out. Not that I have anything against mindless gross-outs; I rather like quite a few of them myself. This movie, after four viewings now, still isn't one of the ones I like.
One of the core problems of Hellraiser is that it tosses up these intriguing ideas about pain and pleasure (they're hardly new, but they're sill intriguing), and does nothing with them at all. The hints we're given about the experience of the ultimate agony are quite mundane; really, being pulled apart by hooks seems hardly notable when you compare it to any number of torments (burning, scraping, Hellraiser: Bloodline) people endure all the time here in the real world. And we're not given even the slightest hint as to the uber-pleasures offered by the Cenobites. The introduction of the novella gave us some hints; the movie gives us nothing.
Andrew Robinson, who is so good when he gets a good role (such as in Dirty Harry or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), is wasted here in a nothing role where all he gets to do for the film's length is stand around and be clueless, never once bothering to look around in that master bedroom they happen not to be using. Chapman is pretty silly as Frank-with-skin, and Oliver Smith is even worse as Frank-without-skin, and I'm pretty sure somebody overdubbed his voice anyway in one of those "Americans won't go to movies where people have British accents!" moves of hilarious stupidity and bad taste on the part of some dumb bastard out there.
The character of Kirsty, who had no apparent, specified relationship to anybody in Barker's novella, is made into the daughter here, which is all well and good. Too bad the only function she serves in the story is to bring about a happy ending, more clumsily in the movie than in the novella, since here the Cenobites just start acting way out of character at the end, necessitating Kirsty's "you go, girl!" Cenobite-kicking. (I can't believe Word 97 knows the word "Cenobites") The Cenobites are not once shown as villains, and yet that's how they start acting at the end. Is that really necessary?
I have to admit to being impressed by Barker's fabulously successful characterization of Julia as the ultimate bloodsucking bitch - that woman who all men who have dated are not unfamiliar with, the one which will turn her nose up at the perfectly nice guy she claims to be committed to and race after the nearest guy who's likely to beat the living crap out of her and pee on her head while she lies bleeding in the gutter, yelling at her the whole time to hurry up and put some clean clothes on before the neighbors see. Barker may be gay, but he's written this character with such boo-hiss-inducing passion that I have to wonder how long it's been since he's figured that out, because he has REALLY managed to capture just what kind of a horrible person Alex - I mean, Michelle - I mean, Julia - is like. You don't get venom like this second-hand.
Of course, most of the credit for that should probably go to Higgins. Barker's dialogue is mostly rather banal, with all of the good lines going to Pinhead (Doug Bradley). It's rather striking, considering how good his prose is in his written works.
The makeup and gore, depending on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend, is either fantastic or laughable. On the good side are the Cenobites - sort-of people cooly enduring their apparently permanent suspension in states that rather look painful - throats peeled open, nails pounded into heads (Pinhead was a female in the story). They only show up at the beginning and end, but while they're there, they make a hell of an impact, and it's of little wonder that Pinhead & Co. were marketed as the stars of this movie, and eventually became the stars of the sequels.
On the bad side, what we see here is a man start with barely more than bone, and then spend much of the film adding muscle and tissue. Great idea in concept. Never been done well once in execution though, and you've really gotta suspend your disbelief to buy into this man - who isn't THAT thin - with about sixty pounds of latex and slime slapped on him to make him appear more skeletal.
And the bad effects don't stop at the makeup; creature FX in one scene is totally unconvincing, not to mention a climax of razzle-dazzle obviously done by a six-year-old with orange and blue crayons. Yeah, I know, low budget and all, but that's not an excuse for making the movie worse. That the puzzle box is effectively used as a laser gun in the end (surprise, surprise, not in the story) speaks of limitations beyond just the budget; mostly in Barker's then-fledgling filmmaking abilities.
All in all, just an unexceptional movie to me; like I said, a "guilty displeasure" if there ever was one, because I can't think of a horror movie I liked less that captured the imaginations of so many people whose tastes in horror I respect. I'm way past "I just don't get it" on this one. I just don't think there's all that much to get.
Wow. All this way without making one "Rubik's Cube" joke. Ah, shit...