HELLRAISER (1987)
Starring Clare Higgins and Andrew Robinson
A flawed film, but a real classic, "Hellraiser" came along just as the horror genre was looking pretty moribund in the late 1980s. We'd already gone through such classics as "Return of the Living Dead," "Evil Dead 2," "Fright Night" etc., and not much else was being released. Along came Barker, a novelist who decided to make a movie. "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker," Stephen King was quoted as saying in "Hellraiser" ads.
As far as low-budget movies go, "Hellraiser" delivers plenty of punch, with an amazing amount of effects squeezed out of a film with a small pocketbook. Barker tackles the intersection of pain and pleasure with a vision of a hell populated by demons that are obsessed with order, kinky to the extreme and ready to "tear your soul apart" if your'e stupid enough to summon them via a puzzle box that's been floating around for the last several centuries.
Indeed, in Barker's
vision, there are actually people fighting to get their hands on the puzzle box,
apparently unaware of what terrors await them when they solve it. They're both obsessed
with -- and terrified by -- the power of the box. Higgins plays the evil wife of a nice
middle-class man (Robinson). through an extramarital affair with his brother,
she learns
about the box and its power. After her dead lover is resurrected from an accidental blood
spilling, but only feels like half himself because he no longer has skin, she lures men
to her home as sacrifices to him. He takes their flesh and life force and slowly rebuilds
his body.
Ashley Lawrence plays Robinson's daughter who suspects her stepmom is up to something and eventually finds herself the target of the Cenobites, the demons that show up whenever the box's puzzle is solved. Many of them have bizarre body piercings -- and this was before the body piercing craze of the late 1990s! The lead Cenobite is played with dead seriousness by Doug Bradley. Eventually Robinson becomes evil too and it's great to see him playing a bad guy again. He was the psychotic villain in the original "Dirty Harry."
A must-see movie, "Hellraiser" does suffer from a mildly slow pace. But overall it beats just about everything that's coming out in the new millennium. They do NOT make them like this anymore. The follow-up is worth catching as well.
