Hellraiser
Starring:
Andrew
Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Sean Chapman
Running
time: 94 minutes
Year:
1987
Directed
By: Clive
Barker
Written
By: Clive
Barker
I remember
the first time I saw the poster for this film. It was in a friend's bedroom and
it had the scariest looking person plastered across the middle of it. This
person was the notorious Pinhead. Written underneath his white, bald, nail
impaled head was the title Hellraiser. I
decided then that this was a film I would never dare watch. Recently however I
decided that I should give this a chance as it is classed as a horror classic.
I have to say I wish I had stuck to my original instinct and never actually watched
this film. Not because it's scary but because it is dreadful.
The film follows four characters. To start with we
see Frank (Chapman), a pleasure seeker who obtains a box. Once he solves the
puzzle on the box he is transported to hell where he is put through ultimate
pain by the Cybernites. After his pain he manages to escape and ends up being
imbedded in the floor boards of his old family home.
Next we see couple Larry and Julia. Larry is Frank's
brother and Julia is his girlfriend who once had an affair with Frank,
something she can't stop fantasising about. The couple decide to move into this
now abandoned house and whilst there Larry cuts himself, spilling the blood on
the floorboards in the attic. The blood brings Frank back to life, but not
completely human, just enough to be seen. As Frank begins to be reformed Julia
notices him and her arousal towards him comes rushing back despite the state he
is in. Soon it becomes clear that the more blood Frank receives, the more he
re-forms. Due to Julia's infatuation with him she brings men back to the house
with the promise of sex, only to kill them and allow Frank to take the blood.
The final character is Larry's daughter Kirsty, who
dislikes her new mother-in-law Julia and stumbles across her Uncle Frank as he
is regenerating. We get some feeling from his intimidation towards her that
perhaps he raped her or fathered her, either way he forces her to run away with
the box, and accidentally call the Cybernites. Pinhead then turns up trying to
take her away to inflict some pain but she tries to strike a deal with them and
deliver Frank back to them.
Each part of the film seems to follow a different
character and to be fair I didn't care about any of them what so ever. I think
half of the problem with that was the considerably terrible acting that was on
show. It really was bad. Each character also seems to be really miserable, with
no joy in their lives at all, meaning they were so one dimensional it wasn't
believable.
The horror of it was also non-existent. Now I'm not
saying horrors are particularly realistic but this one was beyond stupid. Fair
enough Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers are not realistic, but I bought into
their world and they were frightening. Here we got monsters that looked like
puppets, and Cybernites that were nowhere near as scary as I was expecting them
to be. The poster of them was far scarier. This film, considering the puppet
like monsters and Ashley Laurence's striking resemblance to Winona Ryder, was
like watching Beetlejuice, without
the comedy of course.
I'll move onto Pinhead, whose image alone was the sole
reason I watched this film. Let me tell you now Pinhead is barely in it. The
fact that he has become a horror icon because of this is ridiculous because he
isn't scary, has no screen time, pops up at strange moments when the story felt
it needed something scary, and has an actor playing him so poorly that his
lines would have been delivered better by the talking clock. Pinhead does not
deserve to be an icon due to this movie.
Everything about this film is bad. It isn't a patch
on Halloween, Friday the 13th, A
Nightmare On Elm Street or, to an extent, Candyman. And they were all made before this and done everything
horror films should do. Maybe they were trying to do something different here
but it purely did not work. Horror fans love this movie, and for some reason
put it on a pedestal but I can't understand why. This was certainly not the
scary horror movie, with the scary horror icon that I was expecting.
1
/ 5
Tolli
Next film to be reviewed: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
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