Hellraiser (2022) poster

Hellraiser (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – David Bruckner, Screenplay – Ben Collins & Luke Piotrowski, Story – Ben Collins, David S. Goyer & Luke Piotrowski, Producers – Clive Barker, David S. Goyer & Keith Levine & Marc Toberoff, Photography – Eli Born, Music – Ben Lovett, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jacob Eaton, Visual Effects – Ingenuity Studios (Supervisors – David Lebensfeld & Grant Miller), Special Effects Supervisor – Gabor Kiszelly, Makeup Effects – Russell FX (Supervisors – Josh Russell & Sierra Russell), Production Design – Kathrin Eder, Puzzle Box Design – Michael Emborg. Production Company – Phantom Four.

Cast

Odessa A’zion (Riley McKendy), Jamie Clayton (The Priest), Drew Starkey (Trevor), Adam Faison (Colin), Brandon Flynn (Matt McKendy), Goram Visnjic (Roland Voight), Hiam Abbess (Serena Menaker), Aoifre Hinds (Nora), Jason Liles (The Chatterer), Yinka Olorunnife (The Weeper), Selina Lo (The Gasp), Zachary Hing (The Asphyx), Kit Clarke (Joey)


Plot

In Massachusetts, Riley McKendy lives with her brother Matt who treats her with suspicious due to her recovering drug problems. In need of money, Riley’s boyfriend Trevor persuades her to join him in conducting a break-in to a container in a seemingly abandoned warehouse. However, all that they find inside is a safe containing a puzzle box. That evening, Matt argues with Riley after she returns home drunk and kicks her out. Sitting in a park, Riley plays with the box and manages to unlock it but passes out. Matt comes to finds her and cuts himself on the box. When Riley comes around, Matt is missing. Concerned for his whereabouts, Riley and Trevor begin an investigation into the nature of the box, finding how it was collected by millionaire Roland Voight, who mysteriously vanished, and how its opened configurations can summon demonic forces that torture souls but offer great boons in return for sacrifice.


I am old enough to have seen the original Hellraiser (1987) in theatres. It went on opening day in September 1987. I had heard about the film and the name of Clive Barker being promoted by magazines like Fangoria for months before, enough to buy up and read Barker’s The Books of Blood collection, and there was a great deal of anticipation. That didn’t quite prepare me for the extraordinary visions on offer – of demonic forces from the beyond offering ecstatic tortures, of glimpses of forbidden pleasures and the amazing originality of the design of the Cenobites and Image Animation’s glistening gore effects.

The film made Clive Barker into a cult name. It immediately produced a string of sequels overseen by Barker with Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) and Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996). The rights were then sold to Dimension Films who handed the making of a further series of sequels over to Neo Art & Logic, who produced the quite good Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) from a then unknown Scott Derrickson, followed by three other increasingly shabbier sequels with Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Deader (2005) and Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005). A few years later, Dimension Films minus Neo Art also made Hellraiser: Revelations (2011) and Hellraiser: Judgment (2018) mainly in order not to let hold on the rights to the series to lapse.

Since the early 2000s, a remake has been announced off and on with names like the French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury who made the grim Inside (2007), Pascal Laugier of Martyrs (2008) notoriety and Patrick Lussier, director of Dracula 2000 (2000) and My Bloody Valentine (2009) being attached at various points. Some of these names leave me highly intrigued as to how the remake might have come out – I would have been fascinated to see a version from Pascal Laugier, for instance.

Jamie Clayton as Pinhead now referred to as The Priest in Hellraiser (2022)
Jamie Clayton as Pinhead now referred to as The Priest

The remake has been placed in the hands of David Bruckner, a choice I am not unhappy with as Bruckner has done some fine work from his first appearance as one of the three directors on the mass insanity film The Signal (2007), followed by the Amateur Night episode of the horror anthology V/H/S (2012), the The Accident episode of the anthology Southbound (2015) and the Total Copy episode of V/H/S/85 (2023). He made his full-length directorial debut with the Folk Horror film The Ritual (2017) and went on to the ghost story The Night House (2020). The film is produced by David S. Goyer, the high-profile screenwriter of Blade (1998), Dark City (1998), The Dark Knight (2008) and Man of Steel (2013) among others, and produced via Goyer’s Phantom Four production company, who were also behind Bruckner’s The Night House. Clive Barker has signed on as a producer, although whether that means he is influencing the vision or it is just another of the 1990s sequels where his name as producer was more a case of him taking the money and running.

There have been a great many remakes of 1970s/80s films since the early 2000s. See the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Toolbox Murders (2003), Willard (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), The Fog (2005), Black Christmas (2006), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Omen (2006), Sisters (2006), When a Stranger Calls (2006), The Wicker Man (2006), Halloween (2007), The Hitcher (2007), April Fool’s Day (2008), Day of the Dead (2008), It’s Alive (2008), Long Weekend (2008), Prom Night (2008), Friday the 13th (2009), The Last House on the Left (2009), My Bloody Valentine (2009), Night of the Demons (2009), Sorority Row (2009), The Stepfather (2009), And Soon the Darkness (2010), The Crazies (2010), I Spit on Your Grave (2010), Mother’s Day (2010), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Piranha (2010), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011), Fright Night (2011), Straw Dogs (2011), The Thing (2011), Maniac (2012), Carrie (2013), Evil Dead (2013), Patrick (2013), Poltergeist (2015), Suspiria (2018), Child’s Play (2019), Jacob’s Ladder (2019), Pet Sematary (2019), Slumber Party Massacre (2021) and Firestarter (2022). (For a more detailed listing see Films That Were Remade and Remakes). That said, there are only a handful of these that have anything that stands up to the original – The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha, while Suspiria was not uninteresting.

So how does the new Hellraiser shape up? The thing that immediately becomes apparent is that the new version has not attempted to replicate Clive Barker’s plot but does its own thing. The original has a fairly unbeatable plot where a husband, his wife and daughter move into a house where the skinless remains of his brother remains lay in the wainscoting whereupon the brother persuades the wife, with whom he had an affair, to lure men so that he can kill them and regain his skin. None of the other sequels have had something so amazingly twisted, so steeped in forbidden desires and have instead just opted for straightforward plots where someone comes into possession of the box, opens it and summons demons.

Odessa A’zion as Riley in Hellraiser (2022)
Odessa A’zion as Riley

Against this, the plot here in which a recovering drug addict comes into possession of the box, opens it etc seems just another variant on the plots of the sequels. When Goran Visnjic turned up with a clockwork contraption impaled through his chest, I thought maybe we were in for a repeat of a Frank plot but that is not the case. This version also takes over an hour to unveil its Pinhead. It runs half-an-hour longer than the original and the majority of this first hour is spent with the younger cast running around trying to deal with missing people and understand the mystery of the box – ie. piecing together information where we already know the answers – before getting to the same place that Barker started at. And then after that point, we essentially have a variation on Hellraiser: Hellworld with a group of victims imprisoned in a mansion as they are picked off by Pinhead and the Cenobites. The remake does explain a little more about the mythology of the puzzlebox and what each stages will do.

This brings us to the new Cenobites. Trans actor Jamie Clayton was an interesting choice for the part – I had certainly enjoyed her work on The Wachowskis’ Sense8 (2015-8). And she had the seal of approval from Doug Bradley, the original Pinhead, who wrote a rave Tweet in support of Clayton. I am a little more mixed on the Clayton issue. She is certainly creditable in the part but what is lacking is the gravitas that Bradley brought to the role. It might just be David Bruckner and the way he frames and lights Clayton but this Pinhead seems a more passive presence, meekly standing waiting outside the house with hands clasped. Not to mention, Bradley did all of his threat with his mellifluous voice alone and unaltered whereas Clayton’s voice is given its basso timbre through digital amplification.

The other Cenobites are give or take. I far preferred Clive Barker’s conception, whereas the new ones look like designs for androids gone wrong. And whose bright idea was it to give us pink Cenobites? Not to mention having them able to be used as sacrifices seems a cheat on the rules. The scenes where they end up trapped between gates and doors, or unable to enter the house and are left standing in the garden unable to enter the house severely robs them of their mystique.

The remake is not entirely uninteresting in places. On the other hand, David Bruckner’s direction is very middle-of-the-road in comparison to Clive Barker. It is only rare that we get any of the sadomasochistic cruelty and blood-glistening nastiness – although the final image the film goes out on offers some compensation. I was left wondering if this were the film I was watching back in 1987, whether it would have become a cult film, launched the name of its director and created a series of sequels we were seeing to this day. I doubt it.


Trailer here


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