Hellraiser

Hellraiser

Starring Odessa A'zion, Jamie Clayton, Drew Starkey, Adam Faison

Directed by David Bruckner

Life, knowledge, love, sensation, resurrection, power. These six sensations are what everyone strives for, but it might not be all it's cracked up to be. Life can be beautiful, but can also be tragic. Knowledge can open your mind to a world you never knew, but could also leave you hollow and empty. Love can fill your heart, but can also break it. Sensation allows you to experience the carnal pleasures, or the most intense pain. Resurrection can bring your loved one back to life, but with dire consequences. Power can give you everything you ever wanted, or it can strip it all away. Clive Barker's novel The Hellbound Heart might not be known to most people, but the film based off it - "Hellraiser" - sure is. The 80s was rich with sequel-hungry slashers like Leatherface, Jason, Freddy, Chucky, and Michael - and also Pinhead, the supposed villain in the "Hellraiser" franchise. Much like its predecessors, Pinhead has finally come to the 2000s with a loving soft reboot film that maintains its highly cerebral, thought-provoking issues bathed in gallons and gallons of blood.

Six years after wealthy socialite Roland Voight (Goran Visnjic) disappeared, Riley McKendry (Odessa A'zion) and her boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey) find something he was hiding - a mysterious box. Riley is trying to turn her life around, but Trevor serves as a bad influence, at least according to her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn), his boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison), and their friend Nora (Aoife Hinds) - and it could be true because Riley manages to open the box, unleashing a modern-day Pandora's Box of hell on her friends and family. She's inadvertently released the Cenobites under their leader the Priest (Jamie Clayton), and they seek the blood of five people in order to give Riley her deepest desires. Riley tries to find a way to stop them before more people die, and before the Priest and the Cenobites achieve their goal.

The "Hellraiser" series started off strong with three impressive outings before it spiraled out of control - like all franchises do - and lost the heart of the matter. The overarching theme of the film is the issue of pain and pleasure, and how both tend to co-exist in the same frame, like a yin-yang relationship. What's one person's pleasure is another person's pain, and the entirety of the franchise points out the hedonism associated with it. Doug Bradley played the role of the Priest for the majority of the franchise, before some other guy who's name I can't remember took over in the last two installments. Now, for this soft reboot, the role of the Priest is played by a female - Jamie Clayton - and she serves as a worthy successor to Bradley's pin-cushion head (fun side note: the character everyone knows as Pinhead is never called that by Clive Barker - in fact he hates that name - and its name is merely the Priest, and is neither male nor female).

For this outing, the film continues the theme of the 2000s with the hero (or heroine) struggling with mental issues. Here, it's the issue of alcoholism and drug use, as Odessa A'zion's Riley is a recovering addict, which could've been used as a crutch as it has been in other films where she tells everyone what's happening and no one believes her because of her machinations, but thankfully that doesn't happen here: she receives encouragement and help, even if it's not always the right kind. When she accidentally opens the Lament Configuration, she does something that shouldn't have happened - she didn't get stabbed by it. This makes her the owner of the box, and she's tasked by the Cenobites to bring five sacrifices in order to get what she truly wants, which is to resurrect her brother Matt after inadvertently making him the first sacrifice. The film follows her misadventures as she tries to bring her brother back as well as stopping the Cenobites, and bloody mayhem ensues.

For Jamie Clayton, it was an almost impossible task to don the Priest (Pinhead) makeup after Doug Bradley made it his own, but she served as a worthy successor to the crown as she played the role of the Priest with pinpoint precision, proving the character to be the most nuanced in all the slasher greats. The Priest isn't out for revenge, doesn't kill without purpose, and doesn't crack wise - it's an eternal being of pure pain, thinking that this pain is pleasurable, and only dishes out what's given to it. There's no sense of empathy or emotion at all, and Clayton - using a voice modulator to give her voice a non-gender feel - shows up and understands the assignment.

Director David Bruckner is an underrated horror director for our modern times, giving us great films like "The Ritual" and "The Night House," and he tackles the subject matter of "Hellraiser" with the same bravado as his other work, mixing in bloody body horror with philosophical debates that'll have audiences discussing long after it ends, much like the original three films.

The film does falter in its character development, especially for being two hours long. Side characters exist merely in the realm of their own caricatures - Matt is the loving but firm brother, Colin is his sweet understanding boyfriend, Trevor is the bad boy boyfriend, and Nora is the roommate. There's not much character development to any of them, and only serve as bodies to be offered to the Priest. Even Riley's storyline is stinted in her approach to find out what's happening, reducing the story to a generic by-the-books mystery to unravel - but unlike other films (like "Smile"), "Hellraiser" keeps it interesting.

The interesting comes with the violence that the film promises, and delivers in spades. While it's not as nightmare-inducing as Barker's original, it still provides some truly creepy moments, such as when someone is pricked by the box and the room changes into the labyrinth that fans will remember from the first few outings. The Cenobites are also different in that they're not donning the dominatrix leather from the original, but rather their own fleshy selves, complete with all the gory goodness you'd expect from a great mixture of practical and computer-generated effects. One of the main issues in modern film is how they polish everything, and that's where some of the allure from the original is missing - the original is visceral, unnerving, and revolutionary for its time, while this one is more polished and subdued, but still gets its point across.

The Score: A