I was excited to hear that they were making a new Hellraiser movie. I love the original movie, but there's room for more interpretations of Clive Barker's work, so I couldn't wait to watch this movie when it finally came out yesterday. I finally got the chance to watch it today, so here goes nothing. what did I end up thinking about this movie?
In this version a young woman must confront the evil forces that lurk within a puzzle box that is responsible for the disappearance of her brother. In the original movie, the box was responsible for the disappearance of her uncle and she had to fight her wicked stepmother for her father's soul, so this version takes a different track. right from the opening sequence, we see that the puzzle box is back to its old tricks, taking souls and torturing them for eternity.
I'm not sure I agree with the path this version of the story takes, because the puzzle box has always been used primarily by those who know what's going to happen when they play with it, those who are searching for that spot where pain becomes pleasure becomes pain, and in this movie innocent people are almost tricked into getting trapped by the evil box, so that changes the story for me into more of a cautionary tale about not hanging out with assholes rarher than a warning about violent sex becoming a dangerous addiction. once I got over that and started appreciating this story for what it was, though, I started liking it better.
Riley is the main character in this movie, and she's an addict with only six months clean when the movie starts. when she and her boyfriend stumble upon the puzzle box they decide to keep it instead of running away because they're great at decision-making, so I guess that's a choice they make to keep the box, but it still feels like a cop out where the box hurts innocent people. I miss the old Pinhead from the second hellraiser movie, who says "it is not the hands that call us, it is the desire" so people couldn't get away with tricking other people to use the box, the cenobites would still come after them because it was their desire that raised the demons in the first place. Soon Riley is taking drugs again and so when she first sees the cenobites who dwell in the box she thinks it's the drugs making her see things. When her brother tries to help her he gets sucked in by the cenobites and it's up to her to investigate the box and try to find her brother and set him free.
People in horror movies make some really boneheaded moves. If I was in some creepy huge abandoned looking house and a secret passage opened up in the wall, I wouldn't go in. If I found a creepy looking puzzle box left mysteriously as if to lure me away, I wouldn't play with it, and I wouldn't trust anyone who led me into a place that opens a portal to hell, so if I were in this movie it would be five minutes long and not nearly as much gory, twisted fun. There's plenty of gore here, though I think there was more gore in the original. It's hard to say. This movie almost seems like one of the Saw sequels, where people get trapped in contraptions designed to torture them and they have to turn on each other in order to survive. I guess this is what Hellraiser has become in a post-saw world. I miss the practical special effects of the first movie, but the new cenobites are kind of cool looking. I remember thinking some of the practical special effects in the original were cheesy looking back when I first saw it and now I'm bitching about the CGI heavy effects of this movie. I guess you can never make a horror fan happy. There's also too much standing around preaching at each other in this movie for my taste. I get tired of listening to the bad guys give exposition-heavy speeches at the end of the movie when I would rather be watching actual stuff happening (hasn't anyone told you to SHOW NOT TELL, movie?) If you can get past the preachiness there's a cool little movie buried under there. There's even some cool gore effects at the end that make me forgive the trips to CGI-land. All in all, I ended up digging this movie. There's definitely more good than bad here. Give it a watch and try not to compare it too much to the original.
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