Director: Clive Barker
Rating: 8 out of 10
From the absurd excesses of the 1980's in Fright Night, I took a major left turn and went down one of the darkest, bloodiest, goriest, creepiest roads of the 1980's with Hellraiser. If you're looking for some majorly screwed up imagery, look no further. Of course, judging by the poster, this is the film that spawned one of horror's most indelible creation's: Pinhead. Slight piece of trivia: he's credited as Lead Cenobite in this flick, not Pinhead. That came later, as I'm sure fan focus was squarely on the bad guy with the booming voice and needles stuck all over his ghostly head.
The real bad guy in this is Frank Cotton, who we meet in the opening sequence as he's buying a mysterious puzzle box in, what looks like, an Asian marketplace. Having performed a candle-lit ritual and activated the box, we next see Frank literally in pieces all over an otherwise empty room. The culprits for the grisly scene, where we literally see Frank's face get pieced together after being torn apart, are the Cenobites, "demons to some....angels to others." The sadomasochist undertones of the movie are certainly hard to miss, with the theme of "pleasure and pain, indivisible" being constantly displayed on-screen mixed with the sexual tension, chains, and the black latex outfits of the Cenobites. Next enter Frank's brother, Larry, and his unhappy wife, Julia, a former lover of Frank's, and eventually Larry's daughter, Kirsty. They unknowingly move-in to the house where the gruesome murder took place, though the room is spotlessly clean after the deed is done.
After a drop of blood hits the floor in that room from Larry's gushing hand, there comes a scene that's both awe-inspiring and just plain grotesque: Frank begins to literally take form again before our very eyes. Bones pop out, flesh grows, and some kind of goo covers his weakened form. Before long Julia discovers this hideous thing upstairs and yearns to be with him, but with a catch. You see Frank gave her more pleasure and thrill than Larry ever could, which is a feeling she wants desperately again. What does she have to do? Oh, just bring home random guys from bars, get them in the room with Frank, smack them on the head with a hammer, and let Frank feast on their flesh and blood so he can regain his full physical form.
Now, I hate giving detailed plot synopsis', but I feel like this film needs to be set-up like that in order to comment on it. It's such a work of originality from Clive Barker and it doesn't have a single predecessor, as far as I can tell. The film isn't nearly as simple as "guy walks around killing people", which was the direction horror was definitely in at that time. It just leads me to believe that Clive Barker has a pretty sick mind to come up with some of these images. He wrote the novel it was based on, adapted it for the screen, and directed it himself on a shoe-string budget. Unfortunately, the budget does show in a few of the ending effects shots, but all-in-all he did more with very little than most filmmakers could do with a lot. I think the constraints of a small budget only serve to unlock the most creative minds and push them to another level.
I'm not going to go any further than that with the plot and all, it's definitely worth checking out to see where that set-up goes. Just make sure you have a pretty strong stomach, that last scene in the house is a doozy.
Next: Nosferatu
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