Hellraiser 2022 Review: Pinhead returns on Hulu, but just cuts under the skin

To be perfectly honest, it’s not all that difficult to make one of the better Hellraiser movies. Any franchise with more than three or four entries is bound to be inconsistent, but Hellraiser’s drop-off is particularly sharp, starting from a sequel that improves on the original (Hellbound: Hellraiser II) to two films that are not Wellexactly, but it’s quite fun to look at (Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and Hellraiser: Bloodline) to a long line of direct-to-video sequels so bad that the series is starting to look like a meta-joke inflicting pain on the audience instead of the characters. And yet, fans have stayed true to the 1987s for nearly 35 years Hellraiser and Clive Barker’s diabolical vision.

Director David Bruckner is one of those fans. That becomes clear when you look at his new reboot of Hellraiser, which doesn’t exactly go back to the source material but stays true to its spirit. The heroes of this straight-to-Hulu movie are scumbags, queers, and addicts. The film’s tone is very serious and mature, a welcome focal point for teen-centric slashers like Scream (2022) and body body body. The occult Art Deco production design blasts the original’s puzzle box to awe-inspiring architectural scale. The cenobites inspire a breathtaking combination of wonder and terror, softly spoken and glowing under the wan moonlight. And the chains… oh yes, there are chains flying in all directions tearing human bodies apart like milk cartons.

Still, Bruckner’s priorities remain, and those of screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (The night house), something else. While the 2022 film has an omnivorous sexuality that feels right Hellraiser

– we see both gay and straight couples naked in bed together, and there is more male than female nudity – this version is less perverted than Barker’s sadomasochistic original. In this film, the promise of an eternity on the razor’s edge between pleasure and pain exerted a perverse fascination. Here it’s a definite evil, attractive to no one but the leader of the cenobites, referred to here as The Priest (Jamie Clayton) and her minions. Even HellraiserThe corrupt billionaire (and there must be a corrupt billionaire) regrets his adventures “in the wider regions of experience.”

Instead, Bruckner and Co. descend on franchise lore. This film fleshes out the world of the cenobites in a new and comprehensive way, laying out exactly how the Lament Configuration (i.e. the puzzle that summons the cenobites) works and the seven steps a penitent must go through in order to beg like the film does puts it, “an audience with God”. Each of these steps requires a human sacrifice and Hellraiser buys itself time by letting its protagonists figure this out and deliberately lengthening the intervals between these bloody sacrifices. This is where the film starts to lose sharpness.

Hellraiser begins with a title card that reads “Belgrade, Serbia,” replacing Morocco as the global capital of taboo delights. There, the Lament Configuration is purchased and returned to Voight (Goran Višnjić), the aforementioned decadent billionaire, who promptly sacrifices a young man to her and summons the god Leviathan. Fast forward six years and the box sits abandoned in a shipping container in an empty warehouse. Then 20-something degenerates Riley (Odessa A’zion) and Trevor (Drew Starkey) “liberate” it while looking for valuables to sell for a quick buck.

The pair met at a 12-step meeting, but just touching the box knocks recovering addict Riley out of the car. Here Bruckner’s film takes on a more realistic tone and places the Hellraiser universe into something more like our world than anything in Barker’s original. The ensuing feud between Riley and her more responsible brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) similarly grounds the film with down-to-earth conflicts and settings – until the arrival of the cenobites turns a public park into a surreal nightmare and Matt inexplicably disappears.

Overcome with guilt and grief, Riley sets out in search of clues to the puzzle box she suspects may have caused Matt’s disappearance, briefly bringing the film into a procedural plot that should have been followed to the end. Instead, the focus shifts when Riley breaks into Voight’s Massachusetts mansion, followed by Matt’s boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison) and her roommate Nora (Aoife Hinds). There, Hellraiser turns from mystery to siege film as the group barricades themselves inside Voight’s palatial home while the cenobites gather outside.

This part of the film highlights HellraiserThe two biggest weaknesses: the characters and the length. The film earns most of its two-hour run, but Riley, who is updating the rest of the gang on what the heck these things are and what they want, burdens Bruckner’s reimagining with a few too many scenes of dialogue during an already slow stretch of The Movie. And apart from the fact that she has a brother and a weakness for alcohol and pills, we know relatively little about Riley. We know even less about her friends – a minute’s silence please for poor Nora, who has no distinguishable character traits other than being “the roommate”. This makes it difficult to engage in the drama between the characters, which even the film’s writers seem indifferent to.

Perhaps appropriately, the most compelling character in the film is a cenobite. Of the five actors who have put their stamp on the hellish bureaucrat colloquially known as Pinhead, Jamie Clayton is the only one aside from Doug Bradley to truly embrace Pinhead as a character. Clayton’s version is breathier and more feminine than Bradley’s authoritarian priest figure; She is more of a holy mystic than a Pope-King. Her black eyes gaze with the cold curiosity of an alien scientist on the people begging for mercy before her, and she patiently waits for them to come to her with regal bearing and delicately clasped hands. Clayton’s Pinhead is a different, quieter type of scare, which makes the extensive dialogue she provides in the film (far more so than Bradley in the 1987 film) quite tongue-in-cheek.

The Cenobite design in Hellraiser is excellent all round, using advances in prosthetics to scrap black leather fetish gear in favor of suits made from her own skinned hide. Familiar features are exaggerated – the female cenobite’s neck folds have never looked so vaginal – and new designs evoke the terrors of iron lungs, forked hands and human taxidermy. The film is gory and intense when it needs to be, at one point following a needle down a character’s throat and out the other side. But its most imaginative horror flourishes are built into the sets, which, like the pieces of the Lament Configuration, shift and jingle when the cenobites are near.

Hellraiser 2022 easily raises the admittedly low bar of being one of the best Hellraiser films. It’s the best since Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and might even be the second best in the series after this film. It has some great, grotesque imagery, which makes it a real shame that this film doesn’t get a theatrical release. And it achieves what many fans (including this one) wanted for the series, which is to pull it out of the creative purgatory it’s been stuck in for a few decades. The only thing to worry about at this point are the points where Barker’s perverted edge has been sanded down for a sex-shy era and his enigmatic storytelling has been discarded in favor of a performance that’s more readable but less compelling. In addition, the suffering is exquisite.

Hellraiser will be published on Hi on October 7th.