Viking Night: Hellraiser
By Bruce Hall
November 6, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It all starts when an avowed hedonist named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman)walks into an exotic marketplace and buys a strange puzzle box. The seller is a mysterious Asian man who chuckles ominously as Frank hurries away. Not understanding the danger of buying from stereotypes, Frank returns home, heads to the attic, sets up some mood lighting and starts fiddling with the box - which promptly shreds him into roadside diner quality hash.
I have no idea what he thought it was supposed to do.
Eventually Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Claire Higgins) move into Frank’s old house, for some reason. Larry has some sort of sentimental attachment to the place, while Julia hates it. This becomes a constant source of conflict between them, as does Frank’s mysterious disappearance. And like a lot of people in horror movies, Larry is irrationally insistent upon moving into a shitty old house more quickly than is practically necessary, and is the only one who can't sense what a bad idea it is.
It's no wonder Julia looks at him like he's made of navel lint, and her incessant brooding over Frank's absence makes it clear - to everyone but Larry - that her heart may be somewhere else. Larry’s daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) drops in to visit and is obviously suspicious of her stepmother, because frost forms in the air between them every time they speak. Kirsten is also less than excited about the drafty old house. But since Larry is a spineless idiot and his wife is a creepy shrew who looks like a mannequin, Kirsten decides to keep an eye on them.
Good call, because this is where things start to get weird.
Larry cuts his hand and spills blood in the attic, right about the spot where Frank was sitting when he got splattered. It seeps through the floor and somehow into the Godless realm where Frank's tortured soul resides. He's now able to return to partial form, which means that Julia finds him, sprawling around on the floor of the attic, looking like a pile of raw gefilte fish. He asks her to bring him victims, so that he may continue his fleshy transformation and they can run away together. Julia takes all of this surprisingly well; you'd think it was every other day she meets a half digested ex-boyfriend in the attic who asks her to prostitute herself and perform human sacrifices.
But there's a catch - the forces that took Frank once want him back, and they're coming. Time is short. So while Larry putters absently around the house, Frank is upstairs trying on clothes and oozing everywhere, Julia is luring horny young men to their doom, and Kirsty's suspicions move her to start poking around. Who will live? Who will die? Will Frank's evil plan succeed? Will Larry plant tomatoes in the garden while hell on earth unfolds in his attic? It's not as much fun finding out as it was in high school, sneaking into a matinee and passing around an ill-gotten flask of bottom shelf whiskey with your friends.
Today, my adult mind questions why a woman as obviously nauseated by the idea of monogamy as Julia is even married. She's pretty heartless, too. Most people, when faced with the shambling corpse of a randy ex-lover at least stop to ask a few questions before they start murdering people. Larry is almost too useless to mention, beyond the obvious question of how he ended up with a girl whose hobbies are rough sex and ritual slaughter. It would all be nice to know, but Hellraiser never credibly establishes the character relationships that are supposed to drive the story.
It doesn’t earn your concern.
No, this isn't the kind of film you go into looking for credible drama. But I tend to expect from a movie only what it seeks to deliver, and this is a movie that clearly aspires to something - I just don't know what that IS. Hellraiser meanders endlessly, switching emphasis from one character to another so often that you're never quite sure how you're supposed to feel about anyone outside of "evil" or "stupid". It’s hard to truly care about who these people are or what they’re doing, or why you should root for one over the other.
There's a theme in there somewhere, about those with extreme desires getting more than they bargain for. But it gets lost in the jumble of meaningless dialogue and pointless imagery. For horror to work on the psychological level it's clearly meant to here, you have to make the audience care about, or at least identify with what's at stake, at least a little. It never happens here. Instead, we get hokey art house tricks like visually comparing a waking woman to a blooming flower, or cheap jump scares - holes in heads and corpses literally falling out of closets.
There are some good points, but to me they highlight the notion that Clive Barker's imagination is better suited to art and design than to film making. Hellraiser's true antagonist isn't who you think it is, and when we get finally get to the truth, you can't help but feel a little cheated. I wanted to see more of that and less of what looks like a depraved teenage sex fantasy from the mind of a sado-masochist who hates his parents but loves costume design. Like Frank, it's a gory husk stretched over a brittle skeleton, and it’s filled with a briny mess so lifeless and indistinct you can't even be bothered to enjoy it when people start to die.
So forget about all the intellectual shadow boxing I just did with myself, and consider this: Hellraiser is not scary. It's not even funny. It's just tedious. Five minutes in particular near the end are kind of clever, but you could get a more rewarding experience hanging out with some Goths the night before Halloween. I don't hate it - I just don't get the love.
As a certain someone from way south of Heaven might say, "It's a waste of good suffering."