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Grown women and outcast “goth” girls in 10th grade alike, rave of Pinhead’s “sexiness”. Horror conventions across the globe consistently attract their share of cosplayers attired in tight black leather and wielding rubber knives in an attempt to look like a Cenobite. What’s a Cenobite, you ask? Wow, you really HAVEN’T seen this film! Well, you are the only one. Because of the scope of this film’s popularity, it becomes nearly impossible to sit down as a reviewer and do more than regurgitate the same, tired IMDB factoids over and over…so when it came time to add a review for this film to our site, I decided to go a little different route. First off, I’ve seen this movie enough times to talk about it freely, but admittedly, not in a long while…so it looked like a fresh viewing would be in order. I was a bit distracted actually, and figured that I’d sort of half-watch my way through Hellraiser in an attempt to jog something loose enough for it to fall out on this page. What I did NOT expect was to be sucked right back in for another go-round with the twenty-one year old film and Pinhead…the Angel of Suffering. So here, what I am going to share with you are the results of that recent viewing…things I never realized, simply forgot over time, or otherwise feel compelled to mention about Hellraiser. Number 1: Pinhead is just as awesome now as he ever was. Doug Bradley pulled this character from within himself just as much as he did from the pages of Barker’s novella, The Hellbound Heart; and the results are still amazingly poignant. Pinhead’s lines in Hellraiser, while written in a way that should cement them forever in the record books of “Cheesy One-Liners from 80’s Films”, are just as quotable as they ever were, yet retain much of their menace and coldness…qualities that no one other than Doug Bradley could have achieved in the same way. I suppose it isn’t so strange after all that all those lonely MySpace teens post blogs about how sexy he is. Number 2: While on the subject of who is hot or not, standards of beauty in the UK of the late 80s were apparently t an all time low. While Western films were throwing dime-a-dozen blonde college girls at us to be slaughtered by some maniac or another, the Brits were trying to convince us that Ashley Laurence (Kirsty) and Claire Higgens were lookers. I am not sure which was the bigger annoyance! It is shameful to admit, but after viewing enough horror films, you start to expect a certain criteria from your leading ladies…but Hellraiser apparently was having NONE of that! For added laughs and a reason to throw Hellraiser back in your DVD player, take the time to check out Ashley Laurence in Kirsty’s “feather dream” sequence…this girl is looking a WHOLE lot like Tom Cruise! Don’t take my word for it… Number 3: This whole film comes off as a b-movie when held to side by side comparison with more recent materials (and even some of its own time!). Everything from the dialog to the film quality and cinematography style simply screams “outdated”. Perhaps the only vibe more distracting nowadays than the age is the “movie of the week” quality of the writing and acting. I kept waiting to spot the commercial break fades! Having aid that, however, it is a treat to see how much Clive wrangled this film like a giallo…a genre I wasn’t familiar with by name (let alone stylistically) back then. After this viewing however, the POV work, the misdirecting camera angles, inventive lighting, the Euro-girl in terror, the over-excess of sexuality, and themes of a maniac’s madness inducing hunt, all combine here to elevate Hellraiser above the “slasher” genre and actually makes the “low-budget dub” qualities of this film work (as it feels familiar to that Italian genre). Number 4: The homeless bug-eating guy? Not so scary actually…maybe a little silly. He’s got a real “Deadliest Catch boat captain with eyeliner” thing working for himself. Number 5: The score of this film, while by no means poor, would be far better suited to a sword and sorcery fantasy tale. Understanding of course that Hellraiser is straddling a line of horror/fantasy/supernatural, I guess I could have let this one slide…if I wasn’t a HUGE Coil fan. Coil was an electronic-experiemental “industrial” (if your thinking Nine Inch Nails right now…your too young to know the “industrial” I am talking about) group, who Clive himself was quoted as saying “Coil was the only group I’ve heard on disc whose records I’ve taken off because they made my bowels churn.” Why someone took the guy who wrote the score to Invaders From Mars (1986) for Hellraiser, over churny-bowels is beyond me! Lastly, Number 6: The makeup-work done for Frank before he has restored all his skin is the freaking highlight of the movie! I paused, slow-mo’ed, and rewound my way through these scenes over and over and I am telling you that this FX job is amazing. Layers of muscle, layers of flesh, layers of bone…all exposed and on display in a glisteningly wet red gleam. Talk about summing up the thematics of the film! So there you have it…one guys
rediscovered opinions and feelings on a film that anyone would be
hard-pressed to label as anything less than influential, memorable
and intelligent. With the remake on the horizon (remember, Clive
himself is involved), it might just be time that you revisit this
piece of horror history. See what you think about this decades old
offering…does it live up to everything you’ve remembered? Or maybe
it surpasses those memories! So go grab this one off your shelf…or
go buy it for crying out loud…and revisit one of the greats!
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