Hellraiser is a revitalized reboot that gets the blood pumping, beginning with Jamie Clayton’s worthy Pinhead performance, which establishes a new tone while paying homage to Clive Barker’s works.
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Hellraiser Review: A Clever New Approach To The Franchise
Hellraiser, directed by David Bruckner, is nothing like Clive Barker’s 1987 original. Bruckner and his screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski appear uninterested in the kind of psychosexual introspection that drove Barker’s film, instead using the franchise’s iconography as a canvas for a different kind of psychological exploration.
The film stars with Riley, a recovering drug addict who lives in the apartment of her brother Matt and his boyfriend Colin. Riley reluctantly agrees to help her boyfriend with a warehouse break-in, recovering only a strange puzzle box as the sole piece of loot. After Matt confronts her about being drunk, Riley storms out to sleep in her car and unintentionally solves the first stage of the box while in a drug-induced haze. Matt locates her quickly, but while doing so, he cuts himself on the box. Riley decides to investigate the box further after its monsters appear and seize him in the hopes of discovering information that will help her in locate her brother.
As a result, Collins and Piotrowski apply Barker’s fascination with the sensory BDSM extremes of pleasure and pain to the escapism and trauma of drug addiction—and it works surprisingly well. Riley’s addiction and the enabling influence of a friend are not only physically harmful, but also socially when her closest familial relationship becomes a literal casualty, as A’zion demonstrates. It’s an astonishingly well-realized metaphor that reimagines solving the puzzle box as a never-ending high to be pursued, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake as the Cenobites become acolytes to a god of euphoric pain.
The Cenobites themselves are fascinatingly realized, with reality-bending entrances that are reminiscent of a puzzle box. Their eerie redesigns replace Barker’s BDSM fetishism with mutilated flesh, transforming their actual skin into the leather of their bondage. Jamie Clayton, who takes over the role of series staple Pinhead, carries the same unwieldy but provocative combination of sensuality and menace that Doug Bradley did, but her alien disdain for distinguishing between pain and pleasure not only sets her apart but reinforces this film’s deeper themes.
Despite these differences, this Hellraiser sequel provides the same amount of gore spectacle as its predecessor. The franchise’s trademark chains turn victims into raw meat, but other torture tools like barbed wire and needles never manage to turn them into anything as viscerally wet as the first film’s skinless killer. Bruckner expertly balances the pain and empathy of violent scenes because this film is about psychological wounds that become physical.
