But any aspects of perversity have been thoroughly scrubbed clean from this misbegotten reboot, as its idea of debauchery begins and ends with a couple of thoroughly anemic sex scenes between Riley and her boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey). What the previous entries in the Hellraiser canon also understood, even when they weren’t rising above Z-grade DTV schlock, was the kink that ran through the veins of Barker’s creation, which was inspired by his time working as a hustler in ’70s-era S&M clubs. But the Cenobites of Bruckner’s Hellraiser attack and kill with little rhyme or reason beyond the need to set up another grisly (though still relatively bloodless) set piece. Within dreamlike episodes that are closer in spirit to Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder than your average Friday the 13th kill-a-thon, Pinhead’s victims are largely doomed to their fate by virtue of their twisted morality and deviant behavior, with the Cenobites simply sealing the deal. And beyond a few derivative moments in which Riley’s friends don’t believe her due to her troubled history, any ambiguity over the veracity of the story’s events is quickly jettisoned to adhere to the demands of the leaden slasher-film plotting.ĭespite Pinhead earning his spot in the horror pantheon alongside Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers, Hellraiser was never really a slasher series, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s a potentially intriguing idea but one that isn’t satisfactorily committed to, as Riley’s struggles with addiction promptly fade into the background. Specifically, Riley is a recovering addict and when she relapses right before opening the box, the film initially questions whether the horrors that follow are real or part of some kind of drug-addled hallucination. From this point, Riley spends an inordinate amount of time ponderously investigating the box’s beyond-obvious mysteries.īruckner does try to give Barker’s invention a new coat of paint by positioning this reboot, like The Night House, as an allegory for unmanaged trauma. All it takes are a few light touches from the film’s central protagonist, Riley (Odessa A’zion), before the box, which now comes outfitted with a nifty retractable stabbing spike, roars to life. The puzzle box itself, conceived in Barker’s The Hellbound Heart novella as an elusive object that would only respond to a pleasure-seeker’s overwhelming desire to access its contents, is once again far too easy to crack.
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Some of the problems that afflict this Hellraiser are ones that also plagued the series throughout its prior 10-film run. Cue the feverish hallucinations, which give way to the introduction of Pinhead (Jamie Clayton), who-alongside some other familiar, chain-wielding Cenobites (the Chatterer is still, well, gleefully chattering away)-begin to dispatch the roomies across a series of gruesome but unimaginatively staged set pieces.
Until, that is, they obtain a certain ancient puzzle box and unwittingly unleash the demons within.
In generic slasher mode, this new Hellraiser introduces us to a group of anonymously attractive twentysomethings, all of whom share a swanky apartment and are prone to spouting affected quips as if they were trapped in a 1990s sitcom. With this in mind, it feels like an even greater betrayal of Clive Barker’s indelible vision of boundless human depravity that the Hellraiser reboot from director David Bruckner and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, the makers of The Night House, is such a toothlessly retrograde enterprise. It’s all too easy to imagine the extradimensional Cenobites rising up into the grotesquely hedonistic, real-world hell on Earth that’s set the conditions for individuals like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump to thrive. Perhaps more than any other horror franchise, Hellraiser seems uniquely suited for re-emergence into a contemporary climate overdosing on narcissism and self-gratification.
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