While I have never been much for horror movies, I have read a lot of horror novels. Why was one something I could get into more than the other? I don’t know. Maybe it has more to do with how my mind translates scares from a page as opposed to from a screen. Whatever the reason, my horror knowledge is greater when it comes to the written word than anything else.
And I’ll say it: I really dig Clive Barker’s novels. They often read more like dark fantasy than anything else, and his imagination is outright weird. I remember some of the creatures he described were so full of odd details that I had a hard time mentally visualizing some of them.
But my general distaste of horror movies meant I avoided the ones based on his work, and that would primarily be the Hellraiser series. So, let’s fill in one more gap in my cinematic knowledge by looking into the first of these. Yes, let’s see the movie that launched the supernatural demonic killer that is the iconic Pinhead.
And, yeah, he isn’t in the movie all that much. He isn’t the primary antagonist or protagonist. That honor falls to a very different sort of killer, a man named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman). Frank was really into extreme forms of pleasure, leading him to the Lament Configuration.
For reasons I do not understand, Frank figured out the mysterious puzzle box, briefly allowing the Cenobites, led by the character eventually known as Pinhead, to come to Earth, pierce Frank’s skin with hooks, and drag him off to Hell.
I gotta say, I really don’t get the whole urge to use that puzzle box. I realize there’s supposed to be a connection between pleasure and pain for a lot of folks. But why would you opt for something that will just drag you to Hell? That doesn’t sound very pleasurable.
Anyway, somehow Frank escapes Hell when his brother Larry (Andrew Robinson), moving into the childhood home the two share ownership of, cuts himself and bleeds a bit in the room Frank died in. Such an action allows Frank to come back, sort of.
I gotta say, the special effects in this movie are rather impressive. See, Frank only partially comes back. The more blood that gets shed in that room, the more of his flesh comes back. For just Larry’s bleeding hand, he gets his brain, eyes, various bones, some muscles, and that’s about it. But the process of a pile of goo taking a partial human form was really rather cool for a movie of this era. Heck, it would probably be good practical effects for today.
From there, Frank needs blood, and he has a willing accomplice in Larry’s second wife, Julia (Clare Higgins). It seems she and Frank had a thing going on, and she really liked the sex. So, the only thing to do is lure men back to the house to kill so Frank can use their blood to put his body back together.
As it is, Larry’s daughter by his first marriage, Kristy (Ashley Laurence), eventually gets a hint of what’s going on and inadvertently summons the Cenobites and a demon with a face in its crotch.
So, this was a fun movie all told. It plays a bit with the concepts of pain and pleasure through sex, especially given the Cenobites’ general appearance as demonic S&M aficionados. And that’s kind of what they are. The make-up effects, whether it’s the general appearance of the Cenobites or how Frank gradually gets more and more of his flesh and blood back as time passes, are great. Frank’s also always a bit messy. Clothes he puts on show more and more blood stains the longer he wears them, and they come from the goo that is the outer layer of Frank’s reforming body. That shows a real attention to detail that a good movie like this should have.
And maybe it’s because I haven’t seen too many horror movies, but as final girls go, Kristy is rather bad-ass. At the film’s climax, as her father’s house comes crashing down around her and Cenobites and crotch demons keep appearing, she just buttons down, plays with the Lament Configuration, and sends them all back to Hell one by one. Her boyfriend shows up to presumably help, but he comes out as fairly useless and the one time he does get his hands on the box, she smacks him one and takes over. Really, this girl never blinked when she realized what she was dealing with. Sure, she had to stifle a scream here and there, but that sort of thing happens when you hide in a closet with a rotting corpse that has a mouth full of maggots.
Overall, I enjoyed this one. I’m not sure I want to go too much deeper into the series, but this was a good start. Maybe next time I got for a horror movie, I’ll listen to my good pal Jimmy Impossible and watch Halloween.
But this year, it was Hellraiser.
Grade: B+
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