Quick grab from the trailer outlining the six puzzle box configurations mentioned:
Lament - Life
Lore - Knowledge
Lauderant - Love
Liminal - Sensation
Lazarus - Resurrection
Leviathan - ?
This is Leviathan.
I think I’m a little…excited? It that possible after 3 decades of low-rent Hellraiser crap? This looks like it has a chance.
Yes, but it’s unclear what the document says.
I used to be a huge fan of Clive Barker’s novels in the 90s. But I never got the love for those Hellraiser films. I thought they all sucked. I may have to watch the first one again sometime as I haven’t seen it since release.
Hey baby, I hear the blues a-callin’, flayed skin and lament configurations …
OK, so songwriting was never really my thing.
Leviathan - Friday, 3pm. Remember to cancel.
That aside, I’m not sure having Barker involved is really a make or break deal for me. Love the characters, love the setting, but what he did with the last novel was just…not good.
However, I am very excited for this, it looks like it has just the right amount of existential gravitas and dread and enough scenes that will make me uncomfortably squirm and look away. What more can I ask for?
Reviews are starting to show up:
Like I already wrote, there’s no way the new movie, with Hulu money backing it, could be worse than the last few license-holding projects.
From the reviews, it sounds like they kind of went back to the drawing board, in other words to Clive Barker’s original story ‘The Hellbound Heart’ for inspiration with the cenobites. I’m interested to see how things turned out.
The androgynous, high voiced Pinhead is straight from the original story.
This was…fine. I haven’t seen a new Hellraiser since the one set in space or whatever, but this was at least not terrible. I wasn’t really a fan of how it devolved into poking people with the box to get rid of them. I’m no expert, but I always saw the box as something that drove the person to solve it like a metaphor for bdsm enthusiasts. I feel like it should be against the rules to pick up the box and acidentally have it poke you (like what happened with the brother) and summon cenobites.
I was also kind of surprised how light it was on gore. Lots of the gnarly stuff with the chains happened in the background. The new Pinhead was fine, although it was kind of hard to hear what she was saying at any given moment.
So yeah, I was hoping this would be better. Not much tops the first two Hellraisers for me, but this was at least not super awful.
I thought this was pretty bad. Nothing makes any sense. And worst of all it is boring. It picks up in the last 20 minutes or so, but still bad. The Cenobites aren’t scary, they just look like Halloween costumes. The twists are obvious. The thing that happens to Roland is so dumb.
It also had a very familiar pattern to it, including the “let’s go talk to the final survivor of last time this happened to learn what’s going on” which I’m sure I’ve seen in a Final Destination movie, and a Saw movie, and I’m sure some others. That didn’t bother me though, felt like kind of a tribute to horror movie history.
I have to totally agree with everything you wrote. Not terrible. Certainly better than the last few, as far as production value and story goes, but overall just kind of blah.
I disliked the way the box works now. Just stab anyone and they pay your price? Dumb. The cenobites are able to just doom you to force you into using the box? Even dumber.
And the cenobites weren’t even that scary! Plus, you can trick them and kill cenobites now?
Why is this movie so stupid?
The new Hellraiser nearly knocked me out of my chair! After sitting through a half-hearted attempt at Clive Barkering that went nowhere interesting, you can imagine the surprise – nay, outright shock – I experienced when the title cards flashed up at the end of the movie.
This was directed by David Bruckner?
I’d known this previously and even commented on it, but I’d forgotten by the time I settled in to watch. But the bigger shock was that the script was from the writers of Night House, the very good movie Bruckner just did with Rebecca Hall. The writers, Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, also wrote a fantastically grim little coming-of-age movie called Super Dark Times.
This Hellraiser’s script showed no sign of any of the craft or inventiveness that went into Night House or Super Dark Times. At best, it’s a showcase for some Cenobite cosplay, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not. I mean, sure, the costumes look freaky, but all I can think about is how long those poor people had to sit in the make up chair just to be trundled out on set to stand carefully and briefly in front of the camera. And how immobile they have to be for the actual shooting. And how latex no long looks convincing to me, and it certainly doesn’t look wet, or like flesh. It just looks like latex.
Those poor actors are just scaffolding. So I couldn’t care less that there’s supposedly a new “Pinhead” underneath the make-up, because that’s all these things are: make-up! They barely move, they don’t do anything except one of them bites and another can make chains fly in from out of frame. Neither of those is particularly impressive as far as demonic powers go. I mean, heck, I can do one of those two things myself! And if you let me rig up something offscreen, I’m sure I could do the other as well!
So I’m really glad I didn’t go into this Hellraiser reboot knowing they were involved, expecting something on the same level as Night House or Super Dark Times. That would have been agonizing. Torture. Insufferable.
Instead, this Hellraiser was merely forgettable. But props for Odessa A’zion, the lead, who was part of a great ensemble in a lovely little horror movie called Let’s Scare Julie. I quite liked her and she really committed. Someone get her a good movie, please!
Very glad you mentioned this, a) because you’re our resident Hellraiser authority, and b) because I knew that felt kind of weird. I don’t remember the other movies that well, but it seems to me the whole theme is to trick people into dooming themselves, right? You had to appeal to someone else’s depravity, or at least trick them into being curious enough to manipulate the box? The point was it took some sort of personal manipulation to doom someone, not just a poke, right? So I’m glad you called this out, because it didn’t feel right as I was watching the movie.
Somewhere along the line, I must have internalized Hellraiser lore!