Hellraiser (2022) - Oh right. This. So I snuck this in at some point before Halloween. I was initially interested in seeing it after seeing the early casting news and the initial trailer but after it started getting breathless praise from certain corners of the internet, I immediately became skeptical and watched it out of obligation to one of the few movie franchises I have any emotional investment in.
TL;DR: It's the third best movie in the series but that's faint praise.
I'm a lifelong fan of the series (books and movies, at least) and while the first two movies are genre-defining and genre-defying, almost everything after that is varying levels of trash. The original movies were theatrical (as in the theater) and told a timeless story with a thick layer of gore and fetishy sex laid over top. It's really not unlike a Greek tragedy. After those two movies, the Weinsteins bought it and immediately turned it in to a joke. They converted Pinhead in to a slasher villain spouting hacky one-liners and it nosedived in to direct-to-video hell for the next 25 years. They fundamentally misunderstood what made the series interesting. Julia was the villain of the original stories. She was the evil stepmother in a fucked-up fetish fairy tale. The cenobites were just really cool looking ferrymen. They're Virgil from the Divine Comedy.
Anyway, the later movies still have their moments and I have a soft spot in my heart for Bloodlines (aka Hellraiser in Space) even though that movie's a total mess.
So yeah, the remake. It gets a lot right and makes some smart changes and decisions along the way that modernize the story without making it an embarrassing mess like so many unnecessary remakes do. The decision to cast a trans woman as Pinhead: great. The cenobites are described in the books as genderless anyway and frankly, no one was going to match Doug Bradley. His booming voice of cold, uncaring authority, the look, the subtle facial acting... going in a different direction to avoid any comparisons was wise and it worked for me. Doug is an old man now anyway and you can't just keep dragging him out. They also brought the cenobites back in to the background somewhat. While they are the primary antagonistic force in the movie (and I have serious issues with how they're handled), it's largely a story about human wickedness.
The costumes are great (when we see them) and they do make some additions and tweaking to the lore that I really like (the idea of the six configurations, utilizing Leviathan in an interesting way, etc.). I actually really like the lead actress as well. She's attractive in an unconventional way (she doesn't look like a CW star/Instagram thot) and the character's broken without being a screeching damsel or a mopey mess the entire movie. The fact that she's not "infallible, confident girl boss" in a 2022 movie is a breath of fresh air in and of itself.
My misgivings with this movie though are numerous. While there are certainly some broad strokes that feel more in line with what I personally would want from a Hellraiser movie in the 21st century, the main conceit of the film that drives the plot is a huge swing and a miss. The idea that whoever gets stabbed with the puzzle box's various sharp edges automatically and almost immediately dies at the hands of the cenobites, regardless of whether they were the one who solved it, is stupid. Just pants-on-head retarded. Once again, the cenobites are ferrymen in "the further regions of experience" as Pinhead so eloquently puts it again in this movie. This idea just turns them in to a blunt instrument. It's transactional in a way that cheapens the idea of people solving the box as a way to go beyond the normal realm of pleasures and experiences. It's not a vice that causes their downfall. It's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time and while that's certainly A way to alter the lore to move the story along, for me it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes those characters and that story device work. Especially when they then arbitrarily decide to break that rule later in the movie which is just asinine. And then immediately unbreak it to unceremoniously kill off The Chatterer. As though they would kill off one of their own just because they were stabbed by their device which they literally just showed isn't an automatic death sentence if they don't feel like it. So are they bound to follow the rules of the box or not? There's a number of other smaller, nitpicky things spread throughout but they really weren't worth mentioning.
Next, the movie makes the same mistake so many other movies and TV shows make of late in that it's unnecessarily dark. Not in tone. As in they can't light the movie to save their fucking lives. Multiple deaths happen almost completely in shadow and so much of the great costume and makeup work in the movie goes completely unseen because everything is shot in constant darkness. It's a plague in modern filmmaking that really needs to end.
The idea of bringing back the idea from the original two movies that the world of the cenobites and Leviathan is barely hidden and the rearranging of reality to create doorways to their realm when summoned is a great one (walls and buildings rearranging) but the introductions and entrances of the cenobites just whiff. Half the time, they show up in shadow and the rest they just appear out of thin air with little to no fanfare. The entrances in those original movies (the music, the light pouring in to rooms, their slow introductions) are what made Pinhead iconic and spawned all of those unnecessary, direct-to-video crapfests.
While I do like the lead character being an addict who has to take responsibility for her actions, it is yet another twenty-something cast Scooby Doo-ing their way in to a series of relatively unremarkable deaths which just seems like a trite cliche compared to the more adult stories of the original. The entire turning point of the original stories is illicit love. This is just standard "girl gets beset upon by evil and triumphs after losing everyone around her".
I don't know if I'm too hard on this movie because I'm a nitpicky fanboy who thinks very highly of the original story (and, to a lesser extent, the first movie sequel) or too easy on it because it's probably my favorite horror movie series and just want it to succeed. It's a lot like Prey was earlier this year for me: a mediocre movie in a franchise that hasn't sniffed mediocrity in a long time. The fact that I wrote this much about it means it's way better than any of the sequels past Hellbound... but once again, that's a low bar. Hey, it's way better than The Scarlet Gospels!