Hellraiser (2022)

Riley is a pill-popping alcoholic on the mend trying to find some way of staying clean while feeding an addiction so Trevor gives her sex. Matt is her well-rounded, supportive, patient brother who has clearly tolerated a lot and given her a bedroom out of the goodness of a kind heart that is clearly fed up with the constant drama. Colin is Matt’s nice, live-in boyfriend and Nora is their friend. This is the Scooby Gang, I guess, of the Hellraiser “update”. Trevor pretty much plays Riley for a patsy, luring her eventually to “open the box”, that is the Lament Configuration, a paid prick by a depraved aristocrat in Massachusetts named Roland Voight. So what causes the puzzlebox to “cycle” stage to stage before HellPriest gets her victims? A little blade with a curve that pops out to slit the hands of those who happen to come in contact with it, sometimes by accident or by intention (Matt grabs it when locating his zonked-out sister in a pills-dosed haze spinning on a merry-go-round, Nora is stabbed in the back by Voight, Voight’s former assistant dying of lung cancer is cut by mistake when trying to take it away from Riley), but the Cenobites will claim victims, even forcing Riley to make her own choices…one way or another.

How do I not just sort of follow the same tack as others who describe the positives and negatives of the film? But it is the same, really. I think Matt as the more mature brother just trying to keep his sister clean and out of trouble and Colin, Riley’s eventual surrogate brother (that’s how I saw it, anyway), aren’t bad characters at all. I read those criticisms about “all the characters are awful”, but I didn’t think those two were too bad. Riley is the obvious “conflicted, imperfect, struggling addict” heroine who must make some very difficult choices but isn’t a monster. Trevor is the supposed oblivious bonehead who actually is connected to Voight and reveals himself to Riley in that <i>he’s actually a dickhead getting paid to bring victims connected to (and including) Riley so that his benefactor can be freed from a reward he requested from the Cenobites</i> twist at the end. It gives us all that feeling of visceral bloodlust we crave when Riley gets even with Trevor as Colin appears to be another sacrifice.

Okay, the CGI gore is plenty. Lots of skin-peeling, stretched flesh, open wounds, pulled apart bodies through the classic Hellraiser hook on chains, garrote wire, chatter teeth bite wound, and even a “nerve ending twist machine”. I really did like the voice modification device used for Clayton’s HellPriest. I do think Clayton is absolutely the best thing about the film to me. She just looks menacing and has this presence I found captivating. Oh, and The Gasp, with her split head seems to be a hybrid of two Cenobites from Parts 1 and 4…killing off Chatterer did bum me out, but The Gasp even gets the best line from the Cenobites, “Save your breath…for screaming”. I do appreciate that Clayton’s Pinhead is different from Bradley’s…I was hoping that would be the route that Bruckner and his team would go with their new Pinhead. And with the way the lore is updated, I was happy with going with the “gift” and “reward” option. Oh, and how the puzzlebox has different configurations and stages of change was a touch I did enjoy.

I didn’t care for the color palette. The dark and blue color scheme just didn’t do anything for me. I made sure to turn the lights out, because I was worried about not seeing anything. While this worked and I could see most of what was going on, when the Cenobites are lit, I didn’t get to appreciate their entire form onscreen, just closeups. Bruckner also pulls away the camera at key times – Nora’s death, Joey lifted off by chains as Voight looks away, Matt’s never seen, Menaker is given a needle in her mouth from The Gasp – dulling some punches that I think could have been quite a knockout. I did feel up until the ending finale Bruckner and his team were a little wary of pushing the limits of what we can stomach.

I didn’t hate or love it as many of my LB peers. I’m sort of in the middle. Voight’s “preparations” at the end to “attain his power” is rad, though. And Pinhead letting Riley know she would have to live with her actions did land with me. I noticed Pinhead did say they would be “brief”.