Hellraiser (2022)....
I'll nail my colours to the mast first in saying i really like the original Hellrasier - a rare beast in as much it's a movie 'better than the book' (partly because Barker's novella isn't that great to be honest) - subsequent Hellraisers only served to do a disservice to the original (Hellraiser II being okish, the rest shite), while committing the cardinal sin of making the cenobites a caricature of themselves, watering them down. I view the original cenobites and their portrayal as probably my favourite horror 'character', who were genuinely disturbing and right up there for me as horror icons and were the jewel in the crown of the original, it's what made it standout, what lifted it up above its source material (altho creating the cenobites, it didn't really do much with them, while the movie excelled in creating demonic horrors visually and in essence)
So that's where i stand with Hellraiser and any comparisons of this reboot are to the original movie (not The Hellbound Heart novella).
This new movie is very loosely based on the original story, with a thread through the movie that is identifiable to the original but in no way mirrors it. I dont have a problem with that as long as it's good. It starts off ok, is interesting in the opening set up, which contains the only interesting character in the whole film (Roland). We move to the main character and the start of her journey is okish but soon descends into what i view as a weekly crap 'straight to video' movie you see for download on a near weekly basis (despite having a much greater budget). This just has a Hellraiser veneer covering it.
Spoiler
You know the paint by numbers horror flicks that have a group of people in a house, a cabin, whatever and they get picked off one by one. Despite its source material this movie descends into that once we get to the house (which we are ushered into almost immediately having established a group, albeit bereft of character depth), it's been done a million times, it's generally shite, boring, tedious and putting a hellraiser veneer over this isn't going to change that. Pathetic writing choice, fucking criminal really. BTW, being centred in the house isn't the problem, the original is totally centred in a very mundane house. Which is kind of ironic, cos the house in the reboot is very lavish and clearly an expensive set but totally wasted in this movie, while the original uses a fucking council house to great effect.
The original has a simple but compelling story, tho few in number the characters are interesting and fleshed out (and it's worth noting that film had a good solid cast), and as a whole it feels like exactly what its source material was, a short story, compact and focused, disturbing and alluring in its telling.
Now if a terrible plot choice and totally forgettable characters wasn't bad enough, turning the one thing that might save it into utter garbage is a death nail - the cenobites are absolutely trash. That is fucking unforgiveable, if you're rebooting Hellrasier you have to go in knowing the cenobites are the draw, the stars if you will and to do what they did with them tells me whoever was handling that has no fucking clue about horror whatsoever.
The cenobites are sadomasochistic demons par excellence. The original portrayed that brilliantly visually, in costume that reflects the niche sex scene assosciated with it (cool as fuck in modern parlance), and showed their extreme nature by relatively small but incredibly painful and real looking mutlilations/mods.
In this reboot nothing looks real, it's all way overdone and very 'plastic', not disturbing in the least and not a smidgen of the sadomasochistic scene - and this is a major difference between the two movies in content and cenobites - the original is saturated in sex whether in pain or pleasure, whether in thought or deed. The reboot has total disregard for it, the new pinhead as much as states that fact. Fucking bizarre. Having the main character ask to be 'fucked harder' is the giddy heights it reaches, laughable child's play compared to Frank in the original - and that really does sum up the reboot really, it says 'fuck me hard' and then whips out a tiny flaccid todger. It's clueless of its own impotence.
Love or hate the original, it is grimy, sweaty, dirty, licentious, you imagine the fuckbed stinks, everything about it is visceral, which is the very essence of it, be it blood or sex, of body or mind.
The reboot, all clean, nothing visceral, plastic - story, characters, aesthetically (and i didn't notice the score at all apart from when it uses updated snippets of the original, literally).
The source material novella is called The Hellbound Heart and in the original we can see, smell almost taste that impulse, craving, descent from Frank onwards, the reboot doesn't relate to that title at all, not in any meaningful way with only a little nod to it in the character Roland.
