Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

"Hellraiser", directed by Clive Barker, is an amazing sort of fantasy/monster-horror crossover movie that has the creativity and professionally written touch to both:
A: Make its own set of rules, and B: Not only abide by them, but still prove to be a twisted movie!
So, if you probably know the plot by now but haven't seen the movie, I'll convince you as to why this movie is so incredibly awesome:
First off, "Hellraiser" is a movie that is able to pull off having quite a few characters. There's Julia and Frank, who, although are deemed the "protagonists" are in the end, obviously the villains. We have Kirsti, played by the gorgeous Ashley Laurence, the type of jailbait only Motorhead would sing about (I can't believe I just said that!), and Kirsti is also a protagonist, though, we can tell that she stays good and doesn't cross over to being an actual villian.
And then we have the Cenobites! Pinhead, the sadomaschocistic (sp?) leader, Butterball as I call the heavy-set one, the Chatterer, one bad fella who proves it when he sticks his fingers down Kirsti's throat, and Fembot, as I call the Cenobite that's female with the pale face and shadowed eyes.

OK, so obviously all the characters are dazzling, but what makes this movie even better is how there's so many twists! When Frank opens the puzzle box, he is supposedly dead, but when a mover cuts his hand on a nail and spills blood on the floor, Frank gets resurrected as a deformed corpse...hey, that's the supernatural for ya.
Frank and Julia used to be lovers, and the only way for Julia to restore Frank to his fully human form is to bring people to their attic and kill 'em, then their blood will spill so Frank can absorb it and become fully human.
This is also all the responsibility of the puzzle box that contains Pinhead and the Gang, and that comes into play about an hour in. Kirsti, now the only protagonist that's still good, opens the box, and, yes, does set Pinhead and the Wild Ones free. If there's another thing to know about "Hellraiser", is that it's a movie with GREAT monsters! Pinhead can even control chains all with his head, baby!

But the ingenious factor of "Hellraiser" is how sadistic it becomes. How far Julia is willing to go to give Frank rebirth? How many people must she kill to have her lover return from being but a bloody corpse? What's gonna happen to Kirsti, the innocent heroine, throughout all of this? And what are Pinhead and the Cenobites gonna do?
The answers lie within the movie. Within these 90 minutes of sex and violence lie true intellect, so many props go to Clive Barker. The good guys, the bad guys, the monsters, the sublime sort of pain each character seems to be in (as Robert Englund said on the 100 Scariest Movie Moments countdown), the gore, the plot, EVERYTHING about Hellraiser that I thought was good, was GOOD! This is a movie that, if you rent it for the weekend, you WILL watch it twice!
And since that was the case with me, "Hellraiser" now holds a high and mighty spot on my "Horror Movies To Buy" list. WATCH THIS! If you like fantasy horror, if you like scary movies with good monsters, if you wanna watch a movie with lots of depth, twists and style, "Hellraiser" will make your night! Thanks for the time, and peace.

I swear, new ground is so seldom broke in horror, but I guess the same can be said in any genre. The thing is that the horror genre NEEDS new ground CONSTANTLY - especially these days, we've gone with but - what? TWO groundbreaking horror films (THE EXORCIST and this film...) within 30 years? And it's so easy to get jaded when you're sane enough to keep from killing people 'cause you DON'T know it's not just a film...horror requires something groundbreaking AT LEAST once every decade, but I haven't seen or even heard of anything all that inventive since this film came out. Sure, there's been GOOD horror films, films of very high caliber, but nothing groundbreaking.
Why am I saying all of this? I say all of this because this film deserves to be projected onto the masses by the biggest advertising firms hired by a much bigger company than Anchor Bay. I say this 'cause it's hard to imagine how the world came out of comas from watching the original FRANKENSTEIN (with Boris Karloff) and the world only paid mild attention to this gem.
Sure this film's reputation has grown to mythic proportions (after all, it's almost a sort of mythical film in itself, right?), and the DVD has made a lot of profit since its release, but...I still feel this film has been shortchanged.
What I like most about this film is how it manages to provide very convincing and very effective special effects along with a very complex system of character involvement. It seems like most everyone would say the bad guys are the "cenobites" (see front box cover art for an idea of what that term means if you haven't seen this film;), but the real bad guy in this film is the male leads' brother Frank. I actually thought he really loved Julia...hard to believe he even HAD a soul to tear apart...
The plot itself is intriguing, yet a little bit simplistic. The last two scenes are quite interesting, but the scene prior to those two where Kirsty (sp?), the daughter of the male leads' character, gets rid of the cenobites was a little too tidy and went on for a tad bit longer than it should have, but I think the film would have been unsatisfying somehow had EVERYBODY died at the hands of the strange twist of events depicted in this film. The writer (Clive Barker) really had no other choice, IMO.