Review by
Eric Hillis
Arrow Video's Quartet of Torment collects the first four movies of
Clive Barker's Hellraiser series, all newly restored in
4K.
Hellraiser
Shot for a paltry $1 million, Clive Barker's
Hellraiser proved a surprise box office hit on its initial
release in 1987, spawning multiple sequels (and a reboot) of ever
decreasing quality and putting its writer-director firmly on the horror
map.
Based on Barker's novella 'The Hellbound Heart',
Hellraiser is the story of American businessman Larry Cotton
(Dirty Harry's antagonist Andrew Robinson) and his British wife Julia (Clare Higgins), who move into the former's dilapidated family home in London. Despite
a gross infestation of maggots and roaches in the kitchen, Larry is happy
to make it their home. Julia isn't so keen until she stumbles across some
photographs of Larry's handsome brother Frank (Sean Chapman)
engaging in coitus with a series of women. Through flashbacks we learn
that Julia was herself one of Frank's lovers, and the look on her face
tells us she still holds a candle for the rogue.
When Larry cuts his hand open on an inconveniently placed nail in the
attic, his blood drips down through the floorboards and onto a few pieces
of rotting meat, which happen to be the remains of poor old Frank. The
blood regenerates Frank - well, partially, as he returns in the form of a
rotting skeleton. When Julia stumbles across her former beau in his icky
new form, she is at first repelled, but he works his charm to convince her
to provide more blood, which will eventually return him to his original
state.
Julia dutifully sets about seducing a series of barflys, luring them up to
the attic and bludgeoning them so Frank can feast on their blood, becoming
a little closer to human with each victim he consumes. Meanwhile, a group
of interdimensional S&M freaks, the Cenobites - led by the character
we would come to know as Pinhead (Doug Bradley) - are searching for
Frank, who is in possession of the Lament Configuration, a puzzle box with
the power to open a portal between dimensions.
Subsequent instalments of the Hellraiser franchise would put
the Cenobites, and Pinhead in particular, front and centre, but Barker's
sparing use of his creations here make them all the more impactful when
they show up. Inspired by notorious libertine Barker's regular visits to
S&M fleshpots, they're a striking bunch, none more so than Pinhead,
one of horror cinema's most visually audacious creations.
For the most part, Hellraiser is a gritty, kitchen sink
thriller with a very British aesthetic. There are moments of black comedy
- Frank's infamous "Jesus wept" line is unforgettable - but Barker plays
his sadistic thrills largely straight. At a time when the horror genre was
embracing comedy with 'splatstick' sequels to
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, Barker's film stood out from the crowd with its philosophical musings
on the relationship between pleasure and pain, and a commitment to
practical FX in service not of cheap grossout gags but rather in the cause
of genuine repulsion.
Hellraiser is undoubtedly rough around the edges. Barker
admits he was out of his depth in the director's chair, and his direction
is as flat as an episode of a UK soap opera, but the dazzling designs of
the cenobites go a long way towards making up for the blandness found
elsewhere. He does however display an understanding of the psychological
impact of minor details - witness how a character's eyes suspiciously
change colour, alerting us that something truly horrific has just played
out.
Where the film suffers most is with its human characters, who aside from
the always watchable Robinson, are played by some of the most unconvincing
actors to appear in a horror movie. It doesn't help that many of the
performers are British actors dubbed unconvincingly with American accents
in an effort to appease the US audience. Hardcore horror fans, well
accustomed to the dodgy dubbing of Italian productions, will overlook
this, but it may be a stumbling block for casual modern viewers
discovering Barker's film for the first time.
Claiming he wanted to become a director to prevent other filmmakers from
misinterpreting his work (witness the previous year's adaptation of his
short story Rawhead Rex, which I have to admit I adore for all its goofiness), Barker soon
admitted the page, rather than the screen, was where his talents lay.
Bernard Rose's excellent Candyman would prove Barker's fears
unfounded, but while a more experienced filmmaker may have given us a more
technically adroit movie than Hellraiser, would it have offered us such an iconic glimpse into the recesses of
its creator's arguably deranged mind?
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
It's a sign of how tightly run the film industry was back in the 1980s
that if a movie proved a box office success, a sequel would invariably
pop up the following year (the surprise at
Scream 6
arriving just a year after its predecessor tells you how rare this has
now become). The standout image of Clive Barker's original was of course
Doug Bradley's Pinhead, so it's no surprise that the sequel opens with a
prologue that fills in the iconic character's backstory. Turns out
Pinhead was once a mere mortal human himself until he got his hands on
the Lament Configuration and literally unleashed Hell.
Taking its cues from 1981's Halloween II, Hellbound: Hellraiser II begins its main narrative just
hours after the conclusion of the first movie. Oddly, it retrofits the
previous events from the UK to the US by having the bloody crime scene
of the original now visited by a pair of American cops. Nowhere else is
such regional specificity indicated, so it's a baffling choice. Anyhow,
the first film's young heroine Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is now in
a psychiatric hospital, which ties in with the original's ending but
also feels like an opportunistic way of riding the coat-tails of the
previous year's Dream Warriors, which revived the Nightmare on Elm Street series after
a divisive second instalment (which has since gone on to acquire cult
status due to its queer subtext).
In a plot that harks back to the classic horrors of the 1930s and '40s,
the institute is run by a mad doctor, Channard (Kenneth Cranham,
a Shakespearean actor who took the role to please his horror-loving
grandson), who conducts cruel experiments in the building's lower level.
Channard also has a collection of cenobite paraphernalia in his home
(which has a Cronenbergian coldness), including three Lament
Configuration boxes and the bloody mattress Julia (Clare Higgins)
met her demise on at the end of the first movie. Sacrificing one of his
patients, Channard revives Julia, initially in skeletal and sinewy form,
eventually bringing her back to her whole self with a new 1940s femme
fatale look.
Owing a debt to Eyes Without a Face, these early scenes of Channard reviving Clare and her subsequent
seduction of the mad doc prove the film's ghoulish highlight. The
make-up effects on "skinless" Clare are outstanding, holding up in often
unforgiving 4K. Higgins has fun vamping it up, comparing herself to a
wicked stepmother from a fairy tale when she's discovered by
Kirsty.
The movie's second half plays out in an often visually stunning vision
of Hell that reminds us just what filmmakers were able to achieve on
relatively constrictive budgets in this era. Along with Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a teenage inmate of Channard's asylum who figured out the Lament
puzzle, Kirsty must escape this labyrinth, running into Frank along the
way while pursued by Julia, Pinhead and crew, and a now cenobite
Channard.
This portion of the movie certainly has some sights to show us but
after a while it becomes distancing to watch Kirsty run into various
chambers of horrors. Barker's absence (he wrote the story outline but
passed on writing and directing) is felt in the lack of a meaty plot for
us to chew on, and while we admire the visuals it does start to feel
like we're watching a walk through of a haunted house attraction (much
like another sequel of this era, 1987's House 2).
While it's never remotely as gripping as its predecessor,
Hellbound captivates as a relic of a time when special
effects artists were rock stars in the pages of Fangoria, and it makes
today's mainstream horrors of the Waniverse and Blumhouse stable seem
entirely devoid of imagination by comparison. Despite its poor
reception, it does seem to have proven influential on other filmmakers.
Pascal Laugier's Martyrs owes much to Channard's search
for answers to what awaits us on the other side of mortality, and the
image of Sam Neill's cross-covered padded cell in John Carpenter's
In the Mouth of Madness was surely inspired by a brief
look at a similarly decorated cell housing one of Channard's unfortunate
patients.
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
With Barker bailing, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth marks
the point where the series begins to divert from its original heady
themes into a schlocky franchise that turns Pinhead into a Freddy
Krueger knockoff. While the purists (including my snooty teenage self)
might have baulked in 1992, Hellraiser III surprisingly
holds up as a highly entertaining and visually impressive piece of
schlock.
The second movie ended with Pinhead trapped inside a sort of chopping
block of horrors which has now been reinvented as a sculpture purchased
by douchebag impresario JP Monroe (Mark Wahlberg lookalike
Kevin Bernhardt), who installs the piece in his New York
nightclub The Boiler Room.
When an incident at the club leads to a young man being torn apart by
chains that seem to come to life, TV reporter Joey (a pre
Deep Space 9 Terry Farrell) begins snooping around
and finds the Lament Configuration is in the hands of Terri (Paula Marshall), a young party girl who swiped it from Monroe's sculpture.
This leads to Joey being visited in her dreams by Elliot Spencer (Doug
Bradley), the human we saw transformed into Pinhead in the second
movie's prologue. Spencer is trapped in limbo and needs Pinhead to be
destroyed in order to end his suffering. Meanwhile Pinhead has convinced
Monroe to feed him souls, which in this case is played out in a campy
fashion not dissimilar to the feeding of the man-eating plant in Roger
Corman's Little Shop of Horrors.
With some striking cinematography by Gerry Lively and the
sort of inventive production design the series had become known for at
this point, Hellraiser III is a reminder of how great
mainstream horror movies looked before the blandness of
Scream and its teen horror clones took over in the second
half of the '90s. We're treated to a new set of cenobites here, all
clever variations on their prior human forms (my favourite being the DJ
with CDs sticking out of his head). The slaughter is expansive, with a
nightclub massacre that wouldn't be out of place in a
Final Destination movie, and Joey chased through the
nighttime streets of New York by the cenobites as the city explodes
around her. It's a film that certainly makes the most of its relatively
small budget.
While the ambiguity of Pinhead is binned for an outright villain who
likes to crack wise, you have to admit Bradley is a lot of fun in the
role. While it's the first movie in the series to be shot outside
England, director Anthony Hickox (son of
Theatre of Blood director Douglas Hickox and legendary
editor Anne V. Coates) brings a very British eccentricity that Bradley
latches onto. Farrell is very good in a lead role that might be read by
modern viewers as queer-coded, and it's a shame she didn't have a bigger
career outside the world of Star Trek.
Hellraiser: Bloodline
With seemingly nowhere else left for them to go, a bunch of horror
villains found themselves sent to space in the '90s, and Pinhead was no
exception. In this case it makes perfect sense. The cenobites have been
around for centuries so there's no reason why they wouldn't still be
around centuries from now.
Hellraiser: Bloodline opens in 2127 on a space station
controlled by Doctor Paul Merchant (Bruce Ramsay), the latest
character to find himself in possession of the Lament Configuration.
Merchant has come up with a plan to release Pinhead and co. on the
station before destroying it. Just after releasing Pinhead, Merchant is
interrupted by a crew of space marines.
The movie then becomes something of an anthology as Merchant relays two
stories involving his ancestors. The first takes us back to 1796 Paris
where toymaker Phillip LeMarchand (also Ramsay) is commissioned to
create the Lament Configuration for an evil magician who uses it to
summon a demon, which takes over the body of prostitute Angelique (Valentina Vargas).
The second story jumps to New York 1996 where architect John Merchant
(Ramsay again) has constructed a building based on the design of the
Lament Configuration, as hinted at in Hellraiser III's coda. Merchant is working on a plan to illuminate interiors with
perpetual light, which unbeknownst to him, would double as a means of
closing the gateway to Hell. Still alive, Angelique heads to New York to
stop Merchant, summoning Pinhead along the way.
Where the first two Hellraiser movies were uniquely
original, the third riffed on A Nightmare on Elm Street. Bloodline feels heavily influenced by
Interview with the Vampire, with Angelique representing a similarly immortal being. A young
Adam Scott was likely cast in his role as Angelique's
lover because of his resemblance to Tom Cruise in the Anne Rice
adaptation. Where Pinhead employs suffering, Angelique favours
seduction, echoing the eroticism of so many screen vampires.
Vargas is certainly a seductive presence and Bradley is as intimidating
as ever as Pinhead, but the film is an uninspired sequel that just about
manages to tell a story, though in a bland fashion out of keeping with
its predecessors. Original director Kevin Yagher disowned the
film, opting for the infamous Alan Smithee credit. I'm not sure it's
quite bad enough to justify such a move. It's competently made but
there's no passion for the material on display. The whole thing feels
like an obligatory effort to wring some more money out of a dying
franchise, and it's only the occasional clever cenobite design
(including a cenobite hound and two twins merged together) that offers
anything new of note to the film.
Hellraiser: Bloodline was the last in the series to
receive a theatrical release in the US and the first to go straight to
video in the rest of the world. It was a sorry indication of where the
franchise was headed, with several uninspired sequels knocked out
largely for the sake of holding onto the rights in the decades to
come.
Extras:
New audio commentaries for all four films by film critic Kim Newman and
Hellraiser unit publicist Stephen Jones, also joined by
screenwriter Peter Atkins on Hellraiser: Bloodline; new 60-minute discussion about Hellraiser and the
work of Clive Barker by film scholars Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Karmel
Kniprath; new visual essay celebrating the Lament Configuration by
genre author Alexandra Benedict; new 60-minute discussion between
horror authors Paula D. Ashe and Eric LaRocca celebrating the queerness
of Hellraiser and the importance of Barker as a queer
writer; new visual essay exploring body horror and transcendence in
the work of Barker by genre author Guy Adams; newly uncovered extended
EPK interviews with Barker and stars Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins,
Ashley Laurence, and effects artist Bob Keen shot during the making of
Hellraiser; new 80-minute appreciation of Hellbound, the Hellraiser mythos and the work of Barker by horror
authors George Daniel Lea and Kit Power; new appreciation of
composer Christopher Young's scores for Hellraiser and
Hellbound: Hellraiser II by Guy Adams; unrated version of
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth; new featurette exploring the Cenobites' connection to goth,
fetish cultures and BDSM; archive commentaries and featurettes,
including interviews with Barker, Doug Bradley, Tony Randel, Anthony
Hickox, Sean Chapman, Paula Marshall and others.
Hellraiser Quartet of Torment is on 4K UHD and bluray from October 23rd. All four films will
be available to stream on Arrow from the same date.