Post by ronnierocketago on May 12, 2009 9:05:56 GMT
HELLRAISER (1987) - ***1/2
"We'll tear your soul apart!"[/i]
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Of all the 1970s/80s horror cinema icons, "Pinhead" (Doug Bradley) from HELLRAISER is arguably the odd murderer out. For one thing, in the original HELLRAISER movie he didn't actually have a name, unlike say Michael Myers. Pinhead was actually a nickname the make-up crew coined, and what was a joke became a loving moniker used by fans. You've got a great monster if he can still be scary in spite of a goofy name. Second, Pinhead isn't some lumbering mute like Jason Voorhees or only concerned about cracking bad jokes like Freddy Krueger. He just comes, says what needs to be said, and does his job. A no-bullshit/no-nonsense killer I can admire. Third, he uses no weapons. OK he can summon chains and hooks to fly out of nowhere for him, but hey why do the dirty work when you don't have to?
If I must pinpoint a critical divergence between contemporary and 1980s horror cinema, take the opening with Frank (Sean Chapman) buying the box from a stereotypical Arab marketplace, and after he deciphers it does he regret not keeping the receipt. We cut to an attic floor covered in guts. Today's horror movies (including I assume the upcoming HELLRAISER remake) would feature such a gory shot too maybe with better effects, but it would lack the perverse curiosity that empowers HELLRAISER. I mean it's one thing to just have guts on a floor, but notice writer/director Clive Barker's additional details with the fresh blood staining the floor and how disturbingly wet and fresh it looks. FX Gore is FX Gore, dime a dozen, unless we take take them to heart, especially if they provoke us into imagining and seeing much more than there really is, and that is a difference betwen a horror film, and a good one.
Anyway, Pinhead's introduction is low-key classic. No opening massacre in traditional horror fashion, but just arrives after something bad happened, and picks up some lumps of the flesh. We don't know who or what he is and why he has nails hammered all over his skull. He puts those chunks together like a jigsaw puzzle, and they form a face(!) Then he leaves. Such fucked-up imagery populate HELLRAISER, so get used to it kiddies or pop this DVD out and go watch 17 AGAIN instead.
Apparently novelist Barker decided to make his directorial debut with HELLRAISER after being dissatisfied with a few pictures he scripted. Basing off his own novella "The Hellbound Heart," Barker's filmmatics at times do come off as shakey, even arguably amateurish, but such inexperience with lighting and actors are greatly overcompensated by his exploration of freaky themes and ends up making a better film than many supposed "legitimate" directors have ever produced. I'm much reminded of the underappreciated THE EXORCIST III, shot by another novelist-turned-director William Peter Blatty. Sometimes if decent skills and (more important) creatively bold ideas meet halfway, you can triumph over total flashy filmmaking.
His HELLRAISER begins as a bizarre typical haunted house story, with a family moving into Frank's house, and we learn through flashback that the stiff cold stepmother (Clare Higgins) had an affair with Frank her brother-in-law before he disapeared and got his mug rearranged. I like the random touch where she finds a stash of his photographs, and she's flipping through snapshots of the guy playing bizarre sex games with prostitutes. She then comes acorss a non-lewd picture oh him and a hooker, and she rips the woman's face out, isolating Frank for herself. I also loved Barker's cutting between parallel sequences between her memories of Frank humping her and the husband (Andrew Robinson) trying to cram their marital bed up the tight staircase.
Then her husband cuts himself, the blood dripping onto the Attic floor, and with that Frank comes back to life as a disgusting soggy bag of bones and meat. HELLRAISER turns the tables and becomes surprisingly becomes an effective off-beat Hitchcockian macabre supernatural thriller, with the wife helping to seduce men to come back to her attic, kill them, and her lover then feed off their fluids and regenerate. At first she has trouble with the hammer, but after a few times, she has it down in a cold science. I think what's funny is how she's basically doing all of this so she could fuck him again. He must have been a great screw. There is great irony when restored Frank needs a new skin, so he kills the husband and pulls a Buffalo Bill on him, and she ends up technically bonking the guy she was cuckolding in the first place. Clever.
There's also a terrific shot that I'm sure John woo's FACE/OFF stole, with the partly-restored walking corpse Frank smoking because his taste sensory nerves have returned. I do wonder how he puts on his classy wardrobe without staining them. That must have been a bitch.
But beyond the brilliant FX exhibition and unique adultry dynamics, HELLRAISER becomes something much more both intellectually impressive, clever, and intriguing once the stepdaughter (Ashley Laurence) opens the dreaded box and Pinhead and his leather-clad freakshow arrive. If anything, I would argue what others have before that Pinhead (at least in the first HELLRAISER) in fact isn't the villain at all. Oh sure he rips people apart in gruesome fashion, but he's not like a predator or stalker like Frank.
If Pinhead kills you, its really your fault, and not because you're a not a virgin or whatever genre nonsense. If you just happen to find his little Lemarchand's puzzle box and solve it, well you get what you deserve like most Darwin Award winners. To be fair though, that box seems rather too damn easy to open if you ask me, more about random luck from pressing your fingers than actual smarts or creativity. Pinhead probably did that on purpose. Why? Because he's an asshole, that's why.
These Cenobites (who inspired way too many S&M folks if you ask me) are despite their pale DARK CITY look (yet another good movie that ripped off HELLRAISER), in fact neither evil or good, for as Pinhead himself said: "Demons to some, Angels to others."[/i]. They represent a whole different culture of morality contrast to what Christianist Western civilization has grown accustomed to over the last few centuries, because we culturally associate pleasure with bliss (Heaven) and pain with suffering (Hell), but what if there is pleasure to be gained from pain? What if there is ultimately no real distinction? What if heaven and hell are one and the same?
If anything, what may have seemed frighteningly new for the horror genre in the Reagan Decade was really Barker redressing up Old Testament values and removing all the stories of Moses and Abraham, church architecture, the stained glass pictograms, the hymns, soft yellow hue fresco imagery, and all that external trappings, exposing alone the ethnicality.
Ever reading the Bible? "God" in the New Testament is graceful, fair, unbelievably forgiving, honorable, and pacifist and gave up his only begotten son, then God in the Old Testament is a brutal savage divine egomaniac dictator dickhead. Those same angles who prophecized the arrival of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, also helped their boss in murdering all the first-born Egyptian sons, turned men, women, and children into sulfur, almost made a patriarch sacrifice his own blood to prove his loyalty, wiped the Earth clean as a plate and flooded it for good measure. Well the "God" (i.e. Pinhead) in HELLRAISER is the Old Testament kind, where innocence from ignorance (like the kid Laurence) is no excuse at all for breaching the code. All must be punished. There is even an answer to the old-age question of why the all-powerful, unstoppable God can't (or isn't willing to) destroy the Devil, when a survivor tries to burn the Box, and a literal Deux Ex Machinas swoops in to save it and flies away, thus preserving divine reign over the mortal, as it always has and always will be.
I wondered initially why Barker had Christian symbology everywhere, and dismissed it as a pretentious motiff. Then you understand what he was driving for in that twisted climax with Frank's face violently stretched flat like playdoh, and his last shriek: "Jesus wept!"[/i] What is that about? My guess is Barker putting, or trying at least, within this secular epoch of "God is Dead" to put a new cinema face of the crucified Christ to join the rest of the classical iconography. Or maybe the gay British Barker thought it was funny as hell, I don't know.
So yes, as much as I enjoy and dig such aspects of HELLRAISER that we don't get that much from the horror genre, yet I hate how its brought down a notch or two by the genre's usual bullshit. I'm talking Laurence's completely useless and irrelevant boyfriend character, who if he had completely disapeared this side of the baby in J.J. Abrams' STAR TREK, nobody would have missed. Also plot points not possible without stupid people, or the outright logic gaps that nobody really can defend. These Cenobites are displayed as having metaphysical powers, effectively controlling their reality. Yet in the finale with the house burning down, a few of them are impedded and outright defeated by fire, falling debris, etc. Why? Sure I can accept the idea that they weren't actually killed (how can they be?), but them not using their tools to escape or dodge....smells like a cheap scriptwriting copout. Too bad.
I vaguely remember seeing HELLRAISER over a decade ago, and enjoyed it for what it was: A fearsplatter fest of its time. Now there is much more to reap beyond the technicals. I apparently also saw the sequel, but shit if I can remember it. I'm pretty confidant that follow-up, with the rest of the HELLRAISER sequels for that matter, isn't as interesting or captivating as the original. Or Pinhead as ambigiously fascinating, rather than becoming the outright good guy or baddie as apparently people tell me he becomes in the sequels. I also doubt the remake will bother with the subtext, I mean why kids today care about such theological implications?
Thus, as written in the Gospel of RRA, "Thou only one HELLRAISER to kicketh thy assy."