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Review by E.C.McMullen Jr. |
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USA Release: Oct. 7, 2022 Spyglass Media Group, Phantom Four Films, 247Hub, 20th Century Studios, Hulu Rated: USA: R |
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Never let it be said "Feo doesn't grade franchise movies on the curve."
Because, of course I do.
After well over a decade of sloppy incompetence by Dimension Films, Clive Barker's HELLRAISER franchise was sold to... Disney.
Okee doke.
How much more whuppin' can Disney inflict on the dead horse of a franchise that already had its share of movies so ridiculously rookie that there's even an Alan Smithee one in there?
This HELLRAISER feels like a sequel and not a reboot. Whatever it is, since the title can cause confusion, I'll refer to it as HELLRAISER: HULU.
HELLRAISER: HULU begins in Belgrade where there's an exchange of body fluids a bag of money for a box of LeMarchand's Lament configuration chocolate.
The man (Predrag Bjelac: CHILDREN OF DUNE [TV], HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, THE OMEN [2006], MINDGAMERS) is supposed to be no one, but the woman who came to make the purchase is Celine Menaker (Hiam Abbass: BLADE RUNNER 2049, CARNIVORES).
We next see her at a dark house party in a lavish castle of a place. The structure may appear rococo to some but HELLRAISER fans know what they're looking at.
It's a giant LeMarchand puzzlebox.
Celine is at the bar when a young man named Joey (Kit Clarke), out of place with everyone else, as he's only wearing a tank top and "street clothes", comes up. Their brief conversation makes it clear that he was specifically invited and that the man who owns the house, a wealthy billionaire named Voight (Goran Visnjic: DETONATOR II: NIGHT WATCH, PREPOZNAVANJE, THE DEEP END, CLOSE YOUR EYES, ELEKTRA, THE DEEP [TV], THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO [2011], DARK HEARTS, EXTANT [TV], NEVER HERE, SANTA CLARITA DIET [TV], THE BOYS [TV], THE ACCURSED), will meet with him personally.
Joey is given access to a deeper part of the house where no party goers go, finally coming to a courtyard room beneath a glass ceiling. In the middle of the room is a regular sized LeMarchand puzzlebox. Voight comes out of the darkness, all warmth and smiles, and encourages Joey to solve it. Merry mishaps occur.
Completely unrelated, an enthusiastic couple is having TV sex and enjoying themselves until the guy says, "I love you", ruining the good times for the gal.
They take a break and leave the room. Screen text tells us it's Six Years Later, which I take to mean it's six years since the adventures in Voight's house, not the time it took for the exhausted couple to make their way from the bed to the hallway outside of the room.
The gal is Riley (Odessa A'zion: LADYWORLD, LET'S SCARE JULIE, THE INHABITANT) and her boyfriend, who just ruined sex with romance, is Trevor (Drew Starkey: SCREAM: THE TV SERIES, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME, THE TERMINAL LIST).
In the living room are three of Riley's roommates.
Matt (Brandon Flynn: BRAIN DEAD, 13 REASONS WHY, RATCHED [TV]), Riley's older brother,
Colin (Adam Faison: DAPHNE & VELMA), Matt's boyfriend, and
Nora (Aoife Hinds: THE COMMUTER, IMMORTALITY [TV], CHEAT).
All of them heard the sex screams Riley and Trevor were howling, but while Colin and Nora can laugh it off, Matt is bitch-faced. Conversation makes it clear that Nora is going through 12-Step and Trevor isn't welcome. Though Riley says she's clean for the last six months, she's still an addict and still at the stage where lies and betrayal are part of her nature.
She's wounded her brother too many times for him to trust her or for her to expect trust from him.
Later at Trevor's place, Riley is trying to figure out how to make money. Getting a job isn't easy when your resume is trashed with a long line of brief jobs ended by drugs and alcohol. Trevor, who seems to have an angle on everything, tells her that as a "delivery driver" he would sometimes make deliveries to an empty warehouse.
It is huge, the packages could be anything (he never knew what was sealed in them), but he was convinced that such a nondescript place was some kind of drop off and pick up for billionaires.
Billionaires?
Curiosity got the better of Trevor and he staked it out a couple of times, waiting to see who came to pick up the packages. They looked too wealthy and the warehouse is too huge to be a drop-off for small packages that can fit in a backseat. No, this isn't a place that stores tons of drugs and black market goods.
Plus it's separated from the other warehouses by its own fence and the gate and warehouse has a security code. What's in those packages? Trevor has no idea, but anyone who would go to that much trouble must have something expensive going through there.
How can they get in? Trevor remembers the security code.
So they eventually break in, find a storage container, break into that, find a safe, break into that, and find the box we recognize from the start of the movie. Sure enough, the puzzle box is inside.
A bit deflated over something that doesn't look like it was worth all the trouble, Trevor wants to at least look it up online or have one of his connections appraise it. Riley, however, winds up keeping it.
Well, we know the drill from here. Eventually she begins messing with it, one thing leads to another, and someone gets caught in the hellfire - er - crossfire.
There's no more mystery after this. Sure enough a whole new murder of Cenobites come out to play and slowly approach their victims before tearing ass.
The various Cenobites are mostly creative and interesting, save for a Chatter Cenobite (Jason Liles: DEATHNOTE: NETFLIX, RAMPAGE, THE CLINIC, STEREOSCOPE [TV], AFTERMATH) and an Angelique (Selina Lo: THE SCORPION KING 3, BANGKOK RUSH, BOSS LEVEL) - in this case called a Gasper - thrown in for auld lang syne.
Speaking of auld lang syne (past times remembered with nostalgia), plenty of creative license was wrapped around the lead Cenobite "pinhead", in this case called The Priest (Jamie Clayton: THE NEON DEMON, SENSE8 [TV], CHAIN OF DEATH, DESIGNATED SURVIVOR [TV], ROSEWELL NEW MEXICO [TV], RED BIRD LANE [TV]). Where the original Cenobites were all fascinating in their coarse and crude clothes and maimed bodies, these Cenobites are a hellish version of runway models complete with make-up and shimmering bling. It's different and in a good way because they've refreshingly shrugged off the 1980s Goth chic that spread from HELLRAISER to DARK CITY (David S. Goyer) to BLADE (David S. Goyer - all) to THE MATRIX to UNDERWORLD. In HELLRAISER: HULU, the Cenobite's flesh appears flensed into their "clothing".
Some of the Cenobites stayed too deep in the background to get a good look at them, others were shown only in flash cuts. Two other stand outs though are,
The Weeper (Yinka Olorunnife) and
The Masque (Vukasin Jovanovic: THE ONLY WAY OUT, JEDINI IZLAZ [TV]).
Shot entirely in Belgrade, Serbia, and using mostly local talent, HELLRAISER: HULU makes the most of its low budget thanks to visually impressive yet minimal number of sets, the fresh take on the appearance of the Cenobites, and the direction of David Bruckner (THE SIGNAL, THE RITUAL, NIGHT HOUSE). Further guidance was provided by Co-Writer and Producer David S. Goyer (DEMONIC TOYS, DARK CITY, BLADE [all], BATMAN BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT, THE UNBORN, CONSTANTINE [TV], TERMINATOR: DARK FATE, FOUNDATION [TV], THE SANDMAN [TV]).
Also onboard for the Hell of it are Director David Bruckner's Goto writers of Ben Collins (SUPER DARK TIMES, STEPHANIE, THE NIGHT HOUSE) and Luke Piotrowski (SIREN, SUPER DARK TIMES, STEPHANIE, THE NIGHT HOUSE).
It's nearly everything you'd want from a HELLRAISER movie except what the first two Clive Barker dominated movies brought: Scary Horror.
The Cenobites were the height of Horror once we were thoroughly doused in what happened to brother Frank and his long and hideously excruciating return to a fully fleshed out person. His destruction and how he was brought back from Hell made the audience feel every minute of his anguish. And when his proto-self screamed we felt it.
When Julia was faced with the Horror of what her true love, Frank, had become her terror and revulsion were palpable.
Then again in HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II, Doctor Channard, like Voight, used the puzzle box in a way that avoided direct confrontation, but the Horror he brought forth from the mattress, and his own subsequent consequence, firmly established the gruesome, mind-melting horror of Clive Barker's creation.
Because of this, whenever we saw the cenobites, their threat was ever present. Any wrong word or slightest move could bring swift and horrific punishment.
The new Cenobites never have that moment to establish themselves. Nothing they do powerfully demarcates their character from what has gone before and their introduction needed to be powerful to separate themselves from well over two decades of weak tea HELLRAISER sequels.
With everything else so new, the old instruments were not enough.
Hellraiser fans are long accustomed to all the links, chains, wires, and hooks that are de rigueur of all HELLRAISER movies. What HELLRAISER lost after HELLBOUND was the scares and Horror, as Dimension films were more interested in creating a Pokemon trove of action figures: like a Cenobite with Compact Discs in his head, and a laughing, wisecracking Pinhead that was more aligned with 3rd sequel Freddy Krueger than the awesome High Priest Cenobite himself.
In the new millennia, HELLRAISER: HULU needed to surpass the torturous implements of John from SAW.
As such, the threats, promises, and deceptions that the new Priest Cenobite employs brings nothing new to the table, and the HELLRAISER: HULU uses plenty of shadow and blue tint to shrink back from their well-lit gory glory genuine Horror days of the original HELLRAISER movies (unlike Hulu's PREY, which reveled in competing directly with the original PREDATOR and used slow creep as well as audacious action scenes, some of which surpassed the original).
Worse, the Cenobites rarely show any action. Instead, they slowly mosey around, taking their time to do anything and are content to just stand there doing nothing at all - which happens a lot in this movie and, at 2 hours and 1 minute, is the longest HELLRAISER I've ever watched. If it was edited down to 100 or even 90 minutes I can't see how it could have lost anything and it would have delivered more punch.
HELLRAISER: HULU drags - a lot. But grading on the curve and having sat through shorter and more insipid movies in the franchise, I give this one a barely earned Three Shriek Girls.
This review copyright 2022 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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