Being one of the best Hellraiser films released since 1988 is such a non-achievement that it's a little discouraging that I can't bring myself to say that the eleventh film in the series, simply titled Hellraiser, isn't better than "one of" the best in that time span. This attempt by screenwriters Ben Collins & Luke Piotrowski (who also share "story by" credit with David S. Goyer, and well, there's your problem right there) to reimagine the series makes the peculiar decision to jettison most of what makes a Hellraiser film a Hellraiser film, not so far as I can tell in any sort of "let's get back to basics" manner. There is, honestly, a lot that I can't tell about this movie: it feels like it views the Hellraiser branding as just as much of an irritating imposition as any of those "we shoved Pinhead into an unrelated spec script" direct-to-video sequels from the 2000s, but I also can't really figure out what sort of story it might be telling without that branding.

At least initially, the film is about drug addiction and recovery and by this I mean that it is About that thing. In the grandest tradition of 2020s horror cinema, Nu-Hellraiser is tediously confident that the best way to make a genre movie resonate thematically with the culture that produced it is to have characters directly state the "point" of all this out loud, multiple times. And so we get, and get, and get, and get scenes of Riley (Odessa A'zion) shuffling around with messy, frizzy hair and deep bags under her eyes as the only people who like her enough to tolerate her presence keep saying things like "well, Riley, why would we trust you, you are a drug addict and therefore inherently untrustworthy" and "Riley, while I admire your commitment to not using drugs now, you have to admit that you used to use drugs a lot, and therefore I don't trust you" and "hey everybody, here comes Riley, better hide the drugs, to which she is addicted!" Which is galling enough, but what really flays the skin off my raw and bleeding nutsack is that as soon as the film fully commits to being a Hellraiser, Riley's addiction and what that means for everyone around her is dropped like a bag of day-old mackerel. It's got nothing to do with why she has opened this film's redesigned evil puzzle box, or why she continues to open that box once she realises that it serves as a portal to a demonic dimension where horribly mutilated human forms live, setting them forth on the surface of the earth to demand one soul for every time the box is opened, and that soul is marked by being cut with the knife that juts out of the unlocked box.

Which is all to say that we're not really in any version of the cosmology of the 1987 Hellraiser and its one good sequel, 1988's Hellbound: Hellraiser II; nor, for all the complicated and unsatisfying and mutually contradictory cosmologies used by the next eight films in the series, do any of them line up with what we see here. By and large, the (a)moral universe of this series has always been focused on the quest for extreme sensation and sensory pleasure. Sometimes the Cenobites - the mutilated humans - are merely passively granting those extreme sensations; sometimes they are actively and maliciously punishing mortals for pursuing excess gratification. Both of which, I would like to point out, could be fairly readily grafted onto a story about drug addiction and the difficulty of remaining sober, not that Riley seems to face that difficulty very much. Mostly, she's just grumpy that her past behavior has soured her relationship with her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) beyond the point that it's likely to recover. At any rate, the Cenobites in this picture aren't really practitioners of any kind of extreme BDSM or other sensual torture; they're basically just a gang of demonic slasher killers, who warp into the world and look around with hungry glee at the various innocents they may get to slaughter.

The one exception to this is the new version of Pinhead, who isn't called Pinhead anymore since series creator Clive Barker hates that word; now she/it is just called The Priest, and is presented as purposefully genderless in the fashion of the Cenobites in the novella The Hellbound Heart, from which the first movie was adapted. The Priest is played by Jamie Clayton, whose performance is the best part of the movie by an incredibly lopsided margin; she's channeling some of the authoritative presence Doug Bradley brought to his several performances as a somewhat different version of the character, but not once did I find myself making that comparison in the moment; Clayton has staked out her own interpretation of Pinhead (sorry Clive) as menacing more for her insinuating expressions and coiled-up snakelike energy than the imposing weight Bradley used. And compared to everything else in the film, Clayton alone seems to be eagerly and consistently finding the pleasure in this, the warped joy beyond humanity in glorious suffering.

Clayton is also onscreen for something like five minutes, which is about on par or a bit more than Bradley got in the shittest Hellraiser sequels he had to hold down. And those minutes are all significantly backloaded in a movie that runs to an absolutely disgusting, totally unacceptable 121 minutes all told, a simply brutal length for the meager amount of story that goes on here. I didn't finish my summary: so Riley finds the box, with the help of her not-so-recovering addict boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey), and she opens it without getting cut the blade, but falls into a stupor. Matt finds her, and assumes she's on a bender, and in the process of trying to rouse her cuts himself; quicker than you can say "we have such sights to show you", he's been whisked off to the hell dimension, and Riley, Trevor, Matt's boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison), and their roommate Nora (Aoife Hinds) are off hunting for him, though Riley alone has a somewhat clear sense of where her brother has ended up, or at least what hideous malformed creatures she'll need to bargain with in order to get him back.

And it's right about there that Nu-Hellraiser just kind of goes slack, still with a whole ton of movie left to go, please understand. It's just kind of... empty. Riley's addiction ceases to be an ongoing plot point shortly after Matt is zapped away, give or take the odd one-off line in isolation; instead, it becomes an extremely slow stroll through a mystery with a not-at-all-confusing solution that the film belabors at great length. I won't spoil it, since the main pleasure this Hellraiser has to offer is its overly detailed explication of the new version of the series' mythology, which is far more pedestrian than the old version(s). Which, as pleasures go, is a pretty unpleasurable one: I am certainly not going to make the claim that the main appeal of this or any Hellraiser film is the lore. On the contrary, I think most of them would benefit from quietly ignoring the fact that they have plots at all, and just sink into their hideous imagery and suggestive sexuality, creating a nightmarishly kinky vibe more than telling a story (this is, for the record, why I would consider Hellbound the best of the series). But the makers of this movie obviously don't agree with me, and that is that.

Regardless, the fact remains that Hellraiser simply loses all of its focus and all of its momentum during a brutally long and languid middle, where it takes every bit of 45 minutes to establish that there's a hedonistic and power-hungry millionaire, Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić, whose career feels like it has been calibrated in every way to end up at "the barely-seen villain of a direct-to-streaming Hellraiser movie"), who wants to offer souls up to the Cenobites to unlock one of the six Hell deities who grant wishes in certain spheres (pleasure, power, life-and-death, etc.). Which is both straightforward and a cliché, so I don't really know why we couldn't just go straight there.

The point is the story of this new Hellraiser is a sluggish bore, with very few thoughts that it cares to follow through to its completion: but the question remains, how is it as an experience? Could be better, but could certainly be worse, and in this franchise it has been several times. The film was directed by David Bruckner, whose main claim to fame is the pandemic refugee The Night House; the least we have to credit him with here is that he's eager to fill his feature with style and atmosphere. They aren't very good style and atmosphere, is the thing: the movie is extremely murky and has an unfortunate tendency to grade everything too far towards blue. And Bruckner is obviously counting very heavily on "move slowly" as inherently atmospheric, and a good way to generate tension.

Still, there are moments that work well. One sequence, in which the denizens of hell open a portal in the back of a van, is a great example of what a relatively well-funded Hellraiser made in the era of digital film technology can concoct that none of its predecessors could ever hope for. The design of the Cenobites, and what they do to their human victims, is awfully hard to find fault with; the slight tweaks to Neo-Pinhead are particularly good. The film is shamefully light on gore for its first 90-odd minutes, but it starts to make up for it near the end with some sequences that get at the dreamlike body horror of the best parts of the original movies. It's watchable, which isn't an easy bar for this series to clear, and while I think the characters are insufferably ill-written ciphers, the actors are mostly good enough (Hinds is the big exception) to create the rough illusion that we're watching people. It's not much of anything, and given the long, torturous route this took to arrive in the world after so many years trying to get a Hellraiser remake off the ground, it's a pity that it feels so much closer to "just another fucking dreary Hellraiser sequel" than an actual remake or reboot or re-whatever. It's not thoughtful, and thoughtfulness is one of the key things that makes this series work, in the few instances when it does; instead, this is basically just a glacially slow and insufficiently bloody slasher movie. But at least they spent money on it, for a change.

Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)


Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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