Hellraiser (2022) - To The Point - Movie Review
I never fully watched Hellraiser when i was a kid. At my age it was nightmare material.
Over the years, it never dawned on me to watch them. But now with the 2022 release, i recently watched the original 1987 Hellraiser, in preparation to watching the 2022 Hellraiser, so i could compare.
I thought it would be a re-make, but no, however. It's a revival.
Anyhoo, (after what is it, a trillion sequels?) i would have hoped this revival would have been something special. And i went in to watch it, really thinking they would go full-gore-mode, what with movies like Saw being screened, and many others that don't shy away from the excess blood splattering all over the screen; Hellraiser has all the reason to welcome the extreme-gore-visual-fest, what with all there body parts stretched, cut open and deformed.
So, suffice to say it disappointed in the "gore" department. The 1987 movie didn't shy away from it, at all!
Shame Hellraiser 2022, shame!
The Cenobites really are a quirky hellish lot! Gotta love 'em!
And while there's some interesting looking ones in the 2022 movie, their costumes had a terrible FX artist behind them, looking nothing like real flesh and blood, but instead like rubber.
While the movie is solid, this 2022 version felt like nothing special, for a revival of such a high-caliber staple of a movie that is Hellraiser.
And while good overall, it did hit a weak spot during the middle and turned into an episode of Scooby-Doo, or your typical "dumb teen horror movie", with a Hellraiser theme.
Like, Zoinks!
But, it did immediately move away from being goofy however, and went back to good.
Final verdict: good movie, good acting, nothing special for a revival of Hellraiser. After a trillion sequels i was hoping they would up the stakes and make an extremely gorish Hellraiser, like i said, and that was my biggest disappointment for this movie.
That and Pinhead. Yeah...female Pinhead. Because fuck if they can leave pre-existing characters alone.
Thanks for reading!
That concept I could understand since at the early stages in 1980s the whole thing was even getting to be named Sadomasochists from Hell, not Hellraiser, but where I think this new film really fails is it appears to be afraid of exploring the outer regions of repudiation, at least in visual sense; something that people would feel repulsion of watching. Chatterer and Priest where the only things that felt somewhat dangerous, but not really fitting the descriptions in original novel.
That Hellraiser (2022) is so low on goore is the negative review I've read the most and they are absolutely right.
Unfortunately being a reboot, it is inevitable not to compare with the first film released so many years ago and I expected to see something as shocking as the film released in the 80' and it's a shame because as you say, the story is not bad, the film is not bad, but it lacked that important element to be better.
it really did.
I was extremely disappointed with many aspects of this film especially the script. I was going to turn it off but thought that maybe it would redeem itself by the end. I do not feel like it did so.
why did you think the script was bad?
The dialogue between the main characters was just not very good at all... constant arguing, not believing the main female character even after they had a lot of evidence to do so using her status as an addict was a weak basis for this disbelief... and someone must have said "we don't have time for this!" 25x in the movie... the fact that the manor was meticulously built by a very wealthy person but somehow everyone was just able to walk into the place etc.
yeah, the conveniently hole in front of the window which she got in through was a bit too.. convenient. that said, i didn't find, overall, nothing that lingered on as bad, though. maybe i've just been watching too much crap movies lately!
let's not forget about how even though she struggled to get into the house at all her friends just walked through the front door!
as for that, she opened the door, or some windowed door at some point. i thought it was weird at the time but hey that allowed her friends to enter!
well i guess so. I don't recall that part. I guess you were paying much closer attention than I was. I will admit that the film didn't get completely ridiculous until they got to the house. I actually thought it was pretty great up to that point but then it just all fell apart for me.
yeah its not a bad movie! the house bit did get a bit too "scooby doo" but with the Celo-somethings showing up the scooby dooby dooness faded away. its just a shame the celobites where not cool enough. it would have been a very rewatchable movie