HELLRAISER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Non-stop slam-bang action creepshow makes writer-director Clive Barker seem sicker than he actually is. Lots of sex and violence, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Clive Barker is the new *wunderkind* of horror fiction. While Stephen King writes pretty much in the well-trodden areas of horror--clairvoyance, psi powers, vampires, etc.--Clive Barker seems to create startlingly new ideas that are usually totally off the wall. You cannot be sure what territory a Barker story will take you to, but you can be pretty sure it won't have anything as familiar and reassuring as a blood-sucking vampire. You may encounter a malevolent talking pig, or a haunted burial shroud; one of his more horrific stories involved a giant. It was perhaps the first horror story with a giant in two centuries. Now following in the footsteps of Stephen King, who wrote and directed his own horror film MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, Barker has written and directed HELLRAISER.
Well,.... I heard someone in the audience echo almost word for word the thoughts I had watching the film: "The guy who made this film is one sick son of a bitch." Take RE-ANIMATOR, remove the humor, than add more gore, more graphic violence, and more imagination, and you have something approaching HELLRAISER. The story deals with a man who bought an ornate puzzle box. The box seems to be the key to a universe of sex and torture. At least I think that was what it was. Things are just not very clear. Barker, who is usually a good story-teller, just fails to do a very good job of story-telling. Instead the film devolves into a sequence of imaginative gross-out scenes with some very spare connective tissue. Nothing makes a whole lot of sense and there is little point in asking, "If that guy is really the king of the dead, or whatever he is, why does he have his head marked up like a Rand McNally globe and why has he driven all those nails in his head? Does he just think it looks 'punk'?"
HELLRAISER must be the ultimate of some kind of film. Whatever it is, it certainly is very much what it is. If you like the sort of thing that HELLRAISER is, you're sure going to love this film. And you might want to get some therapy while you are at it. I guess I'd give HELLRAISER a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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