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Hellraiser More at IMDbPro »

2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
While not necessarily a great horror movie by the usual criteria, Hellraiser is a truly exceptional addition to the horror genre., 8 November 2000

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

Yes, Hellraiser is gory, perhaps even overly so. Yes, it's full of blood as well as a fair amount of sex. Yes, the story is questionable at best. And yes, the acting was awful from a lot of the cast, but Hellraiser is nonetheless one of the most distinctive horror films ever made. Despite all of its numerous flaws, Hellraiser succeeds because it is so different from the typical slasher horror film, a subgenre that was created almost single-handedly by John Carpenter's 1978 classic, Halloween.

Clive Barker comes up with some of the most original and fascinating (as well as probably the most recognizable) characters in horror history with the Cenobites, particularly Pinhead. Everything about this character (as well as the other cenobites, but to a lesser extent) just radiates pure evil. The grey/white skin color, the hellish leather costume, the voice, the nails driven into his head, his EYES, all of these characteristics combine perfectly to make-up the most original and sinister horror characters in decades. Not only all that, but there is not a single other character out there who even vaguely resembles him, and this is extremely rare. This is one of the things that makes him so overpowering, no one has ever seen anyone like this before, nor has anyone come up with anything like him since.

However, despite the breathtakingly fascinating and frightening cenobites, there is little to be said for Hellraiser. The gory make-up of Frank, as he slowly comes back to life, was amazingly convincing and sickening (with the exception of the primitive reverse motion photography), but the story and the acting were both mediocre. The story concerns a man who spends a ridiculous amount of money on some sort of evil puzzle box in search of the ultimate sensual experience, and instead he is dealt hell by the Cenobites, who respond whenever the box is solved (why this is true is not revealed until part III). His previous lover, now married to his brother, tries to bring him back to life when her new husband accidentally bleeds on the wrong wooden floor, beginning the process of bringing Frank back to life. Now Julia, Frank's former lover, is faced with the challenge of feeding Frank numerous victims in order to complete the process. This sickening love story is rather difficult to believe, seeing how I feel that no human being on Earth would fall in love with something that looked the way that Frank did early in his resurrection, regardless of how much they loved him when he was alive.

Neither Andrew Robinson as Larry or Claire Higgins as Julia were very convincing, although they both delivered much better performances than did Ashley Laurence, who comes forth with probably (HOPEfully) the worst performance of her forgettable career. This was obviously her movie acting debut, she made that clear in every forced and annoying sob that escaped her mouth.

There is not much to be said about the story, acting, or even the direction (an area in which I expected more from Clive Barker, having read many of his books, despite the fact that this was his directorial debut), but Hellraiser is a horror film that is not soon to be forgotten. It deals with the very human issues of greed, indulgence, and even loyalty. However, this is not the type of film you watch if you want to learn a lesson in any of those areas. Because of that, Hellraiser works best as an all-out gory horror film, the kind of movie that you would watch with your buddies late at night just to have a good time. It is not a film for all tastes (despite its morbidly appealing cover), many people will surely dislike it. But anyone who is even remotely into scary movies should not miss it under any circumstance.

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