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Hellraiser (2022)
An earnest effort, but it misses the mark in so many places.
The original Hellraiser is generally regarded as a landmark in the horror movie genre. It also gave us some of the more memorable villains in cinematic history, though labeling them as such was technically a misnomer.
Fast-forward nearly 40 years later and we have its official remake. However, while it looks the part, and it's clear that a lot of thought and effort went into the movie's overall aesthetic, it ultimately suffers from average to poor writing, and a sore misunderstanding of the source material.
Plot-wise, and barring spoilers, Hellraiser 2022 unfortunately retreads a lot of familiar ground, both in terms of its own franchise, and the horror genre at large. Its main characters are also rather shallow, and, for the most part, come off as generic, ultimately expendable horror movie victims with little in the way of quirk, nuance, or any real character development. Predictably, many die gruesome, borderline pointless deaths throughout the movie.
Where the movie suffers the most, however, is the portrayal of its villains, the Cenobites. Positives first, though. New and returning Cenobites look grotesquely immaculate, and make for a memorable visual update to their counterparts from the original Hellraiser movies. However, there's way too many of them, and the writers absolutely missed the mark when it comes to their characterization, making their overall lack of screen time hurt even more.
For comparison, and with minor spoilers, in the original film, as well as the novella it was based on, the Cenobites may have been unparalleled masters of pain, but only to those who explicitly desired what they had to offer, or whom they felt deserved it. Conversely, in this remake, these new Cenobites subject whomever crosses their paths to their torturous "pleasures," regardless of whether or not they explicitly or implicitly summoned them.
Long story short, the Cenobites remain slightly above average slasher movie villains, rather than returning to form as the terrifying, though ultimately neutral, extradimensional hedonists they once were.
Overall, while Hellraiser 2022's initial overall impact was an unsettlingly welcome change of pace, its story and characters ultimately don't hold up under scrutiny.