I thought I'd give this movie a try. The trailer looked more promising than a Hellraiser movie has in decades, and Clive Barker is involved, though only as a producer. I love the original Hellraiser. I enjoy its theatrical sequels to varying degrees. I've sat through two of the direct-to-DVD sequels and swore never to watch another. This movie makes me feel like I've gone back on that.
The opening prologue is promising enough. Then the movie takes us to our lead characters. Unfortunately, this is where the movie's weaknesses start presenting themselves. When you start a movie like this with characters already in turmoil, there isn't really anywhere to go in terms of putting them through more. They say never to show your top in a performance, because then you've got nowhere to go but down. Maybe these filmmakers didn't realize that starting characters near rock bottom and already at each other's throats is a bad idea too. Remember Kirsty's transformation over the course of the first film? She went from being a happy young adult to a woman fighting for her life in the worst circumstances possible. Well, there'll be none of that here. Riley is a recovering addict and, even if she's sober, her brother second-guesses everything she says. We won't get the destruction of a family dynamic this time because it's already a shambles.
Then the puzzle box comes in. Without getting into specifics, I'll say that the way it works on the Cenobites' victims is totally different now. As to the Cenobites, the code by which they operate is far less respectable. Granted, they weren't the noblest characters before, but they also didn't go around killing innocents just because they could. Here, their role is little more than standard slasher villainy. It's a great reduction in quality to the terrifying, yet elegant manner in which they were presented before. There used to be a grotesque beauty and a logic to how they operated. "Hands do not call us. Desire does." You can forget all about that. Here, they don't care who they take because they've got to take someone. Yay. They're no longer interesting.
As often happens, there's also human villainy afoot. Unfortunately, our human antagonist is given so little time in the movie that his storyline seems largely unrelated to what we've been watching with Riley. His ending is unearned and feels obligatory. We can't get any kind of enjoyment from a story that feels like it's only an outline shoehorned into another plot to give it more material. There's also an aspect of this character's interactions with the Cenobites that is meant to be disturbing, but it's so overexposed that it just gets ridiculous. Part of horror movies is knowing how much to show. This element was given way too much screen time and almost looks like parody after a certain point. When it's first introduced, it works. When you're given time to look at and study it, it falls flat on its face.
At the end of the day, it's not the worst Hellraiser movie I've seen, but it's only marginally better than the direct-to-DVD sequels. The characters aren't interesting and the plot is a betrayal of the basic tenets established in the original films' lore. You're free to do whatever you want in a reboot, but whoever changed the box and the Cenobites seems to have misunderstood what made these movies unique in the horror realm. For that matter, the human characters betray that fact too.
The main thing I got from this movie was a desire to rewatch the originals. I think I will.
