FLESH FOR FANTASY
"NO! Don't do that!"
"GO TO HELL!!!"
- Last words exchanged between the Lead Cenobite (Doug Bradley) and Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), HELLRAISER
Hollywood invented the Monster-As-Superstar. In the Thirties and Forties, Universal took the admittedly creaky prose of Shelley and Stoker and gave their nightmares full cinematic life. Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the Wolfman -- right through to their last post-atomic gasp in the Creature From The Black Lagoon -- were all box-office sensations, but nobody expected them to become the cultural icons that they remain to this day. As the old saw goes, "they had faces then." In the decades since Universal lost its virtual stranglehold on screen monsters, there have been only a handfull of spooks that've had similar across-the-boards appeal: Michael and Jason from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, respectively. Leatherface from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. The ALIEN. Freddy (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) Krueger, of course.
And...oh, yeah...a high priest of pain with a pin-encrusted mug, the product of a gay cigar-smoking author/painter/playwrite/filmmaker/Paul McCartney-lookalike from Liverpool, England.
We're talking Pinhead. We're talking Clive Barker. We're talking HELLRAISER (1987).
Stephen King (the Menace from Maine), who self-importantly declared "I have seen the future of horror, and his name is Clive Barker," once stated that the high-level goal of his (King's) writing was to induce terror in the reader; if he couldn't achieve terror, he'd settle for horror, and failing that, he'd shamelessly go for the gross-out. Barker has never made any such distinction -- terror, horror, and nausea co-mingle equally in his work. King litters his stories with pop/junk culture references (fast food, rock bands, etc.), while the dark, European tenor of Barker's fiction gives even the more modern settings a timeless quality. And while King's directoral debut (MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE) failed to live down to its modest "moron movie" label, Barker's first go behind the camera -- after other parties botched his scripts for TRANSMUTATIONS and RAWHEAD REX -- is, aside from a handful of too-showy or too-enigmatic scenes, self-assured and an almost total success.
Recently-remarried widower Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) returns to the countryside with his new wife Julia (Claire Higgins) in tow and moves into the old family house. Amidst the rubble, Larry finds evidence that his sexually depraved, near-criminal brother Frank (Sean Chapman) had already been there. What Larry doesn't know is that Julia had been the not entirely unwilling object of Frank's knifepoint seduction just after her marriage. But what neither of them know is that Frank is still in the house -- at least, what's left of him. You see, Frank had figured out how to open an ornate puzzle box that promised the ultimate pleasure. What it actually gave him was a quartet of cyberpunk demons called Cenobites, who promptly tore him into large beefy chunks with their hooks and blades.
(Y'know how Joe Bob Briggs is always checking to see if heads roll in the drive-in movie du jour? Well, in the first five minutes of HELLRAISER, everything rolls!)
At one point, Larry gashes his hand, spilling blood on the attic floor that conceals Frank's remains. The blood is enough to bring Frank's skinless cadaver back to life (in a "birth sequence" that out-ick's anything David Cronenberg ever dreamed up). When Julia discovers the "skinned Frank" (pun very much intended!), her initial revulsion is overcome by her memories of desire, and she agrees to bring men to the house and kill them, so that Frank may continue his rebuilding. But Frank is working on a (literal) "deadline:" if he cannot regenerate before the Cenobites catch up to him, there will be (again, literally) hell to pay...
The four Cenobites are HELLRAISER's most distinctive creation, even beyond their pierced and distorted flesh and black leather gowns. Aside from the mute, grossly inhuman "Chatterer" and "Butterball" Cenobites, Pinhead (Doug Bradley, the series' only continuing actor) and the Female Cenobite (Grace Kirby) carry themselves like decadent European aristocrats; their speech is elegant, literate, and unswervingly dangerous. (One of the biggest problems with HELLRAISER 3: HELL ON EARTH is Pinhead's conversion into just another Freddy Krueger clone, chasing the heroine while laughing fiendishly and dishing out plummy bon mots.) If Clive's subsequent turns behind the camera (NIGHTBREED, LORD OF ILLUSION) proved anything, it's that his sympathies are firmly on the side of the monsters.
As for the "human" stars, Robinson's Larry is quiet, cautious, and a too-nice guy (in other words, a complete about-face from his infamous DIRTY HARRY psycho), Higgins is cooly erotic as the devious Julia, and Chapman's Frank is a first-class scumbag, skin or no skin. The big surprise here is Ashley Laurence, in the "ingenue/screamer" role as Larry's daughter Kirsty, who finds herself battling both Frank and the out-for-their-pounds-of-flesh Cenobites. With her wide brown eyes and strong jaw, Laurence is a neat blend of innocent and tough, and her playing of Kirsty -- who would become, by necessity, tougher and less innocent in the sequel HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER 2 -- has some nice, light moments: flirting with her boyfriend before a goodnight kiss, wobbling tipsily to the loo after dinner. It goes without saying that, when first confronted by Pinhead and company, Kirsty is suitably terrified, but by the end, she is able to shut down the Cenobites with the blood-curdling shriek quoted above. (I'll also argue that the downward lurch of the whole series has a lot to do with Kirsty being eased out of the narrative, via her phoned-in cameo in HELLRAISER 3.)
When most modern horror movies are quite content to settle for "junk food" content, it's nice to find the horror equivalent of haute cuisine. (Not to mention a monster that you could probably discuss Hegel, Beethoven, and Max Ernst with.) Any fright flick can tickle your funny bone and your gag reflex simultaneously, but HELLRAISER also manages to stroke your brain in the process.
(THEN chops large pieces out of it!)
Pinhead and friends request the pleasure of your flesh...er...browser, at:
This page hosted by  Get your own Free Home Page |
||
 Send mail to dflat@juno.com |
Back to Da
Homepage!  |