The severe lack of any eroticism results in the movie feeling weirdly sexless it is a sharp counterpoint to the original film, which was almost dripping with bloody libidinousness. It then becomes suitably hard for us to care about any of these characters beyond their being part of this absolute lunacy. Those violent delights having violent ends elicit a dopamine high among horror fans, but it also becomes a counterpoint to all these characters the movie spent enough time building up.

It is in these moments that you are reminded of the movie you are watching. It’s after the first hour that the kills finally begin to become gruesome, and the chains, the hooks, and the barbed wire fences wrap around the bodies of the cenobites’ victims until the body is pulled apart. Jamie Clayton, as the female version of “Pinhead”, is fine, with her modulated voice working in tandem with her creepy appearance.

The designs of the cenobites, however, are suitably unnerving, if not outright scary at times. The scenes which act as harbingers for the Cenobites’ arrival – the formation of the tunnels and all of the moments being depicted slightly off-focus as the victim of the cenobites try to escape to no avail – manage to induce a healthy amount of creepiness, offsetting the visceral horror you would expect to see ample amounts of. However, Bruckner’s visual flair is on point. Thus even at 121 minutes, this new Hellraiser feels very much padded out, with a character drama that feels interesting on the surface but with the inevitable caveat that none of it truly matters. Goran Visnjic and Hiam Abbass as a billionaire and his assistant both have the sinister sexiness perfect for a. The result is the addition of bloat in a movie where the kills and the designs of the cenobites are the big selling points. The much anticipated Hellraiser (2022) starts off like a great first kiss. They all feel like taking in all the necessary tropes and adding them without making any effort to make the characters remotely interesting. To craft a character drama, Bruckner and his co-writers spend an inordinate amount of time setting up all these characters with their backstories and foibles.

Clive barker hellraiser 2022