Chelsea's Film Club: Hellraiser (1987)

Hellraiser

1987 * dir. Clive Barker

Written by Clive Barker

Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence

A woman discovers the newly resurrected, partially formed, body of her brother-in-law and lover. She starts killing for him to revitalize his body and escape the demonic beings that are pursuing him after he escaped their underworld. (IMDB)

Folks, what kind of sex demon was Larry’s brother Frank? Frank banged his brother’s wife before the wedding, right on her wedding gown laid out on the bed, like ten minutes after meeting her for the first time, showing up on her doorstep all rain-wet and sexy. The guy who plays Frank does have some of that animal magnetism, the Kavorka, that cursed Seinfeld’s Kramer. Has anyone read the book “The Hellbound Heart,” on which Hellraiser was based? I haven’t, but I guess I should. Was there something else at play? It seems like Frank enjoyed the hedonistic quest to its endpoint, but did he have some magical amulet or something, some kind of primitive sex totem that women can’t resist? I need to know more. 

I will note that on the Cenobites’ totem of dismembered Frank parts, there was something that looked like an enormous phallus. 

Anyway, luring men to your husband’s family home so you can murder them and thus resurrect your illicit lover’s body to its former glory is chef’s-kiss perfection for me. I wish I had written this. I do have an idea for a wonderful KT horror book that I should write before I’m dead. (Don’t worry, I’ll do it after Reza and Keely and all the others.) If I wrote Hellraiser, I wouldn’t have named the brother Frank. It seems like a dealbreaker. But I guess there are many sexy men named Frank, I just haven’t met them. Clive Barker probably knows his stuff more than I; he worked as an escort in his leaner writing days.

I loved this movie. I was of age when it arrived in theaters, but didn’t see it til it showed up at my video store. This was groundbreaking shit back then. Nothing much like it came before.

Hellraiser works its magic for 95% of the distance, then seems to fall apart at the end, defying already stretched credulity, and it would seem to me that the ending was made by studio decisions. It gets 80s horror-movie goofy. Take out the Nightmare on Elm Street ending and you have perhaps one of the finest horror movies of the 1900s; top ten for sure.

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If anyone wants to get a jump on the next Chelsea movie, it’s “House on the Edge of the Park” or “La casa sperduta nel parco” since it’s an Italian production (but in the English language). I think you can rent it on Youtube, and it's available on Arrow, if you're a subscriber.