Hellraiser (1987)

Internet porn and plastic in our water supply is creating more and more men like Frank Cotton. A besotted hedonist, a flesh-worshiper of the most bent and twisted caste, he becomes bored with the limited variety of earthy holes to put his penis in and seeks out damnation in the hopes of procuring the masochistic Nirvana offered by ‘The Box’.

The Box.
Oh, lawdy-lawd, The Box.
The Box, jeezus-lawd, The Box.

A wood-and brass puzzle box that, when solved, will take the solver to a realm of hell where he will be tortured by shit the sane mind cannot comprehend.

My first thought: there’s a box for that? Is it just masochism that’s entertained in this knick-knack-accesible corner of Sheol, or do you get to pick, like, if it were, say, I dunno, ‘me’, could I bypass the masochism and, say, have a fifty-foot tall Jayne Mansfield sit on me, swallowing me in her giant vagina—because that’s still scary! But, you know, considering, I mean, if you’re gonna have a box, you know, a guy should get to pick—nipple clamps ain’t a universal preference, people, that’s all I’m saying– far be it from me to lecture hell’s ombudsman, but his ‘Box’ as currently configured is a tad ‘niche’.

Don’t get mad, or did hell install that suggestion box for decoration?

Apparently, there’s enough hedonistic creeps like Frank Cotton to justify a life bridge to the infernal, and so we meet him, in Morocco, because, where else, the box’s origin is very telling (North Africa, renown for its pedophilia industry, especially its traffic in that of little boys. The leftist philosopher Foucault and the ‘gay rights pioneer’ William S. Burroughs, lived there specifically for access to these little boys). During the meeting in the casbah, some creepy Chinaman, stirring his cup of tea, offers a gossamer warning to Frank before selling the Box to him. He then takes it back to the United States (I would have loved to hear that conversation with customs:

“And what might this be, sir?
A box which takes the living soul to a realm of diabolical torture.
And what did you pay for it?
All my wealth and the prospect of salvation.
Hmm—taps the computer—yeeeeeah, there’s a duty on these.)”

Franks brother, Larry, his sister-in-law, Julia and his niece by Larry’s first wife, Kirsty (the protagonist) have a house they haven’t moved into yet, and being the freeloading pervert he is, Frank’s been squatting in the attic for the last few months, playing with the box and doing horrible things to prostitutes, as the Polaroids littering the floor next to his dingy mattress have a tale to tell.

When Larry and Julia arrive, they find the mattress and the pictures, but they don’t find Frank, because Frank’s been swallowed up into hell for weeks, having solved the puzzle box. The puzzle box, however, is undamaged and sitting in the center of the room, where a curious Kirsty picks it it up because it’s all pretty-like.

Now, a plot point. Julia, Larry’s wife, got dicked-down-double-good by Frank and holds a Harley Quinn level of obsession for him even as she plays housewife to his brother.

But where-oh-where is bother dear, says Larry, who then cuts himself in the old attic, allowing a drop of blood to fall on the floorboards. The floor eagerly soaks it up and what emerges is a pustulous blob that talks–specifically to Julia, in Frank’s voice. She’s creeped out at first, but soon she’s overcome with her old lusts for her husband’s pervy little brother, and all she wants to do is help.

Awwww.

So she lures horny men to the attic where she murders them and lets the Blob Formerly Known As Frank drink their blood, doing so to become something other than a random assemblage of tendons and sphincters.

It’s slow-going, but soon Frank is no longer a blob and achieves the coveted rank of ‘walking meatball’, from this comes the You Did Real Good Honey, which is followed by Make Love To Me You Sticky Meatball which is capped off with Hey, Where’s My Spooky Box?

Because right about then Kirsty is solving the spooky box, when she does, an entire wall of her room opens up and behind it is hell, more specifically it is a corridor of hell and charging at her with a rebel yell is a quadrupedal penis monster, threatening to pierce any foolish human stupid enough to stumble into it’s savage poking radius.

Then she unsolved the box just in time and the wall closes.

Phew.

Trouble is, hell kinda knows when it’s been blue-balled, first with Frank escaping, and now this cheap little tease wasting the precious time of its ravenous penis monster, who—not that she bothered to ask—has a real issue with rejection.

So. Kirsty solves the box again [?] Run Kirsty!…Why aren’t you running?…just gonna stand there and look at it, huh?… Walls moving to reveal Abaddon not what you’d call a ‘reason for concern’? Now it’s official…

New England is different.

The walls open, and we are introduced to probably the best horror characters in a generation, Ladies and Gentlemen, the leather-clad Dandies of Damnation, the sadistic Lords of Realms Infernal, give it up for ‘The Cenobites’!

[applause sign blinks]

Pinhead to Audience: If you applaud this ridiculous carnival barker, I will feed your scrotum to a cunt-maggot.

Ah, yes. Pinhead, the leader of the Cenobites, shop foreman of hell’s ‘Ultimate Agony’ initiative, his bald head and pale, expressionless face festooned with inward-aiming nails, is pure fan crack! All at once, he’s a Jungian menace, a Freudian exemplar and a cinematic masterpiece–and my guess: not a fan of hats.

Pinhead leads a trio of other Cenobites whom I call ‘Chatter-teeth’, ‘Harvey Weinstein’ and ‘Ex-Wife’: because the first one is just a head with chattering teeth, the second is a fat creep and the third is a bitch who gets moist at the prospect of causing you harm.

“Who are you?!” weeps Kirsty.
“Demons to some, Angels to others. You summoned us, you must come and taste our treasures.”
“Leave me alone!”
“No tears, please. It is waste of good suffering.”

Geek Fact: he was never named Pinhead in the movie or the novella, rather he was named by the fans and the makers of the film ran with it…for the remainder of the 1980s, 90s, 00s and 10s, because that’s how long it took to release this movie’s nine sequels. Nine movies! All justified by this first appearance of British actor Doug Bradley’s unholy Pinhead!

That’s a helluva first impression! Managing to pry loose the rusty purse hinges of Hollywood nine times, spanning four decades–and since the first film was done for 900 grand, Bradley’s sequel-machine performance cannot be attributed to the budget.

The Cenobites are seen on screen for a total of four minutes, and it’s the only four minutes you’ll remember, not because the rest is bad but because the sinister light of Pinhead burns its image into your brain so completely it’s all you can recall weeks later.

That said, the rest of it is pretty bad–but not 900k-bad, it’s more like 8.5 million-bad and that is still an accomplishment for Clive Barker who was a first time director and admittedly didn’t know the difference between a 10 and a 35 millimeter lens. He wrote the novella and didn’t want Hollywood’s grubby thumb in his bowl of cinematic soup, so he shot the film using friends for a case of Royal Crown and a tray of chicken fingers.

Clive spent some time in the theater where he met Doug Bradley and consequently used him to bring his hellish harm-lord to full film fruition and damn! did it work.

The story itself is basically a jaunt through the interconnection of sex and religion, Frank’s last words while flying chains rip his flesh apart is ‘Jesus wept’–but knowing Clive is a gay it’s hard not to interpret the story as one part confession and one part fantasy, that confession/fantasy conceived through dankly gay, sadomasochistic, leather-daddy sort of lens. He confesses a lot indirectly, and I’m inclined to believe Hellraiser (original title: Hellbound) is a disguised dramatization of the psycho-sexual torment of a male queer.

This could be a critical over-step because it requires the knowledge of Clive Barker’s sexual preferences to come to that conclusion, because without that knowledge Hellraiser is Freudian, is Jungian and is disturbing on a level most people have not examined. As a horror film, it works. As a sci-fi film, it works. As a veiled-stroll through a homosexual’s fear of coming retribution for his hedonism, it may work, but it’s not something I would choose to watch.

So watch it for the first two reasons. That’s what I do.