Hellraiser, meanwhile, pits broke and disenfranchised youth against a callous millionaire, but doesn't have much to say about it.Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth - Chatterer Pop! Vinyl Figure To name a few off the top of my head, stuff like The Seed, Cam, Men, We're All Going to the World's Fair or Bodies Bodies Bodies have something to say beyond shock and gore. By contrast, this sexless reboot is sorely lacking those layers of shock and perversity.Īs it happens, right now there are more films than you can shake an ax at which delve into the horror of disaffected life in the social media age. One of the twisted charms of the original film was how the main character embraced the nastiness, sending the film into off-kilter territory where you had no idea who to root for. The film vaguely gestures at Riley's millennial numbness, but it's pretty superficial stuff. In this distraction-saturated, seen-it-all-before-and-posted-it-on-TikTok age, Hellraiser offers a unique opportunity to explore how far you have to go to feel something.

Which is a shame, because monsters who can't distinguish between pleasure and pain is, if anything, more timely than ever. Seriously, the film can't offer you any reason to care about this cast other than the fact they're on your screen. Who is Riley's brother apart from being her judgey landlord? What was their relationship like as kids? Where are their parents? Is there any unresolved conflict between them? One so-called 'character' introduces herself with the words 'I'm the roommate' and no other information is ever given about her, which blunts the impact when she's imaginatively tortured. Where the original introduced flawed humans with relatably sordid urges, the reboot offers no-one with hopes, flaws, dreams or even backstory. It's a worthy new take on a horror icon, and the film does throw up some flashes of imagination in the design, the gory set pieces and the direction from David Bruckner, who helmed chilling The Night House.īut there's more than a whiff of the '90s as four good-looking but utterly personality-free twentysomethings wind up in a creepy mansion. Jamie Clayton takes over from original star Doug Bradley as the high priest of these soul-chomping sybarites, nicknamed Pinhead for fairly obvious reasons. Things start to get weird when Riley's not-quite boyfriend proves to be a bad influence and they discover the franchise's signature MacGuffin, a fiendish Rubik's cube that summons the grisly Coenobites (deadpan monsters in unnerving prosthetics and fetish gear). She's crashing with her exasperated brother and some random roommates as she mutters some non-specific stuff about getting a better job and blah blah blah - the film really doesn't care about any of this, which makes it tough for the viewer to get engaged in Riley or her cardboard cutout chums. The new film centers on Riley, a broke recovering addict played by Odessa A'zion with sweaty desperation even before she encounters the supernatural.

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