Saturday, October 29, 2022

Two Paragraph Review: Hellraiser (2022)

There's a weird type of emptiness encompassing the entire new version of the famous Clive Barker novel called Hellraiser. It does not come from the actors, setting, or plot directly, but more from a combination of all of them. As the main character, addiction-prone Riley, struggles to find her brother, lost on the other side of a hellish universe, the audience is left not really caring about her.

The same goes for her brother or anyone else, including the dreaded Cenobites - even their cut-prone puzzle box. At the same time, the blood and gore elements also kind of fall flat, not provoking neither disgust or comedic effect. That could be the ultimate explanation of the baseline mediocre nature of the latest Hellraiser movie - it is too smart to be entertainingly dumb and too shallow to be emotionally and/or cognitively engaging. That makes it fit squarely (pun intended) into the middle ground where no movie wants to end up, but many sadly do.