Hellraiser (1987)

Last month saw the 30th anniversary of the only reason I've heard of writer-director Clive Barker. All I knew going in was that a guy nicknamed Pinhead (because of the pins in his head) presented a box that could take people to hell. With a bit of a memory jog, I might have recalled that Pinhead had several less normal-looking comrades called Cenobites. Didn't sound like my thing, but the somewhat enduring cult popularity piqued my curiosity. Maybe it would surprise me in its appeal, like A Nightmare on Elm Street had.

Middle-aged Larry gets the bright idea to move into his seemingly long-abandoned former home. His wife, Julia, has reservations about it, not least because she cheated on him in that house with his brother, Frank. An accident causes Larry to bleed on the floor of an empty room, which later enables Frank to materialize from hell -- incompletely. Only Julia becomes aware at first, and Frank urges her to get him enough blood to restore his whole body so that he can run away before the Cenobites find him.

Turns out that the Cenobites don't get a lot of screen time in the series' first entry; nor are they necessarily the main villains. You may consider Frank to have a mitigating factor in his pressure on Julia to commit murder, but make no mistake: He was screwed up right from the start. Larry thinks of his brother as a degenerate petty criminal. Little did he know that Frank would pay good money for a box to willingly submit himself to supernatural torture experts. (Couldn't he just, y'know, commit suicide?) Clearly, Frank's masochism has its limits, or he wouldn't escape, but he's still creepily aggressive toward Julia -- and eventually his adult niece, Kirsty.

While initially portrayed with some sympathy, Julia is far from blameless as well. She takes little time to get used to luring suitors to her house and bludgeoning them with a claw hammer. It leads me to suspect that Kirsty has had some reason beyond typical resentment of a father's remarriage to be reluctant even to meet Julia.

More deftly than you might expect, Kirsty becomes the protagonist in the third act. It would have been an easy route to portray her as a punk, given how little she sees eye to eye with her dad or stepmom, but she's pretty vanilla. It's almost comical how Larry protests against her getting a job and living on her own, given how many modern parents would call that a dream come true. Anyway, as typical for horror stars, she and her late-to-the-party boyfriend don't bring any special skills when dealing with Frank, Julia, or the Cenobites.

It's something of a mercy that so little of the film dwells on hell (or what we might as well call hell), because body horror has to be the most horrific of all horrors. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it -- I actually loved The Thing (1982) -- but you need a strong stomach to deal with it. Just watching gooey, skinless Frank at different levels of completion, still aching to touch a woman, is a challenge. We don't get to see the Cenobites doing anything particularly...creative, apart from what they apparently have already done to themselves or each other.

I kept thinking about how these were harmless feats of makeup. Such thoughts might make the experience more palatable or just a letdown for you. For me, it may have been both. I got my desired education, and it was enough. I leave it to you to answer the question posed by the Asian vendor (because this was three years after Gremlins) at the beginning and end: "What's your pleasure?"