HELLRAISER
I remember this film on video Shelves when I was a kid, the cover, featuring the creature I would come to know as Pinhead, and it used to scare the 'hell' out of me. At about 13 at a friends house, we were foolish left unattended in a room with a video copy of the film and before I knew it I would finally be seeing what Hellraiser was all about. It was awesome.
Moving into a large English house, an American man and his adulterous wife, set in motion the escape of the the husbands brother from his holding cell in hell. Turns out his wife, Juila, is infatuated with the bad big younger brother of her husband and before she knows it she is hiding good old skinless Uncle Frank in the attic and feeding him fresh, sex hungry business men. Soon hell comes for Frank and young Kirsty is dragged into a nightmare from which she must be more cunning than the prince of hell to escape.
The film is off the chain, pun intended, taking the haunted house ideal and twisting it, subverting it and then covering it in blood and body pieces. It features some the greatest special FX in film history and created a horror icon out of Doug Bradley as the origally credited Lead Cenobite, who would later be referred to as Pinhead.
HELLRAISER is a modern classic and an amazing accomplishment directed by novelist Clive Barker and based on his book The Hellbound Heart after the poor adaptions of his previous novels. However if you think HELLRAISER is something special then just wait till you see HELLRAISER 2.
HELLBOUND : HELLRAISER II
Where Cliver Barker's startlingly fresh original film set the scene and hinted at a bigger world. Hellbound takes the ideas and mythos set up in the first and runs with it. HELLRAISER 2 is one of my favourite films of all time because it is quite simple an epic, a horror epic that in all its subsequent follow ups never got bigger or better than this.
Picking up after the original Kirsty is now stuck in a mental institution after witnessing hell decending upon her family home. She quickly meets a young doctor who believes her story and after a visit from her father begging to be saved from hell, She and her new friend break into the institutes head surgeons house only to find that the sinister Doctor Chenarde has resurrected Julia, and has his sights set on becoming the king of hell. Now lost in the labyrinth of corridors that make up the leviathans realm, Kirsty searches hell for her father only to find that someone else has brought her there. The scene soon becomes set for the fight between the Cenobites and Chenarde as the battle for supremacy in the afterlife as hell crumbles around them.
That is part of the reason why HELLRAISER 2 is one of my 3 favorite films of all time. Another is its beautiful cinematography, well crafted screenplay and of course, it's ability to expand on an mythos that was slightly touched upon in the first part and takes it all the way it can go. Literally taking us into the depths of hell, it is Lord Of The Rings epic and unfortunetly because of the diluted sequels since people tend to write it off as just another shitty sequel. They couldn't be more wrong, this is The Dark Knight of horror, the Godfather II of gore. It's as good as it gets and you should watch it. Now.
See you tomorrow.
MJ
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