Popular reviews

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  Review by Jacob Knight ★★ 61

  Hate to be the stick in the mud on this one - especially considering how much I loved Bruckner's THE NIGHT HOUSE - but it just doesn't work for me. It's too long, the new Cenobite designs are too glossily plastic (not to mention weirdly sexless), the mythology is a muddled mess, and it leans way too heavily on modern elevated horror trappings in order to get going (why do we have to sit through another sad addiction movie?). Kept hoping that the main character would turn out to be a new Frank (which would be a helluva perspective shift), but it just never dares to be truly daring and weird. Glad others seem to be into it (and that it's release finally got me to quit stalling and read THE SCARLET GOSPELS), but ultimately this is just a half-hearted "nope" from be.

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  Review by ♦️•Lily•💋 ★★★ 1

  oh no she’s hot

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  Review by Branson Reese 13

  The Hellraiser franchise is a little like Survivor in that it can change its shape like liquid to fit into whatever container its placed in. It's done slasher, torture porn, 90s HBO rerun cheese, and even flirted with that most golden calf of horror: Italian feeling. With the latest installment we've finally gotten a prestige horror Hellraiser. As with all prestige horror, the themes are laid bare for you so you don't have to go digging for them. This time it's addiction, one of my favorite themes due to my own addiction struggles.  Naturally this caused me to watch the movie incorrectly. I kept pointing at the screen like a four year old watching Blue's Clues or a 24 year old watching some stupid thing…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★½ 14

  28

  Where's the kink? Where's the lust? Even if you take a mere cursory glance at this pitiful franchise, it's clear that only the first film fully developed any productive ideas of pleasure and pain, with their origins intertwined but distorted and misshapen. Anything after, even Hellbound and Hell on Earth, start to lose a certain level of sexual exploration as they attempt to expand on the mythology. The original film was genuinely transgressive and shocking for its time, and it holds up as a landmark work of Horror in the 1980s. Hellraiser in 2022, as one can assume, aims for more modern conventions. A thematic focus on addiction is interesting albeit underdeveloped, as is the dynamic between sensation and…

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  Review by c h r i s 🎃 ★★½ 16

  ⛓ there is so much more the body can be made to feel. ⛓ 

  Jesus wept. I love Odessa A’zion and I love David Bruckner’s method of storytelling, simple yet profound, but tackling a film that screams sadism, this didn’t push any boundaries. if you’re going to tackle Hellraiser don’t be afraid to make it fetishistic and gruesome, this reboot plays it too safe to call it imaginative and falls into the pits of generic hell. mainly didn’t like the new cenobite designs, mixing CGI and practical effects can get visually messy to the eye, they didn’t scream sadomasochistic to me, they look more like wet gooey extraterrestrial beings with a slap of gloss primer—I’m seeing a lot of comparisons to Thir13en Ghosts, and I could not agree more!  

  the box, they opened it, they came, I guess?

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  Review by Blake Douglas ★★★½ 6

  I’m probably immune to the Lament Configuration because I suck at puzzle boxes

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  Review by MP Hayes ★½ 4

  Midraiser

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★ 4

  People might not remember at this point but Barker’s original film is actually quite cheaply and amateurishly made and accumulates most of its power through sheer uncompromising and ugly imagination for its characters' perverted sexual yearnings and their subsequent sadomasochistic body horror punishments for them; turning a silly familial melodrama into practically a cosmic, erotic Fulci movie. This, on the other hand, has opted for the approach of a slick and competent addiction drama as Prestige Slasher, which if that’s enough for you fair enough but personally these are not really the kinds of words I want to hear about a Hellraiser movie. There is also no reason for this to be 2 hours long. It gets a bit stronger…

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  Review by B E R T ★★★★ 3

  Dark. Cold. Scary. Sexy. Bloody. I Loved it. Jamie Clayton is terrifying as Pinhead, all the Cenobites were so nightmarish. The visuals are superb, it looks fantastic, so dark, I love this rainy sexy goth world so much. Sign me up for more of this. Loses half a star because the runtime is excessive.

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  Review by Marianna Neal ★★★ 6

  Better than I expected, and I will say, the decision to tell an entirely new story without doing a remake of or a direct sequel to the original was the right one. I also really appreciated that the Cenobites got more screen time here, even though I'm not sold on their new look. Overall, a very decent Hellraiser story, that, sadly, slowly falls apart in the third act.

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  Review by Logan Weisberg ★★★★ 6

  If I were a Cenobite, I would peel someone’s hangnail.

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  Review by brianwcollins ★★★ 3

  Dimension used to cut two hour movies to 80 minutes and this team has seemingly wished to balance things out by stretching an 80 minute story into two hours.