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Some time ago, Julia (Clare Higgins) had an affair with Frank (Sean Chapman), the brother of her husband Larry (Andrew Robinson), but now Frank has disappeared from the face of the earth, and Larry and Julia have decided to movie into his house.

Thing is, Frank hasn't just gone away, he has gone to hell - out of curiosity rather than anything else - but now he has found a way to escape hell again but needs a few human sacrifices to become fully human again. Thank God that Julia still loves him even if she finds him to look less than human, and is soon found all around town picking up men whom she brings to Frank to kill, who becomes more human with each sacrifice.

Of all people, only Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Julia's teen stepdaughter whom she hates, suspects something's wrong. But when she finds out everything about Julia and Uncle Frank, he almost kills her like all the others. Fortunately though Kirsty doesn't only manage to escape - if just -, she even gets hold of uncle's puzzlebox, which is actually the key to the door of hell.

Rather by accident Kirsty opens the door to hell, and to save her own hide, she strikes a deal with Pinhead (Doug Bradley), the leader of the denizens of hell called the Cenobites: She promises to help her recapture Frank in exchange for her life ...

Uncle Frank though has meanwhile killed Kirsty's father and assumed his identity, and thus she almost walks into a trap and he would have killed her too if the Cenobites wouldn't have intervened in time

 - but while they might have saved her life for now, the Cenobites are the sort of allies not to be trusted ...

By the mid-1980's, Clive Barker has become a quite successful horror writer and 2 films were made based on his stories, Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), both directed by George Pavlou. But since both of these movies were very poorly done, Barker (who already had some background in directing) decided to direct the adaptation of his novel The Hellbound Heart himself - and what a fine decision that was: Hellraiser had upon its release almost instantly become a genre classic and over the roughly 30 years since its release it has lost none of its attraction: It's a film that combines very hard gore scenes with atmospheric filmmaking, gothic horrors with modern scare tactics, blunt shock scenes with a complex mythology (if a weird, perverted mythology at that), and besides all that, Barker has managed to make a modern, gory horror film with a intelligent storyline (if you can accept some genre-immanent suspension of disbelief of course). The resulting film is a horror masterpiece and a movie that seems to look fresh even on repeated viewing, and that is thus definitely recommended - even if the movie's many sequels (and counting) have marred the film's reputation a bit ...

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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