Hellraiser (1987)

A sweaty, sweaty man sits in a room, playing with a tiny box.  He seems to be struggling, but suddenly his thumb catches some hidden switch and the box begins opening on its own.  However, instead of G. I. Joe action figures and candy, this box is full of spiky chains that shoot out and embed themselves in the man's flesh, pulling and eventually tearing him apart.

Hell having been raised, we are transported into another movie as a married couple step into their new house.  Who was that guy with the box?  What connection does he have with the married couple?  It is a mystery to this day.

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HELLRAISER is a great low-budget shocker with a fascinating concept and some of the best gooey effects ever put to screen.  The box, it turns out, is a sort of key to an alternate dimension that is home to the Cenobites, sadomasochistic beings who have explored the peaks and valleys of ecstasy and agony so thoroughly that concepts such as pleasure and pain no longer apply to them (they still have no problem with exploding your head though).

The story focuses on a man (Larry), his daughter (Kirsty), his evil scumbag second wife (Julia), and his evil scumbag brother (Frank).  Julia and Frank have a history together, and it turns out that Frank was the guy from the intro that got torn into bits... he still survives, to some extent, as a quivering sack of meat under the floorboards in the attic, and when Larry mistakenly bleeds on the floor like a total buffoon, it sets in motion Frank's resurrection.

The rest of the movie involves Julia seducing and killing men so that Frank can drink their blood and slowly regenerate his muscles, flesh, etc.  I have a major problem with this premise as Julia is depicted as some sort of seductive vixen, but in reality she's sort of a frumpy middle-aged lady that you'd expect to see doing some weeding in her garden, and definitely not seducing men at the local bar.  Her poofy 80s haircut doesn't help matters, although I suppose back then it was irresistibly sexy.

The HELLRAISER series would go on to focus more and more on the Cenobites, specifically their leader "Pinhead" (he's the one with pins in his head).  In this movie, they are just a menacing presence lurking in the background and are better off for it.  They're played here as completely disinterested in what they do, almost bureaucratic, and it is actually quite a chilling contrast with the typical maniacal killing machines (Jason from the FRIDAY THE 13TH series or Michael Myers from the HALLOWEEN series) that were popular at the time in horror movies.

The movie itself is well-paced and a bit of a special effects tour-de-force.  It is not without its problems though.  The quality of the acting outside of Claire Higgins (Julia), Andrew Robinson (Larry), and Doug Bradley (Pinhead) is uniformly awful.  Sean Chapman (Frank) and Ashley Laurence (Kirsty) are MUCH better in the movie's sequel, so I suspect that this was an issue with the direction on the part of writer/director Clive Barker.  A second problem is the overall structure, which feels episode with a rushed ending, as though no one involved had any idea how to make this awesome concept into an actual story.

However, these are minor complaints as the movie works perfectly fine as a "nightmare captured on film" akin to THE BEYOND (1981), SUSPIRIA, or the entire PHANTASM series.  Highly recommended!