Hellraiser (1987)
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got some netflix entropy going right now - i’ve got 3 serious seeming movies and haven’t been feeling up to watching them yet. so i pulled this out of the dvd rack and realized i hadn’t actually watched it since i bought it and it was probably 18 years since i’d seen it at all. surprisingly i found this almost as great as my recollections of it. it’s all about the fx, but they do well setting an appropriately adult tone for it, what with the affair and julia’s violent predatory growth tied in to a sexual predation. and while they do revel in the fx, they don’t go too overboard for it to get silly. the rats were a bit much, but the really fun stuff like frank’s shirt sticking to him, and his various other drippings are never centered in the frame so it’s just an aside. actually, now that i think about it they did go way overboard with the rotating pillar and all the stuff nailed to it, but i guess the few subtleties they did helped everything else.
of course the weird slug cenobite and it’s game of slaps with kirsty was the weakest part. the whole ending with the focus on kirsty and turning her into a typical horror heroine was unfortunate. it certainly would have been more effective for her to just brush up against this strange world, but i guess they had to think about typical genre stuff. also the dubbing was really annoying.
i never really think about casting and style stuff as much i should, but i really liked the contrast between the two leads - the all-out 80’s make-up, hairspray, stockings, and sunglasses vs. the curly-haired innocent. i guess i appreciated it cause they did such purposefully vague character backgrounds, so i wasn’t annoyed at the usually transparent ‘development’.
