RETRO REVIEW: Hellraiser

(Heavy spoilers below.)

One of the many things my high school writing teacher, Mr. Harvey, said that I'll never forget was his criticism of the Tomb Raider movie. Unlike Indiana Jones, who gets knocked about and dirty during his movies, Lara Croft spent her movie clean and things came just a bit too easy for her. There was no sign of struggle. The very opposite can be said for the heroine of Hellraiser, Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), who fights tooth and nail through most of the movie and ends up dirty but completely successful. Of course, that's not exactly uncommon in horror movies, but it's surprising that movies about superheroines have dragged their feet on this "bloody struggle = humanizing" ideal when it comes to women.

Hellraiser is not a perfect movie. For a movie that's supposed to be about S&M demons it's one of the unsexiest things I've ever seen. (And at the risk of sounding cruel I'll just say Clare Higgins, who plays the femme fatale/evil stepmother was maybe possibly just a teeny bit of a poor choice for her job as attractive seductress. Also, her acting is rough.) Plus it seems to be the product of its time in the effects. The movie is short at a little over an hour and a half but spends a lot of film showing off the reanimation of Frank as a monster, mostly because I think they were amazed they were able to do it. Still, a lot of the scenes that I think were supposed to be scary just elicited a "yuck" reaction from me.

Yet I had to admit Kirsty earned my sympathy far more than heroines of better movies, such as Laurie Strode of Halloween or Nancy Thompson of Nightmare on Elm Street. (And of course she is better than whoever the hell was the "Final Girl" of Friday the 13th but almost all movies period are better than Friday the 13th so that's pretty easy.) The story begins in an unspecific foreign land, where sadist creeper Frank buys a puzzle box, takes it back home, and solves it, which sends him to an alternate reality where he's tortured and killed by Cenobites, the aforesaid S&M demons. Later his milquetoast brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Larry's wife move into the house. The wife, Julia, is still obsessed by her masochistic passion for Frank but the husband is trying to make their sour marriage work. The marriage is bad enough that Larry's daughter Kirsty has moved away, even though dad and daughter still love each other.

It was this part where both the movie and Kristy won me over. Kirsty and her father have a sweet relationship built on mutual caring for each other. For a few brief shining moments I would have said Larry reminded me of my father, but then Larry cuts his hand pulling a mattress up the stairs and almost has a fainting fit and I thought, "No, actually, my Dad is not a complete wuss."

Anyway, Larry's blood drips onto the floor and revives Frank into little more than a talking skeleton with eyes. Julia finds Frank later, and their mutual attraction is enough to convince Julia to go out and find human sacrifices so he can be whole again. Yet Frank wants more of Larry's blood, and while Julia tries to dissuade him, it'll ultimately come down to Kirsty to defend her father's honor, even if she can't save him.

I came into this movie completely blind beyond knowing what the head cenobite Pinhead (Doug Bradley) looked like. The male iconography, while striking, does the movie something of a disservice, because I feel it's essentially the struggle between two women. The movie follows Julia before moving onto Kirsty. Julia is motivated purely by a man, and while it annoys me a bit because I think S&M relationships are more complicated than that, it means something that Julia is kowtowing to Frank while Kirsty's main goal is to protect her father.



Since Kirsty won me over in her first scene I spent a lot of the movie worried she would get killed, and grateful when she didn't. This is a good thing, because a hero looks better if their safety is at first in doubt. Kirsty survives her first confrontation with Frank, even stealing the puzzle box. However, the situation gets worse when she solves the box, not knowing what it is, and unleashes the Cenobites, who will kill her with their games. She offers to return Frank to them if they spare her life.

At this point Kirsty has already fought off Frank the first time and then been chased by a monster through a labyrinth, but she returns to the house and Frank has peeled off her father's skin and is wearing it. In the final confrontation Kirsty not only has to fight Frank-as-her-father, but all of the Cenobites, and while her mostly-a-nonpresence of a boyfriend helps her out a bit, it's mostly her that does the fighting, and she's also the one who solves the puzzle, defeating monster after monster and a collapsing building as she does.

And throughout the fight, she gets messy. Kirsty's a bit more glamorous than the average heroine, but she gets dirty and banged up in a way that's both realistic and not exploitative. And, of course, even with the set-up for a sequel, she still saves the day and comes out with her boyfriend by her side. It's not much, but considering how rough the genre can be to women, it goes a long way.