I’ve always considered Clive Barker to be one of those special talents capable of true genious in the fantasy/horror genre almost consistently. However, his more recent books and films relfect that a lot more than his earlier works. Case in point: Hellraiser.
The plot is a shallow one: a wife and husband move into his brother’s house, not knowing that he had, days earlier, purchased a strange box that opened up a dimetional barrier between this world and other worlds... getting sucked into one world and torn apart by the Cenobites. However, during the moving process the husband cuts himself and bleeds on the attic floor. The blood is used to begin the regeration of the brother, who we find out had an affair with the wife. He gets her to help him kill more men so that he can become fully human again. The husband’s teenage daughter comes across the scheme, and steals the dead man’s box, later opening up the portal between worlds. She encounters the Cenobites, and strikes a deal with them... she will give them her uncle if they let her go. Of course the deal goes awry and she has to fight them. She wins, the bad guys disappear. The end.
Hellraiser is slow paced, somewhat contrived and pretty boring. The main nemesis and the hero of the film are never clearly defined: are the the wife and uncle the villains or protagonists, is the daughter and her father the hero (hardly), are the Cenobites the villains?
All the characters are shallow, in the sense that there is no depth to there character. There is little background or build up scenereos deifining their character, giving us no reason to care for any of them. And, oddly enough, the Cenobites are the least defined characters in the movie, given no background for them, little idea about their character, and what goal they ultimately serve aside from killing for pleasure. This one-dimentionality is decidedly anti-Barker, who usually fleshes out his villians more than his central protagonist. The only reason I can see why this movie succeded to 3 more films is because audiences wanted to know what was up with the Cenobites (who were admittedly cool looking). The story itself seems like an hour-long episode of the Hitchhiker streched into two, and has, really, no redeeming qualities.