Matthew Brady’s done a couple of short film reviews today in comments. I like them both, so thought I’d highlight them here:
First, on Hellraiser. (Halloween appropriate!)
Aaron: I like your take on both Hellraiser films (well, the first two, anyway; I don’t think I’ve seen any of the others, except maybe one of the sequels, called Hellraiser: Generations, I think, that I watched years ago on cable. It was all right). The first one was definitely more effective, but they both had their moments, especially in the way they sexualized their horror, making people with their skin flayed off alluringly sensual and lingering on the viscous parts of the exposed bodies. The most effective scene in the sequel was probably the bit in which one of the rooms in hell had beds that kept sliding out of holes in the wall, with female bodies writhing erotically under sheets (which sort of resembled body bags) on the beds, but covered with blood, making for a gross necrophiliac combination. Both films suffer from becoming action spectacles in their climaxes, which cheapens the unknowable horror of hell, making it a threat that can be solved by manipulating a demonic Rubik’s cube or just outrunning the waves of evil. That sort of thing is probably necessary, but if you’re going to sell hell as an inescapable realm of suffering (although I guess there are several people who do escape, so maybe that’s not the case?), the movie should end with everyone meeting a horrible end as a true nightmare of what is to come for everyone after they die (or are dragged into a nether dimension after delving into supernatural affairs in which man should not meddle). That’s not really what these movies are about, since they kind of squeeze themselves into a Hollywood slasher formula, but that’s what I would prefer, even if it’s easier said than done.
And then on Cloud Atlas.
I saw the movie last night, and it was pretty enjoyable, although, as you said, the message is ultimately pretty shallow. I haven’t read the book, but it seems like the stories might have been improved by being intercut throughout, rather than presented discretely. Or maybe they just seem to work better when we only see a few minutes of them at a time, and the clever callbacks and references can be highlighted and underlined by jumping directly between them. Plus, the motif of reincarnation and recurring tropes can be highlighted by casting the same actors in multiple roles in each story (Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant are always bad guys, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess are always good, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks go back and forth). Ultimately, I don’t know how well it worked, or if it was really that good of a movie, but it was certainly an experience. I liked it for the most part, with my favorite aspect probably being how hammy Tom Hanks was in every role except one, and that guy died five minutes after he was introduced. I guess I recommend it?
Matthew, good point about how the Hellraisers undercut the possibility of deeper horror by ending with slambang action finales; I never thought about that.
Because I want readers to be fully informed about the context of these posts, and not because I’m a preening self-promoter, here’s a link to my Hellraiser thing Matthew was responding to.
http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2009/09/and-to-think-i-hesitated.html
Preening self-promotion is the entire purpose of the internet, damn it.
I haven’t seen the second Hellraiser, but one of the elements I always liked about the first one was the ambiguous nature of the Cenobites. Yeah, the movie is called “Hellraiser,” but Pinhead has that great line, “Angels to some, demons to others,” and there’s a lot of focus on pain and pleasure combining. I always read that not as an inevitable torment of the damned, but as an “extreme difference” of a supernatural realm, moral value neutral. Sort of a better, more visceral version of the line from the Christopher Walken film “Prophecy,” which I’ll badly mangle in remembering: “Angels in the bible are always bringers of death and god’s wrath. If you ever met an angel it would be terrifying.”
My understanding is that this ambiguity is jettisoned wholesale in the second film, but it’s definitely present in the first.
Yeah, the second movie reveals that (spoilers, if anybody cares) the Cenobites are humans that stumbled into hell and got turned into bondage monsters or something. I’m not sure I fully understand it; somebody more into Clive Barker/Hellraiser lore could probably explain all the details (paging Sean T. Collins or Tim O’Neil!). The evil doctor that Aaron mentioned in his post gets turned into the newest Cenobite, and for some reason he’s so powerful that he kills all the others and turns them back into their human selves. I imagine they come back in the other sequels though.
The third movie brings back Pinhead, at least, and transforms some bystanders into new Cenobites. One is a DJ who becomes CD Head, and shoots razor-sharp disks at people. Fans were outraged by the dopiness of this, but don’t seem to mind the wisecracking doctor from #2. Hellraiser 3 felt like a Spawn adaptation, right down to beauty shots of mobile chains flying around. I haven’t watched the rest.
I’ve long dreamed of a Hellraiser sitcom called “Angels to Others” that would be like Family Ties starring bondage gangsters, but TV just isn’t ready.
have any of you seen Jigoku? it’s a surreal 60s Japanese Buddhist vision of “hell” that dovetails nicely with the Japanese horror convention of the inescapability of doom, or the fated-ness of horror.
i mention this because the main character is goaded into calamitous moral crimes by a supernatural figure. in many instances he has little or no choice to perform the crime that he will be punished forever for. it’s hard to watch.
I thought it was okay, some nice scenes but I dont rate it next to Kwaidan, Onibaba, Kuroneko etc.
I think Kumashiro did a version of it in the 80s. I didnt like the modern Ishii version at all.