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‘Hellraiser’ Review: A Reboot of the Clive Barker Pain-Freak Horror Franchise Is Now the World’s Edgiest Disney Movie

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variety.com

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every horror movie is about pain, but only the “Hellraiser” series is about sadomasochism — the electricity and agony of it, the higher calling of it. “Hellraiser,” a reboot of the franchise that began in 1987 and has given us nine sequels (time flies when you’re having fun imagining yourself being tortured for fun), is a movie that honors the subversive tug of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart.” But it takes a long time for the new “Hellraiser” to get to what devotees of the series would call the good stuff.

When it does, however, the movie doesn’t hold back. Flesh is torn and frayed, flesh is peeled and sliced, flesh gets split wide open with mystical mechanical devices.

The film’s brutal final act may put you in mind of such queasy landmarks of cinematic mutilation as “Audition,” “The Cell,” the “Saw” series, the 2018 remake of “Suspiria,” and David Cronenberg’s recent return to body horror “Crimes of the Future.” Yet even before it reaches that garish under-the-skin climax, the new “Hellraiser” could be considered one of the more perverse fright films in recent memory.

It’s a walk-on-the-wild-side horror movie that’s being released by Disney, and if you’re wondering how Disney — apart from the fact that they own everything in sight, including Hulu, the platform that’s streaming “Hellraiser” — would now be associating its brand with a horror series devoted to the nightmare assertion of outré sexuality, the answer is: “Hellraiser,” for most of its two-hour running time, actually does feel kind of like a Disney movie…except for those moments when it seems to have been taken over by the spirit of the Marquis de Sade.

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