Hellraiser (2022)

Director: David Bruckner

Cast: Odessa A’zion, Jamie Clayton, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey

Have I Seen it Before: Is it possible to see any new Hellraiser film and not feel like you haven’t seen all of this before? Please, don’t bring up any of the recent quasi-ashcan cash-grab sequels. A mortal being can only take so much torture.

Did I Like It: The film probably fulfills its promise by bringing the series out of its apparent absolute rock bottom and is a thorough victory of style. The special effects are largely good, or at least have the good sense to be ignorable when they can’t be very good. I’m looking in your direction janky CGI puzzle boxes who have the good sense to get real blurry. Any place where the pyrotechnics fail the proceedings, the art direction surpasses. The Hell Priest (Clayton, more than equal to the role) and company, to say nothing of our brief glimpses of the labyrinth have probably never looked this good.

Substance-wise, things are lacking, sadly. The inherent intriguing element of this series at its best is that the true victims of the Cenobites not only had their fate coming, they lusted after their unpleasant destinies. Here, the worst fates are reserved for seemingly benign (and certainly not willfully depraved) people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Our seeming protagonist (A’zion) practically loses her brother and several of her closest friends, but the Cenobites are perfectly content to just let Riley live with her guilt and her guilt alone. She doesn’t even lose them. They are relegated to the kind of prolonged and repeated eviscerations normally reserved for the worst of the worst in the series. I’m afraid that even with a few key cosmetic updates, the Cenobites most righteous—dare I even say, creative—days are long since past.

My benign disappointment with the movie notwithstanding, the real problem is how Hulu exhibits their—or really, any—films. I think I’ve made my peace with most streaming content being ad supported, but they couldn’t load me with a bunch of commercials—like many other streaming services—at the start of the film? Commercial interruptions? Really? Haven’t we moved past that? I suppose not.

Then again, if the Cenobites really wanted to find a way to torture me…

The Night House (2021)

Director: David Bruckner

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin

Content Warning: Suicide

Have I Ever Seen It Before: Never. Had it not been for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, it would have completely missed my radar.

Did I Like It: Pieces of the film work well. Rebecca Hall is always an interesting performer, and aside from a few effects in the early goings, the cinematography and art direction are pristine throughout.

Aside from that, though, it feels like the film will disappear from my memory at or near the instant I finish this review and/or the Beyond Cabin episode posts. At its core, I think it makes many of the same mistakes made by Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath (2000)—another  movie that has long since inspired echoes of, “Wait, that was a movie?” Both films are trying to embrace a modern Hitchcockian sensibility, but the trappings of a Hitchcock yarn are apparently not enough for the modern audience, so it also has to be a ghost story.

Maybe this fusion can be done well, but the plot machinations that make Hitchcock Hitchcock have to be as immaculate as the cinematography and art direction. Here there are just one-too-many-red herrings (was her (Hall’s) friend (Goldberg) also having an affair with the husband (Jonigkeit); what did the neighbor know?) that it feels like a lot of wasted screentime dwelling on them.

These could be forgiven alone, but the movie also spends a significant amount of time—and doing so with some skill—communicating Beth’s intelligence to us. The sequence where she does a little bit of magic with MacOS and begins to unfurl her husband’s secrets was good in its simplicity, but the problem remains: If Beth is truly this bright, how did she not piece together that something was not quite right while Owen was still alive? I believe it was Siskel and/or Ebert who would complained at no end about a movie that arbitrarily needed its characters to be stupid to contain the story at hand. I can only imagine (and could probably go look it up, but again, this movie is already slipping from my memory) what they might have said about a movie that suddenly needs a character to be smart for the first time in fifteen years, for fear of the plot collapsing in on itself.

One more note before we leave: Some streaming services will offer some manner of content or trigger warnings, and it should really be standard across platforms. I’m not bothered by depictions of suicide, but it can cause real harm.