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Today, my adult mind questions why a woman as obviously nauseated by the idea of monogamy as Julia is even married. She's pretty heartless, too. Most people, when faced with the shambling corpse of a randy ex-lover at least stop to ask a few questions before they start murdering people. Larry is almost too useless to mention, beyond the obvious question of how he ended up with a girl whose hobbies are rough sex and ritual slaughter. It would all be nice to know, but Hellraiser never credibly establishes the character relationships that are supposed to drive the story.

It doesn’t earn your concern.

No, this isn't the kind of film you go into looking for credible drama. But I tend to expect from a movie only what it seeks to deliver, and this is a movie that clearly aspires to something - I just don't know what that IS. Hellraiser meanders endlessly, switching emphasis from one character to another so often that you're never quite sure how you're supposed to feel about anyone outside of "evil" or "stupid". It’s hard to truly care about who these people are or what they’re doing, or why you should root for one over the other.

There's a theme in there somewhere, about those with extreme desires getting more than they bargain for. But it gets lost in the jumble of meaningless dialogue and pointless imagery. For horror to work on the psychological level it's clearly meant to here, you have to make the audience care about, or at least identify with what's at stake, at least a little. It never happens here. Instead, we get hokey art house tricks like visually comparing a waking woman to a blooming flower, or cheap jump scares - holes in heads and corpses literally falling out of closets.

There are some good points, but to me they highlight the notion that Clive Barker's imagination is better suited to art and design than to film making. Hellraiser's true antagonist isn't who you think it is, and when we get finally get to the truth, you can't help but feel a little cheated. I wanted to see more of that and less of what looks like a depraved teenage sex fantasy from the mind of a sado-masochist who hates his parents but loves costume design. Like Frank, it's a gory husk stretched over a brittle skeleton, and it’s filled with a briny mess so lifeless and indistinct you can't even be bothered to enjoy it when people start to die.

So forget about all the intellectual shadow boxing I just did with myself, and consider this: Hellraiser is not scary. It's not even funny. It's just tedious. Five minutes in particular near the end are kind of clever, but you could get a more rewarding experience hanging out with some Goths the night before Halloween. I don't hate it - I just don't get the love.

As a certain someone from way south of Heaven might say, "It's a waste of good suffering."

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