Clive Barker’s 1987 film “Hellraiser” did not tear my soul at all when I watched it for the first time via an old VHS copy in 1996. When I saw its promotional poster before that, it looked so scary to me that I even had some nightmares involved with those grotesque figures in that film, but, alas, the movie turned out to be not as scary as I imagined during that time.

The story opens with a sadomasochist dude named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) buying a mysterious puzzle box in some middle Eastern country. After that, we see him attempting to solve this puzzle box alone by himself at a house belonging to his family, and, what do you know, solving it turns out to be much easier than handling Rubik’s cube.

Frank was promised that he would experience pleasure to the extreme degree once he solved the puzzle box, but, of course, he gets far more than he wished for. The gate of hell or whatever is opened, and then there come several gruesome entities who give him an extreme amount of not only pleasure but also pain via their own sadomasochistic way.

Some time later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the house. When she and her husband find that Frank was there at least for a while, Julia cannot help but become haunted by what happened between her and Frank not long before she married Larry. It is apparent to us that there is not much love between her and husband, and that makes her miss Frank all the more than before.

Of course, she gets her wish – sort of. Not long after her husband gets seriously injured in one of his hands and then bleeds a bit on the floor of a big empty attic room where Frank solved that puzzle box, Frank returns from hell as partially regenerating his body during the stickiest moment in the film. After finally reuniting with Julia later, he demands that she should get more blood for completing his regeneration, and Julia eventually agrees to help her lover.

What follows next is supposed to scare or horrify us, but the movie presents that without much tension or suspense at all, while just serving us more goriness from Juila and Frank’s morbidly bloody love affair. She lures those several lustful guys into the house one by one, and their blood comes to nourish and then strengthen Frank more, though he still mostly looks like a walking human anatomy textbook picture.

While all these and other things happen, Larry, who is usually absent to whatever he does outside the house, remains quite obtuse as merely wondering about what is wrong with his wife – even after when Frank is right behind him while he is having a rather joyless sex with Julia during one dark and stormy night. Eventually, he confides his ongoing issue to Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), the daughter from his previous marriage, and it does not take much time for Kirsty to find what her stepmother has been doing behind her back.

Around that narrative point, those horrible entities of Hell appear again as expected, but the movie does not have much shock or surprise or depth for us – even during a deranged moment when Julia and Frank decide to go further in the name of love and lust. Besides, we never get much understanding on what drives Julia so much into such gory madness, and that is why we come to observe the eventual finale without much care or fear for anyone in the story.

The movie is based on Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart”, and, needless to say, the novella is more effective in engaging and then scaring us in my humble opinion. Thanks to Barker’s good writing, we get more engaged in the unspeakable horror surrounding its several main characters along the story, and I particularly remember when one of them desperately tries to save herself from those horrible entities of Hell during its climatic part.

In contrast, Barker stumbles more than once as struggling to deliver shock and awe on the screen. The climactic part of the movie feels curiously static, shabby, and sloppy even during its most horrific and unpleasant moments, and those horrible entities of Hell, led by a figure later nicknamed “Pinhead”, sometimes feel like the masked killers in those cheap slasher films during the 1980s. Sure, they do have a bit more style and personality in their extremely sadomasochistic appearance, but do they actually add up much to the story and characters? I don’t think so.

At least, the movie is not a total dud thanks to a few good things to stand out. Claire Higgins is convincing in several disturbing scenes where her character lets herself go down into more evil and madness, and it is a shame that Barker’s screenplay does not flesh out her character more. In case of the unforgettable gothic score by Christopher Young, it was a major breakthrough work in his career filled with a lot of notable horror films ranging from “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” to “Drag Me to Hell” (2009), and I must tell you that I often listen to his score despite not liking the movie itself much.

Overall, “Hellraiser” still does not impress me a lot, but I also have to recognize that it remains as one of the notable horror films from the 1980s. Yes, its status has been tarnished to some degree by a bunch of unnecessary sequels, but its gruesome qualities are something you cannot easily forget, regardless of whether you like it or not.